essay topics on progressivism

Presentations made painless

• Get Premium

112 Progressive Era Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

Inside This Article

The Progressive Era was a period of social and political reform in the United States from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. During this time, a number of important social issues were addressed and significant changes were made to improve the lives of Americans. If you are studying this time period in history, you may be looking for essay topics that will help you explore the key events and ideas of the Progressive Era. Here are 112 progressive era essay topic ideas and examples to help you get started:

• Discuss the goals and accomplishments of the Progressive Era reformers.
• Analyze the role of women in the Progressive Era reform movements.
• Evaluate the impact of muckraking journalism on American society during the Progressive Era.
• Compare and contrast the approaches of different Progressive Era reformers, such as Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt.
• Examine the significance of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the context of the Progressive Era.
• Explore the relationship between the Progressive Era and the labor movement.
• Investigate the role of African Americans in the Progressive Era reform efforts.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on child labor laws.
• Analyze the role of education reform in the Progressive Era.
• Evaluate the impact of the Pure Food and Drug Act on American society.
• Discuss the conservation efforts of Theodore Roosevelt during the Progressive Era.
• Examine the impact of the Progressive Era on immigration policy.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of the Progressive Era in addressing urban poverty.
• Analyze the role of religion in the Progressive Era reform movements.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on women's suffrage.
• Examine the role of the media in shaping public opinion during the Progressive Era.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on the environment.
• Discuss the role of government regulation in the Progressive Era.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American society and culture.
• Evaluate the legacy of the Progressive Era in modern American politics.
• Discuss the role of social welfare programs in the Progressive Era.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on the economy.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping American foreign policy.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on race relations in America.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer culture.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on public health and sanitation.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping the modern welfare state.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor laws.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy.
• Discuss the role of women's clubs in the Progressive Era reform movements.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on education policy.
• Evaluate the role of the federal government in the Progressive Era.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on the rights of workers.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern civil rights movements.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on public health.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern environmental policy.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American foreign relations.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer protection laws.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American journalism.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern social welfare programs.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American education.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor unions.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political reform.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern immigration policy.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American race relations.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer culture and advertising.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American public health and sanitation.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern welfare state policies.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and social policy.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor laws and workplace regulations.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political participation.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern civil rights movements and activism.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American foreign relations and diplomacy.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer protection and product safety laws.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American journalism and media.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern social welfare programs and services.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and school reform.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor unions and workers' rights.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political reform movements.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern immigration policy and citizenship laws.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American race relations and civil rights.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer culture and advertising practices.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American public health and sanitation policies.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern welfare state programs and social services.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and child welfare laws.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor laws and workplace safety regulations.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political participation rates.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern civil rights movements and activism campaigns.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American foreign relations and global diplomacy.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer protection laws and product safety regulations.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American journalism and media coverage.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern social welfare programs and government services.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and school reform efforts.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor unions and workers' rights movements.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political reform initiatives.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern immigration policy and citizenship legislation.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American race relations and civil rights advancements.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer culture and advertising strategies.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American public health and sanitation practices.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern welfare state programs and social welfare services.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and child welfare policies.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor laws and workplace safety regulations.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political participation rates.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern civil rights movements and activist campaigns.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American foreign relations and global diplomacy efforts.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer protection laws and product safety regulations.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American journalism and media coverage practices.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern social welfare programs and government services.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and school reform policies.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor unions and workers' rights movements.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political reform movements.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern immigration policy and citizenship laws.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American race relations and civil rights advancements.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer culture and advertising practices.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American public health and sanitation policies.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern welfare state programs and social services.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and child welfare laws.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor laws and workplace safety regulations.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political participation rates.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern civil rights movements and activism campaigns.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American foreign relations and global diplomacy.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer protection laws and product safety regulations.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American journalism and media coverage.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern social welfare programs and government services.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American education and school reform efforts.
• Analyze the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern labor unions and workers' rights movements.
• Evaluate the impact of the Progressive Era on American democracy and political reform initiatives.
• Discuss the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern immigration policy and citizenship legislation.
• Analyze the impact of the Progressive Era on American race relations and civil rights advancements.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern consumer culture and advertising strategies.
• Discuss the impact of the Progressive Era on American public health and sanitation practices.
• Evaluate the role of the Progressive Era in shaping modern welfare state programs

Want to research companies faster?

Instantly access industry insights

Let PitchGrade do this for me

Leverage powerful AI research capabilities

We will create your text and designs for you. Sit back and relax while we do the work.

Explore More Content

• Privacy Policy
• Terms of Service

© 2024 Pitchgrade

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction

Historical context

Goals of progressivism.

• Diversity and disagreement within progressivism
• The legacy of progressivism

progressivism

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Social Science LibreTexts - Progressivism at the Grassroots Level
• Khan Academy - The Progressive Era
• The University of Hawaiʻi Pressbooks - U.S. History - Progressivism in the White House
• The Ethics Centre - Ethics Explainer: Progressivism
• Social Welfare History Project - Progressive Era
• National Center for Biotechnology Information - PubMed Central - Progressivism, Old and New: The Spiritual Moorings of Progressive Reforms
• Wisconsin Historical Society - Progressivism and the Wisconsin Idea
• Natural Law, Natural Rights and American Constitutionalism - Progressivism and America's Tradition of Natural Law and Natural Rights
• Digital History - Progressivism
• Table Of Contents

progressivism , in the United States , political and social-reform movement that brought major changes to American politics and government during the first two decades of the 20th century.

Progressive reformers made the first comprehensive effort within the American context to address the problems that arose with the emergence of a modern urban and industrial society. The U.S. population nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900. Urbanization and immigration increased at rapid rates and were accompanied by a shift from local small-scale manufacturing and commerce to large-scale factory production and colossal national corporations . Technological breakthroughs and frenzied searches for new markets and sources of capital caused unprecedented economic growth . From 1863 to 1899, manufacturing production rose by more than 800 percent. But that dynamic growth also generated profound economic and social ills that challenged the decentralized form of republican government that characterized the United States.

The Progressive movement accommodated a diverse array of reformers—insurgent Republican officeholders, disaffected Democrats , journalists, academics, social workers, and other activists—who formed new organizations and institutions with the common objective of strengthening the national government and making it more responsive to popular economic, social, and political demands. Many progressives viewed themselves as principled reformers at a critical juncture of American history .

Above all else, the progressives sought to come to terms with the extreme concentration of wealth among a tiny elite and the enormous economic and political power of the giant trusts , which they saw as uncontrolled and irresponsible. Those industrial combinations created the perception that opportunities were not equally available in the United States and that growing corporate power threatened the freedom of individuals to earn a living. Reformers excoriated the economic conditions of the 1890s—dubbed the “ Gilded Age ”—as excessively opulent for the elite and holding little promise for industrial workers and small farmers. Moreover, many believed that the great business interests, represented by newly formed associations such as the National Civic Federation, had captured and corrupted the men and methods of government for their own profit. Party leaders—both Democrats and Republicans—were seen as irresponsible “bosses” who did the bidding of special interests.

In their efforts to grapple with the challenges of industrialization , progressives championed three principal causes. First, they promoted a new governing philosophy that placed less emphasis on rights , especially when invoked in defense of big business, and stressed collective responsibilities and duties. Second, in keeping with these new principles, progressives called for the reconstruction of American politics, hitherto dominated by localized parties, so that a more direct link was formed between government officials and public opinion . Finally, reformers demanded a revamping of governing institutions, so that the power of state legislatures and Congress would be subordinated to an independent executive power—city managers, governors, and a modern presidency —that could truly represent the national interest and tackle the new tasks of government required by changing social and economic conditions. Progressive reformers differed dramatically over how the balance should be struck between those three somewhat competing objectives as well as how the new national state they advocated should address the domestic and international challenges of the new industrial order. But they tended to agree that those were the most important battles that had to be fought in order to bring about a democratic revival.

Above all, that commitment to remaking American democracy looked to the strengthening of the public sphere . Like the Populists , who flourished at the end of the 19th century, the progressives invoked the Preamble to the Constitution to assert their purpose of making “We the People”—the whole people—effective in strengthening the federal government’s authority to regulate society and the economy. But progressives sought to hitch the will of the people to a strengthened national administrative power, which was anathema to the Populists . The Populists were animated by a radical agrarianism that celebrated the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian assault on monopolistic power. Their concept of national democracy rested on the hope that the states and Congress might counteract the centralizing alliance between national parties and the trusts. In contrast, the progressives championed a new national order that completely repudiated the localized democracy of the 19th century.

In their quest for national community , many progressives revisited the lessons of the Civil War . Edward Bellamy ’s admiration for the discipline and self-sacrifice of the Civil War armies was reflected in his enormously popular utopian novel Looking Backward (1888). In Bellamy’s utopia , men and women alike were drafted into the national service at the age of 21, on the completion of their education, where they remained until the age of 45. Bellamy’s reformed society had thus, as his protagonist Julian West notes with great satisfaction, “simply applied the principle of universal military service,” as it was understood during the 19th century, “to the labor question.” In Bellamy’s utopian world there were no battlefields, but those who displayed exceptional valour in promoting the prosperity of society were honoured for their service.

Bellamy’s picture of a reformed society that celebrated military virtues without bloodshed resonated with a generation who feared that the excessive individualism and vulgar commercialism of the Gilded Age would make it impossible for leaders to appeal, as Abraham Lincoln had, to the “better angels of our nature.” His call to combine the spirit of patriotism demanded by war with peaceful civic duty probably helped to inspire the philosopher William James ’s widely read essay The Moral Equivalent of War (1910). Just as military conscription provided basic economic security and instilled a sense of duty to confront a nation’s enemies, so James called for the draft of the “whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature,” which would do the rugged jobs required of a peaceful industrial society.

James’s proposal for a national service was not as ambitious as the one found in Bellamy’s utopian society; moreover, James called for an all-male draft, thus ignoring Bellamy’s vision of greater gender equality , which inspired progressive thinkers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman . But both Bellamy and James expressed the core progressive commitment to moderate the American obsession with individual rights and private property, which they saw as sanctioning a dangerous commercial power inimical to individual freedom. Indeed, progressive presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson , and the philosopher John Dewey , strongly supported America’s entry into World War I , not only because they believed, with President Wilson, that the country had a duty to “make the world safe for democracy,” but also because they acknowledged that there was no moral equivalent for the battlefield. Most progressive reformers held a common belief in civic duty and self-sacrifice. They differed significantly, however, over the meaning of the public interest and how a devotion to something higher than the self could be achieved.

The Progressive Era History Essay

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Introduction

Start of the progressive movement, the era of prohibition, works cited.

The Progressive era in the United States which lasted from 1890 to 1920 was known for two things, namely that it was a period of progressive social movement and change that sought to reform many aspects of the country such as the government and economy.

It was also known as the era of Prohibition where in their zeal to completely revolutionize all aspects of American society the Progressives, as they were known, actually caused a large percentage of the population to turn to illegal and downright criminal behavior. This divergent set of events came as a result of the various reform movements that Progressives both within and outside of the government were trying to achieve.

It must be noted that initially the Progressive movement began as a social movement within various local areas which slowly progressed towards the national level. It attempted to address issues such as poverty, racism and class warfare under the assumption that most of society’s problems could actually be “fixed” by initiating social and political reforms (Leonard, 207).

This involved providing a far reaching education system for all classes, a safe environment for communities and families through political and social reform and finally an efficient workplace where anyone who wished to work would be able to earn a decent living (Leonard, 210).

The Progressive movement actually had far reaching effects which can still be felt to this day such as setting into motion concepts related to corporate monitoring, allowing women and minorities to vote and finally combating public fears against the supposed evils of immigration. While such methods of attempted reform can be considered largely positive it was only when the Progressives attempted to tackle vices that led to the movement’s greatest mistake.

The era of Prohibition, which consisted of outlawing the sale and manufacturing of alcohol, was actually started by various religious groups who rode on the coattails of the Progressive movement stating the “social harm” that alcohol had on the general population. As a result, the ban on alcohol achieved success by 1917 resulting in a general ban on its sale and production.

Despite the ban on alcohol a significant percentage of the local population still demanded the product which as a result caused many of them to either illegally manufacture it themselves or resort to smuggling it into the U.S (Beshears, 198). Millions of dollars were spent on preventing alcohol from reaching U.S. borders which further encouraged people to smuggle even more into the country due to the high prices they commanded.

In fact the era of Prohibition actually caused more alcohol to be consumed as compared to when the ban was not in place (Beshears, 200). As a result of the overzealousness of the Progressives a large percentage of the American population could actually be consider criminals which is more or less a slap in the face for a movement that tried to establish social and political reform.

Based on the facts presented in this paper it can be said that the Progressive movement was both positive and negative. Positive in that it was able to establish sufficient social, economic and political reform ideas that are apparent even today but it can also be considered negative since as a result of its overzealousness in “reforming” society it actually caused a period in American history characterized by a large percentage of the population turning to illegal actions.

Beshears, Laura. “Honorable Style in Dishonorable Times American Gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s.” Journal of American Culture 33.3 (2010): 197-206. EBSCO. Web.

Leonard, Thomas C. “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19.4 (2005): 207-224. EBSCO. Web.

• Abraham Lincoln Against Slavery
• Progressive Era in United States
• Public Administration in the Progressive Era
• The Progressive Era and World War I
• Absolutism in Europe
• Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs
• Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Comparison
• FDR Impacts on American Economy of New Deal
• Cold War Major Aspects and Events
• The Crack Epidemic of the 1980s
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, April 23). The Progressive Era History. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-progressive-era-history/

"The Progressive Era History." IvyPanda , 23 Apr. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/the-progressive-era-history/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Progressive Era History'. 23 April.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Progressive Era History." April 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-progressive-era-history/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Progressive Era History." April 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-progressive-era-history/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Progressive Era History." April 23, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-progressive-era-history/.

Home — Essay Samples — Government & Politics — Bureaucracy — The Pros And Cons Of Progressivism

The Pros and Cons of Progressivism

• Categories: Bureaucracy

About this sample

Words: 655 |

Published: Mar 14, 2024

Words: 655 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Dr Jacklynne

Verified writer

• Expert in: Government & Politics

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

4 pages / 1602 words

2 pages / 919 words

1 pages / 554 words

2 pages / 832 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Bureaucracy

According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, bureaucracy is defined as ‘a system of administration marked by officialism, red tape, and proliferation’. It is derived from bureau and cracy which mean a desk and a cloth to cover the [...]

This research paper will serve to explain what a bureaucratic organization is and the manner in which they operate as well as their distinctive characteristics. In addition to that, main principles of bureaucratic organization [...]

The U.S. has four “foundational” agreements that it signs with its defence partners. The Pentagon describes the agreements as “routine instruments that the U.S. uses to promote military cooperation with partner-nations”. [...]

Article 25 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 states that "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, [...]

According to Sheshan.G entrepreneur’s contribution to the economy is of immense value, he or she is indispensable to the economic growth of the country. His or her goods and service are valuable to the overall development of the [...]

George Walker Bush better known as George W. Bush was the 43 president. Bush was elected as president in 2001. He stayed president until 2009. George Walker Bush was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on July 6, 1946.Bush was the [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

Visit the new and improved Hamilton Education Program website

• AP US History Study Guide
• History U: Courses for High School Students
• History School: Summer Enrichment
• Lesson Plans
• Classroom Resources
• Spotlights on Primary Sources
• Professional Development (Academic Year)
• Professional Development (Summer)
• Book Breaks
• Inside the Vault
• Self-Paced Courses
• Browse All Resources
• Search by Issue
• Search by Essay
• Become a Member (Free)
• Monthly Offer (Free for Members)
• Program Information
• Scholarships and Financial Aid
• Applying and Enrolling
• Eligibility (In-Person)
• EduHam Online
• Hamilton Cast Read Alongs
• Official Website
• Press Coverage
• Veterans Legacy Program
• The Declaration at 250
• Black Lives in the Founding Era
• Celebrating American Historical Holidays
• Browse All Programs
• Donate Items to the Collection
• Search Our Catalog
• Research Guides
• Rights and Reproductions
• See Our Documents on Display
• Bring an Exhibition to Your Organization
• Interactive Exhibitions Online
• About the Transcription Program
• Civil War Letters
• Founding Era Newspapers
• College Fellowships in American History
• Scholarly Fellowship Program
• Richard Gilder History Prize
• David McCullough Essay Prize
• Affiliate School Scholarships
• Nominate a Teacher
• State Winners
• National Winners
• Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize
• Gilder Lehrman Military History Prize
• George Washington Prize
• Frederick Douglass Book Prize
• Our Mission and History
• Annual Report
• Contact Information
• Student Advisory Council
• Teacher Advisory Council
• Board of Trustees
• Remembering Richard Gilder
• President's Council
• Scholarly Advisory Board
• Internships
• Our Partners
• Press Releases

History Resources

Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era Fall 2008

Past Issues

70 | World War II: Portraits of Service | Spring 2024

69 | The Reception and Impact of the Declaration of Independence, 1776-1826 | Winter 2023

68 | The Role of Spain in the American Revolution | Fall 2023

67 | The Influence of the Declaration of Independence on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era | Summer 2023

66 | Hispanic Heroes in American History | Spring 2023

65 | Asian American Immigration and US Policy | Winter 2022

64 | New Light on the Declaration and Its Signers | Fall 2022

63 | The Declaration of Independence and the Long Struggle for Equality in America | Summer 2022

62 | The Honored Dead: African American Cemeteries, Graveyards, and Burial Grounds | Spring 2022

61 | The Declaration of Independence and the Origins of Self-Determination in the Modern World | Fall 2021

60 | Black Lives in the Founding Era | Summer 2021

59 | American Indians in Leadership | Winter 2021

58 | Resilience, Recovery, and Resurgence in the Wake of Disasters | Fall 2020

57 | Black Voices in American Historiography | Summer 2020

56 | The Nineteenth Amendment and Beyond | Spring 2020

55 | Examining Reconstruction | Fall 2019

54 | African American Women in Leadership | Summer 2019

53 | The Hispanic Legacy in American History | Winter 2019

52 | The History of US Immigration Laws | Fall 2018

51 | The Evolution of Voting Rights | Summer 2018

50 | Frederick Douglass at 200 | Winter 2018

49 | Excavating American History | Fall 2017

48 | Jazz, the Blues, and American Identity | Summer 2017

47 | American Women in Leadership | Winter 2017

46 | African American Soldiers | Fall 2016

45 | American History in Visual Art | Summer 2016

44 | Alexander Hamilton in the American Imagination | Winter 2016

43 | Wartime Memoirs and Letters from the American Revolution to Vietnam | Fall 2015

42 | The Role of China in US History | Spring 2015

41 | The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Legislating Equality | Winter 2015

40 | Disasters in Modern American History | Fall 2014

39 | American Poets, American History | Spring 2014

38 | The Joining of the Rails: The Transcontinental Railroad | Winter 2014

37 | Gettysburg: Insights and Perspectives | Fall 2013

36 | Great Inaugural Addresses | Summer 2013

35 | America’s First Ladies | Spring 2013

34 | The Revolutionary Age | Winter 2012

33 | Electing a President | Fall 2012

32 | The Music and History of Our Times | Summer 2012

31 | Perspectives on America’s Wars | Spring 2012

30 | American Reform Movements | Winter 2012

29 | Religion in the Colonial World | Fall 2011

28 | American Indians | Summer 2011

27 | The Cold War | Spring 2011

26 | New Interpretations of the Civil War | Winter 2010

25 | Three Worlds Meet | Fall 2010

24 | Shaping the American Economy | Summer 2010

23 | Turning Points in American Sports | Spring 2010

22 | Andrew Jackson and His World | Winter 2009

21 | The American Revolution | Fall 2009

20 | High Crimes and Misdemeanors | Summer 2009

19 | The Great Depression | Spring 2009

18 | Abraham Lincoln in His Time and Ours | Winter 2008

17 | Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era | Fall 2008

16 | Books That Changed History | Summer 2008

15 | The Supreme Court | Spring 2008

14 | World War II | Winter 2007

13 | The Constitution | Fall 2007

12 | The Age Of Exploration | Summer 2007

11 | American Cities | Spring 2007

10 | Nineteenth Century Technology | Winter 2006

9 | The American West | Fall 2006

8 | The Civil Rights Movement | Summer 2006

7 | Women's Suffrage | Spring 2006

6 | Lincoln | Winter 2005

5 | Abolition | Fall 2005

4 | American National Holidays | Summer 2005

3 | Immigration | Spring 2005

2 | Primary Sources on Slavery | Winter 2004

1 | Elections | Fall 2004

The Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt and the Themes of Progressive Reform

By kirsten swinth.

These economic and social crises stemmed from the rise of industrial capitalism, which had transformed America between the Civil War and 1900. By the turn of the century, American factories produced one-third of the world’s goods. Several factors made this achievement possible: unprecedented scale in manufacturing, technological innovation, a transportation revolution, ever-greater efficiency in production, the birth of the modern corporation, and the development of a host of new consumer products. Standard Oil, Nabisco, Kodak, General Electric, and Quaker Oats were among those companies and products to become familiar household words. Many negative consequences accompanied this change. Cities, polluted and overcrowded, became breeding grounds for diseases like typhoid and cholera. A new unskilled industrial laboring class, including a large pool of child labor, faced low wages, chronic unemployment, and on-the-job hazards. Business owners didn’t mark high voltage wires, locked fire doors, and allowed toxic fumes to be emitted in factories. It was cheaper for manufacturers to let workers be injured or die than to improve safety—so they often did. Farmers were at the mercy of railroad trusts, which set transport rates that squeezed already indebted rural residents. Economic growth occurred without regard to its costs to people, communities, or the environment.

Many were appalled. Even middle-class Americans became outraged as the gap widened between the working and middle ranks of society and wealthy capitalists smugly asserted their superiority. A new class of muckraking journalists fed this outrage with stunning exposés of business exploitation and corruption of government officials. Lincoln Steffens’s 1902 The Shame of the Cities , for example, demonstrated the graft dominating politics in American urban centers. To many, such a society violated America’s fundamental principles and promises. Progressivism grew out of that dismay and a desire to fix what many saw as a broken system.

Progressivism emerged in many different locations from 1890 to 1917, and had varied emphases. Sometimes it had a social justice emphasis with a focus on economic and social inequality. At other times an economic and political emphasis dominated, with primary interest in moderate regulation to curtail the excesses of Gilded Age capitalists and politicians. It was, in short, a movement that is very difficult to chart. Historians most conventionally trace its movement from local initiatives through to the state and national levels. But it is potentially more useful to think of progressivism as falling under three broad areas of reform: efforts to make government cleaner, less corrupt, and more democratic; attempts to ameliorate the effects of industrialization; and efforts to rein in corporate power.

Despite their anxieties about the problems in all three areas, progressives accepted the new modern order. They did not seek to turn back the clock, or to return to a world of smaller businesses and agrarian idealism. Nor, as a general rule, did they aim to dismantle big business. Rather, they wished to regulate industry and mitigate the effects of capitalism on behalf of the public good. To secure the public good, they looked to an expanded role for the government at the local, state, as well as national levels. Theodore Roosevelt declared in a 1910 speech that the government should be "the steward of the public welfare." Progressivism was a reform movement that, through a shifting alliance of activists, eased the most devastating effects of industrial capitalism on individuals and communities. Except in its most extreme wing, it did not repudiate big business, but used the power of the state to regulate its impact on society, politics, and the economy.

These progressive reformers came from diverse backgrounds, often working together in temporary alliances, or even at cross-purposes. Participants ranged from well-heeled men’s club members seeking to clean up government corruption to radical activists crusading against capitalism altogether. They swept up in their midst cadres of women, many of them among the first generation of female college graduates, but others came from the new ranks of young factory workers and shop girls. Immigrant leaders, urban political bosses, and union organizers were also all drawn into reform projects.

Still, some common ground existed among progressives. They generally believed strongly in the power of rational science and technical expertise. They put much store by the new modern social sciences of sociology and economics and believed that by applying technical expertise, solutions to urban and industrial problems could be found. Matching their faith in technocrats was their distrust for traditional party politicians. Interest groups became an important vehicle for progressive reform advocacy. Progressives also shared the belief that it was a government responsibility to address social problems and regulate the economy. They transformed American attitudes toward government, parting with the view that the state should be as small as possible, a view that gained prominence in the post–Civil War era. Twentieth-century understandings of the government as a necessary force mediating among diverse group interests developed in the Progressive era. Finally, progressives had in common an internationalist perspective, with reform ideas flowing freely across national borders.

To address the first major area—corrupt urban politics—some progressive reformers tried to undercut powerful political machines. "Good government" advocates sought to restructure municipal governments so that parties had little influence. The National Municipal League, which had Teddy Roosevelt among its founders, for example, supported election of at-large members of city councils so that council members could not be beholden to party machines. Ironically, such processes often resulted in less popular influence over government since it weakened machine politicians who were directly accountable to immigrant and working-class constituents. The good government movement attracted men of good standing in society, suspicious of the lower classes and immigrants, but angered by effects of business dominance of city governments. Other reforms, however, fostered broader democratic participation. Many states adopted the initiative (allowing popular initiation of legislation) and referendum (allowing popular vote on legislation) in these years, and in 1913, the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution mandated the direct election of US Senators. Perhaps the most dramatic campaign for more democratic government was the woman suffrage movement which mobilized millions to campaign for women’s right to the franchise.

Ameliorating the effects of industrialization had at its heart a very effective women’s political network. At settlement houses, for example, black and white woman reformers, living in working-class, urban neighborhoods, provided day nurseries, kindergartens, health programs, employment services, and safe recreational activities. They also demanded new government accountability for sanitation services, for regulation of factory conditions and wages, for housing reform, and for abolishing child labor. Leaders like Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells-Barnett in Chicago as well as Lillian Wald in New York pioneered a role for city and state governments in securing the basic social welfare of citizens. This strand of progressive reform more broadly involved improving city services, like providing garbage pickup and sewage disposal. Some activists concentrated on tenement reform, such as New York’s 1901 Tenement House Act, which mandated better light, ventilation, and toilets. Laws protecting worker health and safety mobilized other reformers. Protective legislation to limit the hours worked by women, abolish child labor, and set minimum wages could be found across the country. Twenty-eight states passed laws to regulate women’s working hours and thirty-eight set new regulations of child labor in 1912 alone.

The second major area—the effort to rein in corporate power—had as its flagship one of the most famous pieces of legislation of the period: the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890. The Act outlawed business combination "in restraint of trade or commerce." In addition to trust-busting, progressive reformers strengthened business regulation. Tighter control of the railroad industry set lower passenger and freight rates, for example. New federal regulatory bureaucracies, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Reserve System, and the Federal Trade Commission, also limited business’s free hand. These progressive initiatives also included efforts to protect consumers from the kind of unsavory production processes revealed by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle . Somewhat unexpectedly, business leaders themselves sometimes supported such reform initiatives. Large meatpackers like Swift and Armour saw federal regulation as a means to undercut smaller competitors who would have a harder time meeting the new standards.

Among progressivism’s greatest champions was Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt had a genius for publicity, using the presidency as a "bully pulpit" to bring progressivism to the national stage. Roosevelt’s roots were in New York City and state government, where he served as state assemblyman, New York City police commissioner, and governor. As governor, he signaled his reformist sympathies by supporting civil service reform and a new tax on corporations. Republican Party elders found him so troublesome in the governor’s office that in 1900 they proposed him for the vice presidency, a sure-fire route to political insignificance. The assassination of William McKinley just months into his presidency, however, vaulted Roosevelt into national leadership of progressive reform.

Although Roosevelt was known as a trust buster, his ultimate goal was not the destruction of big business but its regulation. For Roosevelt the concentration of industry in ever fewer hands represented not just a threat to fair markets but also to democracy as wealthy industrialists consolidated power in their own hands. He turned to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to challenge business monopolies, bringing suit against the Northern Securities Company (a railroad trust) in 1902. The Justice Department initiated forty-two additional anti-trust cases during his presidency. During Roosevelt’s second term, regulating business became increasingly important. Roosevelt had always believed big business was an inevitable economic development; regulation was a means to level the playing field and provide the "square deal" to citizens, as Roosevelt had promised in his re-election campaign. He supported laws like the 1906 Hepburn Act, which regulated the railroads, and the same year’s Pure Food and Drug and Meat Inspection Acts, which controlled the drug and food industries.

Although not always successful in achieving his goals, Roosevelt brought to the federal government other progressive causes during his presidency, including support for workers’ rights to organize, eight-hour workdays for federal employees, workers’ compensation, and an income and inheritance tax on wealthy Americans. Under his leadership, conservation of the nation’s natural resources became a government mandate. He encouraged Congress to create several new national parks, set aside sixteen national monuments, and establish more than fifty wildlife preserves and refuges. Through the new Bureau of Fisheries and National Forest Service, Roosevelt emphasized efficient government management of resources, preventing rapacious use by private businesses and landowners.

After leaving the presidency in 1909, Roosevelt initially withdrew from politics. But his dismay at the slow pace of reform under his successor, William Howard Taft, prompted him to return for the 1912 election. When Republicans failed to nominate him, he broke with the party and formed the Progressive Party. He campaigned under the banner of a "New Nationalism." Its tenets united the themes of his leadership of progressivism: faith in a strong federal government, an activist presidency, balancing of public interest and corporate interest, and support for a roll-call of progressive reform causes, from woman suffrage and the eight-hour work day to abolishing child labor and greater corporate regulation.

While progressives guided the country down the path it would follow for much of the twentieth century toward regulation of the economy and government attention to social welfare, it also contained a strong streak of social control. This was the darker side of the movement. Progressive faith in expert leadership and government intervention could justify much that intruded heavily on the daily lives of individual citizens. The regulation of leisure activities is a good example. Commercial leisure—dance halls, movies, vaudeville performances, and amusement parks like Coney Island—appeared to many reformers to threaten public morality, particularly endangering young women. Opponents famously deemed Coney Island "Sodom by the Sea." Seeking to tame such activities, reformers, most of whom were middle class, promoted "Rules for Correct Dancing" (no "conspicuous display of hosiery"; no suggestive dance styles) and enacted a National Board of Censorship for movies. These rules largely targeted working-class and youth entertainments with an eye to regulating morality and behavior.

Eugenics also garnered the support of some progressive reformers. Eugenics was a scientific movement which believed that weaker or "bad" genes threatened the nation’s population. Eugenicists supported laws in the name of the rational protection of public health to compel sterilization of those with "bad" genes—typically focusing on those who were mentally ill or in jails, but also disproportionately affecting those who were not white. Any assessment of the progressive movement must grapple with this element of social control as reformers established new ways to regulate the daily lives of citizens, particularly those in the lower ranks of society, by empowering government to set rules for behavior. It was often middle-class reformers who made their values the standard for laws regulating all of society.

Progressive reform’s greatest failure was its acquiescence in the legal and violent disfranchisement of African Americans. Most progressive reformers failed to join African American leaders in their fight against lynching. Many endorsed efforts by southern progressives to enact literacy tests for voting and other laws in the name of good government that effectively denied black Americans the right to vote and entrenched Jim Crow segregation. By 1920, all southern states and nine states outside the South had enacted such laws.

Progressivism’s defining feature was its moderateness. Progressives carved out what historian James Kloppenberg describes as a "via media," a middle way between the laissez-faire capitalism dominant in the Gilded Age and the socialist reorganization many radicals of the period advocated. It was a movement of accommodation. Some regulation of business joined some protection of workers, but no dramatic overhaul of the distribution of wealth or control of the economy occurred. Instead, progressives bequeathed the twentieth century faith in an active government to moderate the effects of large-scale capitalism on citizens and communities. Government would secure the public claim to unadulterated food, safer workplaces, decent housing, and fair business practices, among many other things. Theodore Roosevelt epitomized progressive rebuke of the outrageous excesses of capitalists and their cronies, but also typified progressive accommodation of the new order. He opposed unregulated business, deemed monopolies antithetical, defended labor unions, supported consumer protections, and initiated government protection of natural resources. Yet he never believed we could turn away from the new economy and the transformation it had wrought in American society. The balancing act of reform and regulation that Roosevelt and other progressives pursued led the nation through the moment of crisis at the end of the nineteenth century and accommodated it to the modern industrial society of the twentieth century.

Kirsten Swinth is associate professor of history at Fordham University and the author of Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (2001).

Stay up to date, and subscribe to our quarterly newsletter.

Learn how the Institute impacts history education through our work guiding teachers, energizing students, and supporting research.

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• 20th Century: Post-1945
• 20th Century: Pre-1945
• African American History
• Antebellum History
• Asian American History
• Civil War and Reconstruction
• Colonial History
• Cultural History
• Early National History
• Economic History
• Environmental History
• Foreign Relations and Foreign Policy
• History of Science and Technology
• Labor and Working Class History
• Late 19th-Century History
• Latino History
• Legal History
• Native American History
• Political History
• Pre-Contact History
• Religious History
• Revolutionary History
• Slavery and Abolition
• Southern History
• Urban History
• Western History
• Women's History
• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

Article contents

Progressives and progressivism in an era of reform.

• Maureen A. Flanagan Maureen A. Flanagan Department of Humanities, Illinois Institute of Technology
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.84
• Published online: 05 August 2016

The decades from the 1890s into the 1920s produced reform movements in the United States that resulted in significant changes to the country’s social, political, cultural, and economic institutions. The impulse for reform emanated from a pervasive sense that the country’s democratic promise was failing. Political corruption seemed endemic at all levels of government. An unregulated capitalist industrial economy exploited workers and threatened to create a serious class divide, especially as the legal system protected the rights of business over labor. Mass urbanization was shifting the country from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one characterized by poverty, disease, crime, and cultural clash. Rapid technological advancements brought new, and often frightening, changes into daily life that left many people feeling that they had little control over their lives. Movements for socialism, woman suffrage, and rights for African Americans, immigrants, and workers belied the rhetoric of the United States as a just and equal democratic society for all its members.

Responding to the challenges presented by these problems, and fearful that without substantial change the country might experience class upheaval, groups of Americans proposed undertaking significant reforms. Underlying all proposed reforms was a desire to bring more justice and equality into a society that seemed increasingly to lack these ideals. Yet there was no agreement among these groups about the exact threat that confronted the nation, the means to resolve problems, or how to implement reforms. Despite this lack of agreement, all so-called Progressive reformers were modernizers. They sought to make the country’s democratic promise a reality by confronting its flaws and seeking solutions. All Progressivisms were seeking a via media, a middle way between relying on older ideas of 19th-century liberal capitalism and the more radical proposals to reform society through either social democracy or socialism. Despite differences among Progressives, the types of Progressivisms put forth, and the successes and failures of Progressivism, this reform era raised into national discourse debates over the nature and meaning of democracy, how and for whom a democratic society should work, and what it meant to be a forward-looking society. It also led to the implementation of an activist state.

• Progressives
• Progressivisms
• urbanization
• immigration

The reform impulse of the decades from the 1890s into the 1920s did not erupt suddenly in the 1890s. Previous movements, such as the Mugwump faction of the Republican Party and the Knights of Labor, had challenged existing conditions in the 1870s and 1880s. Such earlier movements either tended to focus on the problems of a particular group or were too small to effect much change. The 1890s Populist Party’s concentration on agrarian issues did not easily resonate with the expanding urban population. The Populists lost their separate identity when the Democratic Party absorbed their agenda. The reform proposals of the Progressive era differed from those of these earlier protest movements. Progressives came from all strata of society. Progressivism aimed to implement comprehensive systemic reforms to change the direction of the country.

Political corruption, economic exploitation, mass migration and urbanization, rapid technological advancements, and social unrest challenged the rhetoric of the United States as a just and equal society. Now groups of Americans throughout the country proposed to reform the country’s political, social, cultural, and economic institutions in ways that they believed would address fundamental problems that had produced the inequities of American society.

Progressives did not seek to overturn capitalism. They sought to revitalize a democratic promise of justice and equality and to move the country into a modern Progressive future by eliminating or at least ameliorating capitalism’s worst excesses. They wanted to replace an individualistic, competitive society with a more cooperative, democratic one. They sought to bring a measure of social justice for all people, to eliminate political corruption, and to rebalance the relationship among business, labor, and consumers by introducing economic regulation. 1 Progressives turned to government to achieve these objectives and laid the foundation for an increasingly powerful state.

Social Justice Progressivism

Social justice Progressives wanted an activist state whose first priority was to provide for the common welfare. Jane Addams argued that real democracy must operate from a sense of social morality that would foster the greater good of all rather than protect those with wealth and power. 2 Social justice Progressivism confronted two problems to securing a democracy based on social morality. Several basic premises that currently structured the country had to be rethought, and social justice Progressivism was promoted largely by women who lacked official political power.

Legal Precedent or Social Realism

The existing legal system protected the rights of business and property over labor. 3 From 1893 , when Florence Kelley secured factory legislation mandating the eight-hour workday for women and teenagers and outlawing child labor in Illinois factories, social justice Progressives faced legal obstacles as business contested such legislation. In 1895 , the Supreme Court in Ritchie v. People ruled that such legislation violated the “freedom of contract” provision of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court confined the police power of the state to protecting immediate health and safety, not groups of people in industries. 4 Then, in the 1905 case Lochner v. New York , the Court declared that the state had no interest in regulating the hours of male bakers. To circumvent these rulings, Kelley, Josephine Goldmark, and Louis Brandeis contended that law should address social realities. The Brandeis brief to the Supreme Court in 1908 , in Muller v. Oregon , argued for upholding Oregon’s eight-hour law for women working in laundries because of the debilitating physical effects of such work. When the Court agreed, social justice Progressives hoped this would be the opening wedge to extend new rights to labor. The Muller v. Oregon ruling had a narrow gender basis. It declared that the state had an interest in protecting the reproductive capacities of women. Henceforth, male and female workers would be unequal under the law, limiting women’s economic opportunities across the decades, rather than shifting the legal landscape. Ruling on the basis of women’s reproductive capacities, the Court made women socially inferior to men in law and justified state-sponsored interference in women’s control of their bodies. 5

Role of the State to Protect and Foster

Women organized in voluntary groups worked to identify and attack the problems caused by mass urbanization. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs ( 1890 ) coordinated women’s activities throughout the country. Social justice Progressives lobbied municipal governments to enact new ordinances to ameliorate existing urban conditions of poverty, disease, and inequality. Chicago women secured the nation’s first juvenile court ( 1899 ). 6 Los Angeles women helped inaugurate a public health nursing program and secure pure milk regulations for their city. Women also secured municipal public baths in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, and other cities. Organized women in Philadelphia and Dallas were largely responsible for their cities implementing new clean water systems. Women set up pure milk stations to prevent infant diarrhea and organized infant welfare societies. 7

Social justice Progressives sought national legislation to protect consumers from the pernicious effects of industrial production outside of their immediate control. In 1905 , the General Federation of Women’s Clubs initiated a letter-writing campaign to pressure Congress to pass pure food legislation. Standard accounts of the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and pure milk ordinances generally credit male professionals with putting in place such reforms, but female social justice Progressives were instrumental in putting this issue before the country. 8

Social justice Progressives sought a ban on child labor and protections for children’s health and education. They argued that no society could progress if it allowed child labor. In 1912 they persuaded Congress to establish a federal Children’s Bureau to investigate conditions of children throughout the country. Julia Lathrop first headed the bureau, which was thenceforth dominated by women. Nonetheless, when Congress passed the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act ( 1916 ), banning interstate commerce in products made with child labor, a North Carolina man immediately sued, arguing that it deprived him of property in his son’s labor. The Supreme Court ( 1918 ) ruled the law unconstitutional because it violated state powers to regulate conditions of labor. A constitutional amendment banning child labor ( 1922 ) was attacked by manufacturers and conservative organizations protesting that it would give government power over children. Only four states ratified the amendment. 9

Woman suffrage was crucial for social justice Progressives as both a democratic right and because they believed it essential for their agenda. 10 When suffrage left elected officials uncertain about the power of women’s votes in 1921 , Congress passed the Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infant Welfare bill, which provided federal funds for maternal and infant health. The American Medical Association opposed the bill as a violation of its expertise. Businessmen and political leaders protested that the federal government should not interfere in health care and objected that it would raise taxes. Congress made Sheppard-Towner a “sunset” act to run for five years, after which it would decide whether to renew it. Congress temporarily extended it but ended the funding in 1929 , even though the country’s infant mortality rate exceeded that of six other industrial countries. The hostility of the male-dominated American Medical Association and the Public Health Service to Sheppard-Towner and to its administration by the Children’s Bureau, along with attacks against the social justice network of women’s organizations as a communist conspiracy to undermine American society, doomed the legislation. 11

New Practices of Democracy

Women established settlement houses, voluntary associations, day nurseries, and community, neighborhood, and social centers as venues in which to practice participatory democracy. These venues intended to bring people together to learn about one another and their needs, to provide assistance for those needing help, and to lobby their governments to provide social goods to people. This was not reform from the bottom; middle-class women almost always led these venues. Most of these efforts were also racially exclusive, but African American women established venues of their own. In Atlanta, Lugenia Hope, who had spent time at Chicago’s Hull House, established the Atlanta Neighborhood Union in 1908 to organize the city’s African American women on a neighborhood basis. Hope urged women to investigate the problems of their neighborhoods and bring their issues to the municipal government. 12

The National Consumers’ League (NCL, 1899 ) practiced participatory democracy on the national level. Arising from earlier working women’s societies and with Florence Kelley at its head, the NCL investigated working conditions and urged women to use their consumer-purchasing power to force manufacturers to institute new standards of production. The NCL assembled and published “white lists” of those manufacturers found to be practicing good employment standards and awarded a “white label” to factories complying with such standards. The NCL’s tactics were voluntary—boycotts were against the law—and they did not convince many manufacturers to change their practices. Even so, such tactics drew more women into the social justice movement, and the NCL’s continuous efforts were rewarded in New Deal legislation. 13

A group of working women and settlement-house residents formed the National Women’s Trade Union League (NWTUL, 1903 ) and organized local affiliates to work for unionization in female-dominated manufacturing. 14 Middle-class women walked the picket lines with striking garment workers and waitresses in New York and Chicago and helped secure concessions from manufacturers. The NWTUL forced an official investigation into the causes of New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire ( 1911 ), in which almost 150 workers, mainly young women, died. Members of the NWTUL were organizers for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. Despite these participatory venues, much literature on such movements emphasizes male initiatives and fails to appreciate gender differences. The public forums movement promoted by men, such as Charles Sprague Smith and Frederic Howe, was a top-down effort in which prominent speakers addressed pressing issues of the day to teach the “rank and file” how to practice democracy. 15 In Boston, Mary Parker Follett promoted participatory democracy through neighborhood centers organized and run by residents. Chicago women’s organizations fostered neighborhood centers as spaces for residents to gather and discuss neighborhood needs. 16

Suffrage did not provide the political power women had hoped for, but female social justice Progressives occupied key offices in the New Deal administration. They helped write national anti-child labor legislation, minimum wage and maximum hour laws, aid to dependent children, and elements of the Social Security Act. Such legislation at least partially fulfilled the social justice Progressive agenda that activist government provide social goods to protect daily life against the vagaries of the capitalist marketplace.

Political Progressivism

Political Progressivism was a structural-instrumental approach to reform the mechanisms and exercise of politics to break the hold of political parties. Its adherents sought a well-ordered government run by experts to undercut a political patronage system that favored trading votes for services. Political Progressives believed that such reforms would enhance democracy.

Mechanisms and Processes of Electoral Democracy

The Wisconsin Idea promoted by the state’s three-time governor Robert La Follette exemplified the political Progressives’ approach to reform. The plan advocated state-level reforms to electoral procedures. A key proposal of the Wisconsin Idea was to replace the existing party control of all nominations with a popular direct primary. Wisconsin became the first state to require the direct primary. The plan also proposed giving voters the power to initiate legislation, hold referenda on proposed legislation, and recall elected officials. Wisconsin voters adopted these proposals by 1911 , 17 although Oregon was the first state to adopt the initiative and referendum, in 1902 . 18

The political Progressives attacked a patronage politics that filled administrative offices with faithful party supporters, awarded service franchises to private business, and solicited bribes in return for contracts. Political Progressives proposed shifting to merit-based government by experts provided by theoretically nonpartisan appointed commissions or city managers systems that would apply businesslike expertise and fiscal efficiency to government. They proposed replacing city councils elected by districts (wards) with citywide at-large elections, creating strong mayor systems to undercut the machinations of city councils, and reducing the number of elective offices. They also sought new municipal charters and home-rule powers to give cities more control over their governing authority and taxing power. 19

Political Progressives were mainly men organized into new local civic federations, city clubs, municipal reform leagues, and municipal research bureaus and into new national groups such as the National Municipal League. They attended national conferences such as the National Conference on City Planning, discussing topics of concern to political Progressives. The National Municipal League formulated a model charter to reorganize municipal government predicated on home rule and argued that its proposals would provide good tools for democracy. 20

In general, only small cities such as Galveston, Texas, and Des Moines, Iowa, or new cities such as Phoenix, Arizona, where such political Progressives dominated elections, adopted the city-manager and commission governments. 21 Other cities elected reform mayors, such as Tom Johnson of Cleveland, Ohio, who placed the professional experts Frederic Howe and Edward W. Bemis into his administration. 22 Charter reform, home rule, and at-large election movements were more complicated in big cities. They failed in Chicago. 23 Boston switched to at-large elections, but the shift in mechanisms did lessen political party control. A new breed of politicians who appealed to interest group politics gained control rather than rule by experts. 24

Good Government by Experts

Focus on good government reform earned these men the rather pejorative nickname of “goo-goos.” These Progressives argued that only the technological expertise of professional engineers and professional bureaucrats could design rational and economically efficient ordinances for solving urban problems. When corporate interests challenged antipollution ordinances and increased government regulation as causing undue hardship for manufacturers, political Progressives countered with economic answers. Pollution was an economic problem: it caused the city to suffer economic waste and inefficiency, and it cost the city and its taxpayers money. 25 In Pittsburgh, the Mellon Institute Smoke Investigation marshaled scientific expertise to measure soot fall in the city and to calculate how costly smoke pollution might be to the city. 26 The Supreme Court in Northwestern Laundry v. Des Moines ( 1915 ) ruled that there were no valid constitutional objections to state power to regulate pollution. 27

The political Progressives’ cost-benefit approach to regulation clashed with the social justice idea that protecting the public health should decide pollution regulation. The Pittsburgh Ladies Health Protective Association argued that smoke pollution was a general health hazard. 28 The Chicago women’s Anti-Smoke League called smoke pollution a threat to daily life and common welfare, as coal soot fell on food and in homes and was breathed in by children. They demanded immediate strict antismoke ordinances and inspectors to vigorously inspect and enforce the ordinances. The league urged all city residents to monitor pollution in their neighborhoods. 29 The Baltimore Women’s Civic League made smoke abatement a principal target for improving living and working conditions. 30 The cost-benefit argument usually won out over the health-first one.

For political Progressives, good government also meant using professional expertise to plan city growth and reorder the urban built environment. They abandoned an earlier City Beautiful movement that focused on cultural and aesthetic beautification in favor of systematic planning by architects, engineers, and city planners to secure the economic development desired by business. 31 Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan ( 1909 ) was the work of a committee of men selected by the city’s Commercial Club. 32 Experts crafted new master plans to guarantee urban functionality and profitability through “creative destruction,” to build new transportation and communication networks, erect new grand civic buildings and spaces, and zone the city’s functions into distinct sectors. They proposed new street configurations to facilitate the movement of goods and people. 33 As the profession of urban planning developed, cities sought out planners such as Harland Bartholomew to formulate new master plans. 34

New York’s Mary Simkhovitch contested this approach and urged planning on the neighborhood level, with professionals consulting with the people. She stressed that no plan was good if it emphasized only economy. Simkhovitch and Florence Kelley organized the first National Conference on City Planning ( 1909 ) around the theme of planning for social needs. Simkhovitch was the only woman to address the gathering. All the male speakers emphasized planning for economic development. As architects, lawyers, and engineers, and new professional planners such as John Nolen and George Ford dominated the planning conferences, Simkhovitch and Kelley withdrew. 35

The democratic reform theories of Frederic Howe and Mary Parker Follett reflected competing ideas about political Progressivism and urban reform. Howe believed that democracy was a political mechanism that, if properly ordered and led by experts, would restore the city to the people. The key to achieving good government and democracy was municipal home rule. Once freed from state interference, his theoretical city republic would decide in the best interests of its residents, making city life orderly and thereby more democratic. 36 For Follett, democracy was embedded in social relations, and the city was the hope of democracy because it could be organized on the neighborhood level. There people would apply democracy collectively and create an orderly society. 37 Throughout the country, municipal political reform was driven primarily by groups of men. Women and their ideas were consistently pushed to the margins of political Progressivism. 38

Social Science Expertise

Social science expertise gave political Progressives a theoretical foundation for cautious proposals to create a more activist state. University of Wisconsin political economist Richard Ely; his former student John R. Commons; political scientist Charles McCarthy, who authored the Wisconsin Idea; and University of Michigan political economist Henry C. Adams, among others, filled the role of social science expert. Social scientists founded new disciplinary organizations, such as the American Economics Association. This association organized the American Association of Labor Legislation (AALL). Commons, University of Chicago sociology professor Charles R. Henderson, and Commons’ student John B. Andrews were prominent members. The AALL focused on workers’ health, compensation, and insurance, in contrast to the NCL emphasis on investigation and working conditions. 39 Frederic Howe, with a PhD in history and political science from Johns Hopkins, became a foremost theorist for municipal reform based on his social science theories. John Dewey promulgated new theories of democracy and education. Professional social scientists composed a tight circle of men who created a space between academia and government from which to advocate for reform. 40 They addressed each other, trained their students to follow their ideas, and rarely spoke to the larger public. 41

Sophonisba Breckinridge, Frances Kellor, Edith Abbott, and Katherine Davis were trained at the University of Chicago in political economy and sociology. Abbott briefly held an academic position at Wellesley, but she resigned to join the other women in applying her training to social research and social activism. Their expertise laid the foundation for the profession of social work. As grassroots activists, they worked with settlement house residents such as Jane Addams and Mary Simkhovitch, joined women’s voluntary organizations, investigated living and working conditions, and carved out careers in social welfare. 42

Male social scientists dismissed women’s expertise and eschewed grassroots work. 43 Breckinridge had earned a magna cum laude PhD in political science and economics, but she received no offers of an academic position, unlike her male colleagues. She was kept on at the university, but by 1920 the sociology department directed social sciences away from seeking practical solutions to everyday life that had linked scholarly inquiry with social responsibility. The female social scientists who had formed an intellectual core of the sociology department were put into a School of Social Services Administration and ultimately segregated into the division of social work. 44

Economic Progressivism

Economic Progressives identified unregulated corporate monopoly capitalism as a primary source of the country’s troubles. 45 They proposed a new regulatory state to mitigate the worst aspects of the system. Reforming the banking and currency systems, pursuing some measure of antitrust (antimonopoly) legislation, shifting from a largely laissez-faire economy, and moderately restructuring property relations would produce government in the public interest.

Antimonopoly Progressivism

Antimonopoly Progressivism required rethinking the relationship between business and government, introducing new legislation, and modifying a legal system that consistently sided with business. Congress and the presidency had to take leadership roles, but below them were Progressive groups such as the National Civic Federation, the NCL, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs pushing for significant policy change. These Progressives believed collusion between a small number of capitalist industrialists and politicians had badly damaged democracy. They especially feared that the system threatened to lead to class warfare.

The Interstate Commerce Act ( 1887 ) and the Sherman Antitrust Act ( 1890 ) began to consider the problems of unregulated laissez-faire capitalism and monopoly in restraint of trade. As president, Theodore Roosevelt ( 1901–1909 ) used congressional power to regulate commerce to attack corporate monopolistic restraint of trade. The Elkins Act ( 1903 ) gave Congress the power to regulate against predatory business practices; the Hepburn Act ( 1906 ) gave it authority to regulate railroad rates; the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act ( 1906 ) did the same for those industries. Roosevelt created the Department of Commerce and Labor ( 1903 ) to oversee interstate corporate practices and in 1906 empowered the Department of Agriculture to inspect and set standards in meat production, a move that led eventually to the Food and Drug Administration.

Presidential Progressivism

Roosevelt considered the president to be the guardian of the public welfare. His approach to conservation was a primary example of how he applied this belief. He agreed with the arguments of social scientists, professional organizations of engineers, and forestry bureau chief Gifford Pinchot that careful and efficient management and administration of natural resources was necessary to guarantee the country’s economic progress and preserve democratic opportunity. Roosevelt appointed a Public Lands Commission to manage public land in the West and appointed a National Conservation Commission to inventory the country’s resources so that sound business practices could be implemented. The commission’s three-volume report relied on scientific and social scientific methods to examine conservation issues. 46

William Howard Taft ( 1909–1913 ) refused to support further work by the Conservation Commission. He rejected new conservation proposals as violating congressional authority and possessing no legal standing. Taft’s administrative appointments, including Interior Secretary Richard Ballinger, favored opening public lands to more private development. Taft’s Progressivism was the more conservative Republican approach that focused on breaking up trusts because they were bad for business. 47 Taft sided with business when he signed the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act ( 1909 ), which kept high tariffs on many essential goods that Progressives wanted reduced to aid consumers and small manufacturers. 48

In 1912 , the Republican Party split between Roosevelt and Taft. Political, economic, and social justice Progressives, including Robert La Follette, Charles McCarthy, Jane Addams, Frances Kellor, and George Perkins, a partner at J. P. Morgan and Company, helped establish the Progressive Party. They nominated Roosevelt, who envisioned a platform of “New Nationalism,” which promised to govern in the public interest and provide economic prosperity as a basic foundation of democratic citizenship. 49 Addams was unhappy with Roosevelt’s economic emphasis, but she saw him as social Progressives’ best hope.

Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt received two-thirds of the vote, while Socialist Party candidate Eugene Debs secured 6 percent of the votes. The election results indicated that the general population supported a middle way between socialism and Taft’s big business Progressivism. Wilson’s ( 1913–1921 ) “New Freedom” platform promised to curb the power of big business and close the growing wealth gap. As senator, La Follette helped push through Wilson’s reform legislation. The Clayton Antitrust Act ( 1914 ), the Federal Trade Commission ( 1914 ), and the Federal Reserve Act ( 1913 ) each curbed the power of big business and regulated banking. The Sixteenth Amendment ( 1913 ) authorized the federal income tax. The Seventeenth Amendment ( 1913 ) provided for the direct election of state legislators, who had previously been appointed by state legislatures.

Trade Union Progressivism

Under Samuel Gompers, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) fought to secure collective bargaining rights for male trade unionists. The AFL rejected the AALL proposals for worker compensation and insurance and never supported national worker compensation laws, although local federations supported state-level legislation. 50 Gompers preferred working with businessmen and politicians to secure the right to collective bargaining, the eight-hour day, and a voice for labor in production. The AFL never tried to form a Labor Party but advocated putting a labor agenda into mainstream party politics. 51 The Clayton Antitrust Act, which acknowledged that unions had the right to peaceful and lawful actions, was a victory for trade union Progressivism. The act did not provide everything that Gompers had demanded. Only New Deal legislation would offer more extensive protections to unions.

Gompers and the AFL rejected the AALL’s ideas, fearing that a more activist government might extend to regulating the labor of women and children. The AFL wanted sufficient economic security for white male workers, to move women out of the labor force. 52 Other labor Progressives sought the same end. Louis Brandeis and Father John Ryan promoted the living wage as a right of citizenship for male workers. Ryan acknowledged that unmarried women workers were entitled to a living wage, but he wanted labor reform to secure a family wage so that men would marry and families would produce children. 53 Hostile to organizing women, Gompers forced NWTUL leader Margaret Dreier Robins off the executive board of the Chicago Federation of Labor. 54

Municipal Ownership

On the local level, economic Progressives sought a middle way between socialism and the AFL’s single-minded trade unionism. AFL affiliates and Progressive politicians such as Cleveland’s Tom Johnson favored a municipal democracy that gave voters new powers. Municipal ownership of public utilities such as street railways promised the working class a way to protect their labor through the ballot. 55 Such reform would also destroy the franchise system. In Los Angeles, labor and socialists crafted a labor/socialist ticket to challenge the business/party control of the city and enact municipal ownership. A socialist administration in Milwaukee appealed to class interests to support an agenda that included municipal ownership. In Chicago, socialist Josephine Kaneko argued that she did not see much difference between socialism and women’s Progressive agenda for reform to benefit the common welfare. 56 Despite such flirtations between labor and socialists, labor remained attached to the Democratic Party.

Some cities achieved a measure of municipal ownership. Most middle-class urban Progressives deemed municipal ownership too socialist. They favored state economic regulation, led by experts, rather than ownership to break the monopoly in public utilities. 57

International Progressivism

Progressivism fostered new international engagement. The economic imperative to secure supplies of raw materials for industrial production, a messianic approach of bringing cultural and racial civilization around the globe, and belief in an international Progressivism that focused on international cooperation all pushed Progressives to think globally.

Securing Economic Progress

Although he was generally against Progressivism, President William McKinley annexed Hawaii ( 1898 ), saying that the country needed it even more than it had needed California. 58 The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine ( 1904 ) declared that intervention in the Caribbean was necessary to secure economic stability and forestall foreign interference in the area. Progressive Herbert Croly believed that the country needed to forcibly pacify some areas in the world in order for the United States to establish an American international system. 59 The Progressive Party platform ( 1912 ) declared it imperative to the people’s welfare that the country expand its foreign commerce. Between 1898 and 1941 , the United States invaded Cuba, acquired the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, took possession of Puerto Rico, colonized the Philippines and several Pacific islands, encouraged Panama to rebel against Colombia so that the United States could build the Panama Canal, invaded Mexico to protect oil interests, and intervened in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic. To protect its possessions in the Pacific, Roosevelt’s Secretary of State Elihu Root finalized the Root-Takahira Agreement ( 1908 ), which acknowledged Japan’s control of Korea in return for its noninterference in the Philippines. American imperialism based on economic and financial desires became referred to as “Dollar Diplomacy.” 60

Mission of Civilization

Race, paternalism, and masculinity characterized elements of international Progressivism. Senator Albert Beveridge had supported Progressive proposals to abolish child labor and had favored regulating business and granting more rights to labor, but he viewed Filipinos as too backward to understand democracy and self-government. The United States was God’s chosen nation, with a divine mission to civilize the world; it should exercise its “spirit of progress” to organize the world. 61 William Jennings Bryan had previously been an anti-imperialist, but later, as Wilson’s secretary of state, he advocated intervening in Latin America to tutor backward people in self-government. 62 In speeches and writings, Roosevelt stressed that new international possessions required men to accept the strenuous life of responsibility for other people in order to maintain American domination of the world. 63 Social science likened Filipino men to children lacking the vigorous manhood necessary for self-government. 64 Beveridge contended that it was government’s responsibility to manufacture manhood. Empire could be the new frontier of white masculinity. 65 Roosevelt concluded a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” ( 1907 ) in which Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to Japanese laborers to immigrate to the United States.

Democracy and International Cooperation

A cadre of Progressives who had worked to extend their ideals into an international context did not welcome imperialism, dollar diplomacy, and war. 66 Addams rejected war as an anachronism that failed to produce a collective responsibility. La Follette rejoiced that failures in dollar diplomacy elevated humanity over property. Suffragists compared their lack of the vote to the plight of Filipinos. Belle Case La Follette opposed incursion into Mexico and denounced all militarism as driven by greed, suspicion, and love of power. 67

Many Progressives opposed war as an assault on an international collective humanity. Women organized peace marches and founded a Women’s Peace Party. Addams, Kelley, Frederic Howe, Lillian Wald of New York’s Henry Street Settlement, and Paul Kellogg, editor of the Progressive Survey , formed the American Union Against Militarism. 68 Addams, Simkhovitch, the sociologist Emily Greene Balch, and labor leader Leonora O’Reilly attended the International Women’s Peace Conference at The Hague in spring 1915 . Florence Kelley was denied a passport to travel. 69 The work of the American Red Cross in Europe during and after the war reflected the humanitarian collective impulse of Progressivism. 70

Entry into World War I, President Wilson’s assertion that it would make the world safe for democracy, and a growing xenophobia that demanded 100 percent loyalty produced a Progressive crisis. Addams remained firm against the war as antihumanitarian and was vilified for her pacifism. 71 La Follette voted against the declaration of war, charging that it was being promoted by business desires and that it was absurd to believe that it would make the world safe for democracy. He was accused of being pro-German, and Theodore Roosevelt said that he should be hung. 72 Labor leader Morris Hillquit and Florence Kelley formed the People’s Council of America to continue to pressure for peace. Under pressure to display patriotism, Progressive opposition to the war crumbled. Paul Kellogg declared that it was time to combat European militarism. The American Union Against Militarism dissolved. Herbert Croly’s New Republic urged the country to take a more active role in the war to create a new international league of peace and assume leadership of democratic nations. John Dewey proclaimed it a war of peoples, not armies, and stated that international reform would follow its conclusion. 73

Other Progressives comforted themselves that once the war was won, they could recommit to democratic agendas. Kelley, Grace Abbott, Josephine Goldmark, and Julia Lathrop helped organize the home front to maintain Progressive ideals. They monitored the condition of women workers, sat on the war department’s board controlling labor standards, and drafted insurance policies for military personnel. Suffrage leader Carrie Chapman Catt volunteered for the Women’s Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense. Walter Lippmann worked on government projects. City planner John Nolen designed housing communities for war workers under the newly constituted United States Housing Corporation. 74

Suffragists protested the lack of democracy in the United States. As Wilson refused to support woman suffrage, members of the National Woman’s Party, led by Alice Paul, picketed the White House in protest. Picketers were arrested, Paul was put in solitary confinement in a psychiatric ward, and several women on a hunger strike were force-fed. Wilson capitulated to public outrage over the women’s treatment. The women were released, and Wilson urged passage of the suffrage amendment. 75 The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 , but Progressives’ hopes that equal political rights would bring democratic equality were not fulfilled. The social justice Progressives split over whether to support the Equal Rights Amendment drawn up by the National Woman’s Party, fearing that it would negate the protective labor legislation they had achieved.

Racialized Progressivism

White Progressives failed to pursue racial equality. Most of them believed the country was not yet ready for such a cultural shift. Some of them believed in theories of racial inferiority. Southern Progressive figure Rebecca Latimer Felton defended racial lynching as a means to protect white women. 76 Other Progressives, such as Sophonisba Breckinridge, fought against racial exclusion policies and promoted interracial cooperation. 77 W. E. B. Du Bois and Addams helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ( 1909 ).

African American Progressivism

African Americans believed that Progressive ideology should lead inevitably to racial equality. Du Bois spoke at public forums. 78 He supported the social justice Progressives’ agenda, attending the 1912 Progressive Party convention. Du Bois proposed a racial equality plank for the party platform. Jane Addams helped write the plank. Theodore Roosevelt rejected it, preferring the gradualist policy of Booker T. Washington. Addams objected but mused that perhaps it was not yet time for such a bold move. Racial justice would follow logically from dedication to social justice. 79 Du Bois shifted his support to Woodrow Wilson, while Ida B. Wells-Barnett backed Taft. In 1916 , African American women founded Colored Women’s Hughes clubs to support the Republican nominee. Hughes had reluctantly backed woman suffrage, and African American women viewed suffrage as the means to protect the race. Nannie Helen Burroughs worked through the National Association of Colored Women ( 1896 ) and the National Baptist Convention, demanding suffrage for African American women because they would use it wisely, for the benefit of the race. Burroughs lived in Washington, DC, where she witnessed the segregationist policies of the Wilson administration. She castigated African American men for having voted for him in 1912 . 80 African American Progressives hoped that serving in the military and organizing on the home front during the war would result in equal citizenship when the war ended. Instead, African Americans were subjected to more prejudice and violence. Southern senators blocked the Dyer antilynching bill ( 1922 ).

Immigration Restriction

Anti-immigrant sentiment had been building in the country since passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act ( 1882 ). Several attempts to pass a literacy test bill for immigrants, supported by the Immigration Restriction League ( 1894 ), failed. The forty-one volumes of the Senate-appointed Dillingham Commission ( 1911 ) concluded that immigrants were heavily responsible for the country’s problems and advocated the literacy test. Frances Kellor believed that all immigrants could be Americanized. Randolph Bourne advocated immigration as the path to Americans becoming internationalists. The New Republic , however, feared that excessive immigration would overwhelm an activist state and prevent it from solving social problems. Lillian Wald, Frederic Howe, and other Progressives organized the National Committee for Constructive Immigration Legislation ( 1916 ) hoping to forestall more restrictive measures. In the midst of war fever, Congress passed a literacy test bill over Wilson’s veto ( 1917 ).

100-percent Americanism

Progressives such as Kellor, Wald, and Addams believed that incorporating immigrants into a broad American culture would create a Progressive modern society. Theodore Roosevelt promoted a racialized version of American society. As president, he secured new laws ( 1903 , 1907 ) to exclude certain classes of immigrants—paupers, the insane, prostitutes, and radicals who might pose a threat to American standards of labor—that he deemed incapable of becoming good Americans. He created the Bureau of Immigration to enforce these provisions. The 1907 Immigration Act also stripped citizenship from women who married noncitizens, a situation only reversed in 1922 . At Roosevelt’s behest, Congress tightened requirements for naturalization. Wartime fever and the 1919 Red Scare intensified the search for 100 percent Americanism and undermined the alternative Progressive ideal of a cooperative Americanism. 81

Progressivism beyond the Progressive Era

The democratizing ideals of the Progressive era lived beyond the time period. A regulatory state to eliminate the worst effects of capitalism was created, as most Americans accepted that the federal state had to take on more social responsibility. After ratification of the suffrage amendment, the National American Woman Suffrage Association reconstituted as the National League of Women Voters ( 1920 ) to continue promoting an informed, democratic electorate. The New Deal implemented a substantial social justice Progressive agenda, with the NCL, the Children’s Bureau, and many women who had formed the earlier era’s agenda writing the legislation banning child labor, fostering new labor standards that included minimum wage and maximum hours, and mandating social security for the elderly. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs focused on environmental protection as a democratic right. A women’s joint congressional committee formed to continue pressing for social justice legislation. The National Association of Colored Women joined the committee.

Progressives can be legitimately criticized for not undertaking a more radical restructuring of American society. Some of them can be criticized for believing that they possessed the best vision for a modern, Progressive future. They can be faulted for not promoting racial equality or a new internationalism that might bring about global peace rather than war. Nonetheless, they never intended to undermine capitalism, so they could never truly embrace socialism. In the context of a society that continued to exalt individualism and suspect government interference and working within their own notions of democracy, they accomplished significant changes in American government and society. 82

Discussion of the Literature

The muckraking authors and journalists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries highlighted rapacious capitalism and characterized its wealthy beneficiaries as corrupting the country. In their exposés of the relationship between business and politics, Ida M. Tarbell, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair accused politicians of a corrupt bargain in pursuit of their own economic interests against the interests of the people. 83 Drawing upon these investigative writings, early analyses of Progressivism from Benjamin De Witt and Charles and Mary Beard interpreted Progressivism as a dualistic class struggle. On one side were wealthy and privileged special interests seeking to promote themselves at the expense of everyone else. On the other side was a broad public seeking to restore dignity and opportunity to the common people. 84

By the early 1950s, George Mowry and Richard Hofstadter contended that Progressivism was a movement of an older, professional, middle class seeking to reclaim its status, deference, and power, which had been usurped by a new corporate elite and a corrupt political class. 85 In the early 1960s, Samuel Hays argued that rather than being the product of a status revolution, Progressivism was the work of an urban upper class of new and younger leading Republican business and professional men. 86 Robert Wiebe shifted the analysis to describe a broader middle-class Progressivism of new professional men who wished to reorder society by applying bureaucratic and business-oriented skills to political and economic institutions. 87 In Wiebe’s organizational thesis, Progressives were modernizers with a structural-instrumentalist agenda. They rejected reliance on older values and cultural norms to order society and sought to create a modern reordered society with political and economic institutions run by men qualified to apply fiscal expertise, businesslike efficiency, and modern scientific expertise to solve problems and save democracy. 88 The emerging academic disciplines in the social sciences of economics, political economy and political science, and pragmatic education supplied the theoretical bases for this middle-class expert Progressivism. 89 Gabriel Kolko countered such analyses, arguing that Progressivism was a conservative movement promoted by business to protect itself. 90

Professional men and their organizations kept copious records from which scholars could draw this interpretation. By the late 1960s, scholars began to examine the role of other groups in reform movements, ask different questions, and utilize different sources. John Buenker called Progressivism a pluralistic effort, an ethnocultural struggle based on religious values in which urban immigrants and their democratic politicians resisted the old-stock Protestant elites whose Progressive agenda they believed was aimed at homogenizing American culture through policies such as Prohibition and immigration restriction. Ethnic groups were not anti-Progressive but promoted a new Progressive agenda of economic regulation and rights for labor. 91 In the face of conflicting interpretations, Peter Filene questioned whether there indeed was a Progressive movement. Daniel T. Rodgers posited that Progressivism could best be understood as a shift from party politics to interest groups politics. 92

In the last decades of the 20th century, historians began to distance themselves from the very notions of Progressivism. They criticized Progressivism as the ultimate end of a middle-class search for social control of the masses, or they focused on its class dimension. 93 Recent literature has reconsidered the meaning of the Progressive era. Revisiting his early 1980s essay, Daniel T. Rodgers proposed that the big picture of Progressivism was a reaction to the capitalist transformation of society. Robert D. Johnston saw a revived debate concerning the democratic nature of Progressivism and its connections to the present. 94 A recent book by Robyn Muncy takes another look at the emphasis on Progressivism as a social struggle through the biography of Colorado reformer Josephine Roche and her focus on creating social welfare reforms. 95

Primary Sources

There is a wealth of accessible primary source material on Progressives and Progressivism. Many of these documents can now be found through electronic sources such as HathiTrust, Archive.org, and Google Books.

Consult any of the writings of Jane Addams, Louis Brandeis, John R. Commons, Herbert Croly, John Dewey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary Parker Follett, Frederic Howe, Florence Kelley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Muckrakers Lincoln Steffens , in The Shame of the Cities (1904) ; Jacob Riis , in How the Other Half Lives: Among the Tenements of New York (1890) ; and Upton Sinclair , in The Jungle (1906) , expose urban political corruption and social conditions. Ida M. Tarbell , in The History of the Standard Oil Company (1904) ; and Frank Norris , in Octopus: A Story of California (1901) , expose business practices. The residents of Hull House published an investigative survey of living conditions in their neighborhood in Hull House Maps and Papers: A Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, Together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing out of Social Conditions ( 1895 ). Useful autobiographies are Tom Johnson , My Story (New York: B. W. Heubsch, 1913) ; Louise DeKoven Bowen , Growing Up with a City (New York: Macmillan, 1926) ; Jane Addams , Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1910) ; Ida B. Wells-Barnett , Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida. B. Wells , edited by Alfreda Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

Manuscript collections for national and local organizations and individuals include those of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, National Association of Colored Women, Ellen Gates Starr, Women’s City Club of New York, Sophonisba Breckinridge, National Women’s Trade Union League, National Consumers League, and Theodore Roosevelt. Publications of Progressive groups and organizations include Woman Citizen’s Library , Survey , Charities and Commons , New Republic , and National Municipal Review . Investigative reports include the six volumes of the the Pittsburgh Survey ( 1909–1914 ) and Reports of the Immigration Commission (Dillingham Commission), in forty-one volumes ( 1911 ).

Proceedings of organization conferences include those of the National Conferences on City Planning and Congestion, National Conferences on City Planning, International Conference on Women Workers to Promote Peace, and American Federation of Labor. Supreme Court rulings include Ritchie v. People ( 1895 ), Plessy v. Ferguson ( 1896 ), Holden v. Hardy ( 1898 ), Lochner v. New York ( 1905 ), and Muller v. Oregon ( 1908 ).

Links to Digital Materials

Cornell university, ilr school, kheel center.

1911 Triangle Fire .

The History Place

Lewis Hines photos of child labor .

Library of Congress

Child labor collection .

World War I posters .

The National American Woman Suffrage Association .

The National Woman’s Party and protesters .

Theodore Roosevelt .

The Conservation Movement .

University of Illinois Chicago, Special Collections

Settlement houses in Chicago .

Harvard University Library Open Collections Program

Immigration to the United States, 1789‐1930 .

Further Reading

• Connolly, James J. The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Dawley, Alan . Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003.
• Flanagan, Maureen A. Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.
• Flanagan, Maureen A. America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Greene, Julie . The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal . New York: Penguin, 2009.
• Hofstadter, Richard . The Age of Reform . New York: Vintage Books, 1955.
• Keller, Morton . Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
• Knight, Louise W. Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
• Mattson, Kevin . Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era . University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998.
• McGerr, Michael . A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 . New York: Free Press, 2003.
• Muncy, Robyn . Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
• Muncy, Robyn . Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Piott, Steven L. American Reformers, 1870–1920: Progressives in Word and Deed . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
• Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.
• Salyer, Lucy . Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
• Schechter, Patricia A. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
• Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Unger, Nancy . Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
• Wiebe, Robert H. The Search for Order, 1877–1920 . New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.

1. Maureen A. Flanagan , America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10.

2. Jane Addams , Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902).

3. Michael Les Benedict , “Law and Regulation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in Law as Culture and Culture as Law: Essays in Honor of John Philip Reid , ed. Hendrick Hartog and William E. Nelson (Madison, WI: Madison House Publishers, 2000), 227–263 ; Christopher L. Tomlins , The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in American 1880–1960 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

4. Michael Willrich , City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 100–103.

5. Nancy Woloch , Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996).

6. Victoria Getis , The Juvenile Court and the Progressives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

7. Jennifer Koslow , Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009) ; Daphne Spain , How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) ; Anne Firor Scott , Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992) ; and Judith N. McArthur , Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women’s Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893–1918 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).

8. Nancy C. Unger , Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 86 , for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. See Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick , Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 38 ; Robert H. Wiebe , The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 191 ; Vincent P. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Forum Press), 184; and Daniel Block , “Saving Milk through Masculinity: Public Health Officers and Pure Milk, 1880–1930,” Food and Foodways: History and Culture of Human Nourishment 15 (January–June 2005): 115–135.

9. Kriste Lindenmeyer , “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 10–29 and 114–132.

10. Maureen A. Flanagan , Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) ; and Scott, Natural Allies , 159–174.

11. Robyn Muncy , Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 132–150, 152–154 ; Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood,” chap. 4, esp. 100–103; and Lynne Curry , Modern Mothers in the Heartland: Gender, Health, and Progress in Illinois, 1900–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1999), 120–131.

12. Scott, Natural Allies , 147

13. Landon R. Y. Storrs , Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 1.

14. Elizabeth Payne , Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

15. Kevin Mattson , Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 45.

16. Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public , includes a chapter on Follett, but the rest of the book focuses on men. Alan Dawley , Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 102 , shortchanges women’s Progressivism, saying it “merely extended the boundaries of women’s sphere to the realm of ‘social housekeeping’”; Daniel T. Rodgers , Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 19–20, 239–240 , calls them “social maternalists” rather than social justice Progressives and claims that they were motivated by “sentiment” and focused on protecting “women’s weakness.” For Chicago women’s clubs, see Elizabeth Belanger , “The Neighborhood Ideal: Local Planning-Practices in Progressive-Era Women’s Clubs,” Journal of Planning History 8.2 (May 2009): 87–110.

17. Nancy Unger , Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) . Charles McCarthy , The Wisconsin Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1912).

18. Robert D. Johnston , The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 123.

19. Martin J. Schiesl , The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in American, 1880–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) , provides the clearest overall picture of these elements of this political Progressivism.

20. Committee on Municipal Program of the National Municipal League , A Model City Charter and Municipal Home Rule (Philadelphia: National Municipal League, 1916).

21. Amy Bridges , Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999) ; Bradley R. Rice , “The Galveston Plan of City Government by Commission: The Birth of a Progressive Idea,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly , 78.4 (April 1975): 365–408 ; and Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency , 136–137 for Des Moines.

22. Kenneth Finegold , Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 82–88 for Johnson and 107–111 for charter reform in Cleveland.

23. Maureen A. Flanagan , Charter Reform in Chicago (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1987).

24. James J. Connolly , The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 106–107.

25. David Stradling , Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21–36.

26. Angela Gugliotta , “How, When, and for Whom Was Smoke a Problem?” in Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region , ed. Joel Tarr (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 118–120.

27. Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives , 63–67 and 108–137, provides a comprehensive overview of the political Progressivism of smoke pollution.

28. Angela Gugliotta , “Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Injustice in Pittsburgh, 1868–1914,” Environmental History 6.2 (April 2000): 173–176.

29. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts , 100–102 and America Reformed , 173–179. See Scott, Natural Allies , 143–145 for more on women’s health protective associations.

30. Anne-Marie Szymanski , “Regulatory Transformations in a Changing City: The Anti-Smoke Movement in Baltimore, 1895–1931,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13.3 (July 2014): 364–366.

31. William H. Wilson , The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) ; and Jon A. Peterson , The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) , Parts 2 and 3.

32. Carl A. Smith , The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

33. Max Page , The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) ; and Mel Scott , American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971) , Parts 2, 3, and 4.

34. Eric Sandweiss , St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).

35. Susan Marie Wirka , “The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City , ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55–75 ; and Maureen A. Flanagan , “City Profitable, City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s,” Journal of Urban History 22.2 (January 1996): 163–190.

36. Frederic Howe , The City: The Hope of Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1905).

37. Mary Parker Follett , The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918).

38. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism.

39. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , 236–238, 251–254.

40. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , 108–109.

41. Dorothy Ross , The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158–159.

42. Ellen Fitzpatrick , Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

43. Theda Skocpol , Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 183.

44. Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade , 40–44, 80, 82, and 90–91.

45. Martin J. Sklar , The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

46. Samuel P. Hays , Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Movement, 1890–1920 (repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969), chap. 7.

47. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency , chap. 8.

48. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America , 194–199.

49. Eric Rauchway , Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 189–200.

50. Morton Keller , Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 194–196.

51. Julie Greene , Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219, 279 ; and Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing the “People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 66.

52. Greene, Pure and Simple Politics , 9, 235.

53. Fr. John Ryan , The Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 283–285 . Richard Ely wrote the book’s introduction.

54. Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism , 95–107.

55. Shelton Stromquist , “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History 23.2 (January 1997): 192–220.

56. Daniel J. Johnson , “‘No Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1922,” Labor History 41.1 (February 2000): 25–45 ; Douglas E. Booth , “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12.1 (November 1985): 51–71 ; and Josephine Kaneko , “What a Socialist Alderman Would Do,” Coming Nation (March 1914).

57. Gail Radford , “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90.3 (December 2003): 863–890.

58. Nell Irvin Painter , Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 150.

59. Herbert Croly , The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909).

60. Emily Rosenberg , Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).

61. Matthew Frye Jacobson , Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 227.

62. Alan Dawley , Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 81.

63. Theodore Roosevelt , The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1903).

64. George F. Becker , “Conditions Requisite to Our Success in the Philippine Islands,” address to the American Geographical Society, February 20, 1901, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (1901): 112–123.

65. Albert Beveridge , The Young Man and the World (New York: Appleton, 1905), 338 ; and Kristen Hoganson , Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

66. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , is the most complete analysis of this internationalism.

67. Jane Addams , Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907) ; Robert La Follette , LaFollette’s Weekly 5.1 (March 29, 1913) ; Kristen Hoganson , “‘As Badly-Off As the Filipinos’: U.S. Women Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 13.2 (Summer 2001): 9–33 ; and Nancy C. Unger , Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer (New York: Routledge, 2015).

68. David Kennedy , Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

69. Harriet Hyman , introduction to Women at The Hague , by Jane Addams , Emily Greene Balch , and Alice Hamilton (repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003) ; and Kathryn Kish Sklar , “‘Some of Us Who Deal with the Social Fabric’: Jane Addams Blends Peace and Social Justice,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2.1 (January 2003): 80–96.

70. Julia F. Irwin , Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

71. Jane Addams , Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 4–5.

72. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette , chap. 14.

73. Kennedy, Over Here , 34; New Republic 10 (February 10 and 17, 1917); and Dawley, Changing the World , 122, 147, 165–169.

74. Walter Lippmann , “The World Conflict in Relation to American Democracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 72 (July 1917): 1–10 ; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings , 283–285, 288–289; and Dawley, Changing the World , 147.

75. Christine Lunardini , From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928 (New York: New York University Press, 1986).

76. LeeAnn Whites , “Love, Hate, Rape, and Lynching: Rebecca Latimer Fulton and the Gender Politics of Racial Violence,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy , ed. David Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyron (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

77. Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade , 180–181.

78. Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public , 44.

79. David Levering Lewis , W. E. B. DuBois: A Biography, 1868–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 276–277 ; and Gary Gerstle , American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 77–78 , for Addams.

80. Lisa G. Masterson , Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 101–106.

81. John Higham , Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1869–1925 (1955; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1974), 129–130, 222–224 ; and Gerstle, American Crucible , 55–56.

82. Robert D. Johnston , “Long Live Teddy/Death to Woodrow: The Polarized Politics of the Progressive Era in the 2012 Election,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13.3 (July 2014): 411–443.

83. Ida M. Tarbell , The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904) ; Frank Norris , The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday, 1901) ; and Upton Sinclair , The Jungle (New York: Jungle Publishing, 1906).

84. Benjamin De Witt , The Progressive Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1915) ; and Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard , The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927).

85. George E. Mowry , The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951) ; and Richard Hofstadter , The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).

86. Samuel P. Hays , “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Historical Review 55.4 (October 1964): 157–159.

87. Robert H. Wiebe , Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962) ; and Wiebe, The Search for Order .

88. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency ; and Finegold, Experts and Politicians.

89. John Louis Recchiuti , Social Science and Progressive Era Reform in New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) ; and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science .

90. Gabriel Kolko , The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963).

91. John D. Buenker , Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1973).

92. Peter G. Filene , “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” American Quarterly 22.1 (Spring 1970): 20–34 ; and Daniel T. Rodgers , “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10.4 (December 1982): 113–132.

93. Paul Boyer , Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978) ; Michael McGerr , A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003) ; and Jackson Lears , Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009).

94. Daniel T. Rodgers , “Capitalism and Politics in the Progressive Era and in Ours,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13.3 (July 2014): 379–386 ; Robert D. Johnston, “Long Live Teddy/Death to Woodrow, 411–443; and Stromquist, Reinventing the “People.”

95. Robyn Muncy , Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

Related Articles

• Struggles over Individual Rights and State Power in the Progressive Era
• Anti-Imperialism

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, American History. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 27 August 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [185.80.150.64]
• 185.80.150.64

Character limit 500 /500

The Progressive Era: a Catalyst for Social Reform and Change

This essay will discuss the Progressive Era in American history as a catalyst for social reform and change. It will cover the key movements, figures, and legislative achievements of the era, focusing on issues such as labor rights, women’s suffrage, and governmental reform. The piece will examine how these reforms shaped American society and the lasting impacts of the Progressive Era on modern-day policies and social attitudes. PapersOwl showcases more free essays that are examples of Child Labour.

How it works

The Progressive Era was known as a large reform movement. The progressive Era was a period widespread social activism and political reform across the United States from the 1890’s to the 1920’s. The main objectives of the Progressive Era movement were eliminating problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration and political corruption. Progressive reacted to problems caused by factories and cities. The progressive Era was effective because of child labor, working conditions and women’s suffrage.

The meat-packing industry capitalized when the growth of livestock farming in the midwest started to grow much faster.

Meat-packing companies and industries such as the “ Armour Meat-packing Company ” was one of the five leading firm companies in the meat industry. The Armour Meat-packing Company was founded in Chicago in 1867 by the Armour brothers. The Armour Meat-packing Company handled the slaughtering, processing, packaging and distribution of animals that’s including pigs, cattles, sheep and other livestock animals.

Although the meat-packing industry created jobs for people, working in a meat-packing company was not the best job to have nor was it luxurious. The meat-packing factories were super unsanitary, unregulated and dangerous to people’s health. In “ The Neill-Reynolds Report” president Theodore Roosevelt in 1906 was suspicious of sinclair’s socialist attitude and concussion in “ The Jungle. ” The Jungle was a novel written by Sinclair to expose the working conditions in the meat-packing industry. He described the meat as diseased, rotten and contaminated.

After Sinclair’s novel “ The Jungle “ was written it changed the way Americans looked at the food industry. Americans no longer trusted that the food industry had the best interest of consumers in mind when they prepared or handled food. This shocked Roosevelt and led to new federal food safety laws. The novel served as a wake up call that led to a series of improvements in the industry to make our food safer and to provide better conditions for factory workers. . He sent labor commissioner’s Charles P. Neill and social worker James Bronson Reynolds to visit meat-packing facilities.

Neill and Reynolds were revolted from what they have seen and by the conditions at the factories. Meat scraps were found being shoveled into receptacles from dirty floor. Meat was left to lie on dirty floors. These floors were damp and soggy. Employees in utter ignorance of cleanliness or danger to health. Neill and Reynolds witness meat being shoveled from filthy wooden floors, piled on tables that were rarely washed. In all of which the meat was being process it was gathering dirt, splinters floor filth even expectoration of tuberculosis and other diseased workers.

Shocked at the fact that the lack of concern of the managers of these meat-packing facilities of being cleaned and properly maintain is so low. Tables and floors should be disinfected. All utensils being used should be and must be properly cleaned. All workers must use gloves and hair neets. Meat-packing factories should not have an issue with their maintenance because that is the main thing that should be taken care of. The meat in these factories is being sold to people, there should be no reason on why the meat is not properly processed and packaged. Americans should be able to trust the meat industry in the way there food is being handled and sold to them.

Although much of this has changed today such as how meat is processed now everything is much more sanitary and safer it still crazy to say all of these problems happened only a little over a century ago.

Another major factor in The Progressive Era were that influential journalist wanted to expose the government and big business of their flaws to American citizens with using factual and proven evidence against them. There was this one group of people who lead the change when it came to exposing the corruption in politics and the unsafe work conditions millions of American workers faced in American society. These people were called “ muckrakers. “ The name muckrakers was given to them by Theodore Roosevelt, they got this name because they would go and investigate everything that the American people should know about. They were early day investigative journalists.

Muckrakers were showing the American public just what was going on in the countries government and in the large companies that most of the people were buying their food and other supplies from. Also the use of children in the coal mines, or the monopoly of the standard oil company. These journalist just wanted to let the American citizens know the real deal behind big companies and their lack of work. The muckrakers, seek out the truth of corruption among the government.

Muckrakers did the right thing of letting the American people know what was going on in big companies and created public awareness of corruption, social injustices and abuses of power. They changed the perspective of how people would see big companies especially the meat companies. The best thing about the muckrakers is that they used actual factual and prove evidence so everything they told was absolutely beliveble.

In the Progressive Era factories were utilizing children to the hard work because of such young age they had more strength and power to do much more than the older people. They employed children as young age as five to six to work almost twenty hours a day. Child labor in the United States in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. Families had to find someone to work or they wouldn’t survive so they got their young ones to work because they could work more hours and do more.

They had children doing work that was physically and mentally dangerous. They made them do work which interfered with there chance of going to school and learning. In “ The Spirit of Youth and The City Streets “ spoke about how children should not be employed at such young age. People wanted children to work for them supposedly to have a good mind set in working rather than getting an education. How should kids work before learning, that does them no good. Going to school will help their income-earning potential as adults. Jane Addams argues in “ The Spirit of Youth and The City Streets “ about the importance of providing practical education for young men and women. Jane Addams rejects that children should not work at such young age or will the children start to become a different person rather than typical children. Addams wanted what was right for children which was for them to go to school than work. She wanted to make sure children went to school to get their education than them going out and causing them selves danger at work. Many laws restricting child labor were passed as part of the progressive movement. Hammer vs. Dagenhart was a United States supreme court decision involving the power of Congress to enact child labor laws. In this case the supreme court wanted to band the shipment across state lines of goods made in factories by children that were employed under the age of 14.

Kids should not be able to have jobs as young as the age of fourteen because they’ll have to work harder and work long hours. Kids should be able to enjoy life and be in school or even be active in school activities. Kids at the age of fourteen or even younger should not have to worry about going to work .Their main priority should only be school and their grades. They should stay on task on their school work. If kids are going to be stress it should honestly be because of school not because of a job. They are way too young to stress over a job, there should be no need for that. Kids should have the chance to live and grow. The best time to start working is after school so, they can only have to worry about one thing at a time.

The Progressive Era witnessed the formation of initiatives to fight political and commercial corruption and find solutions to social problems in areas such as public health, labor and education. Although suffrage constituted just one part of the wider efforts of women reforms in the Progressive Era, it was considered symbolic of the broader struggle for the recognition of women’s rights.In the 1890’s Most states in Eastern and Central U.S held restrictions on voting for women, it was said that federal action in the form of a constitutional amendment would be first step in getting women the recognition as equal citizens. Congress then upheld the 19th Amendment in ninety-twenty.It gave women the right to vote and it ended the women’s struggle for equality and the beginning of a new era in human rights.

Women’s rights are so much better now, these rights include, to live free from violence, slavery and discrimination. Women are now given the chance to be educated, able to own property, to vote and to earn a fair equal wage. Women should always be treated as equal as men. A women makes no difference to a man both a man and women can both do the same. Women could always do the same job a man does probably even more and also do it better. Women should never be underestimated just because they are women. Never underestimate the power of woman. Woman will prove you wrong and work hard for what they want just like they did for their rights.Women have went through so much to get the rights they have now. Woman had no freedom what so ever. They couldn’t go out unless they were escorted by a man or their father. They could not be out in public without a man. Woman’s job where to stay home and take care of the family. The Progressivism implies a philosophy that promotes change or reform in the current political, economic,and social aspects of society while conservatism stresses gradual change in society but promotes tradition rather than change. The Progressive movement from 1901 through 1917 worked to improve aspects of society that grew out of problems which grew during the Industrial Age.

The goals of the Progressives were to stop monopolies, corruption, inefficiency and social injustices. Progressive acts and Amendments were being passed to deal with social ills, corruption in politics and corporate America. All the Progressive Era wanted to do was to make society better. To make everything fair towards everyone and one another. Wanted to fix all the problems and get rid of drama.

Before the Progressive Era the federal government became more involved and responsive to the public and implemented many revisions and reform. The federal government made political changes on a national level with the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments. The Sixteenth Amendment imposed an income tax. The Seventeenth Amendment allowed for the direct election of U.S. Senators. The Eighteenth Amendment established the prohibition of alcoholic beverages and the Nineteenth Amendment prohibited any U.S. citizen from being denied the right to vote based on sex. During the Progressive Era, social reform and cultural changes also occurred. Consumerism was at an all time high. It became a time of economic prosperity. With the introduction of electricity came household appliances. Movies, automobiles, radios, telephones, magazines, and advertising were in the forefront. Radios were a huge change. Radios became a new way to help people communicate and even became new entertainment . Radios played all different kinds of music and even had talk shows. Radios also became a new way in staying in touch with news. People no longer had to read newspapers all they had to do was turn the radio on and listen.

The progressives were successful in part because they were able to rally the better part of a generation to their ideas about reform. Although not all progressives agreed with some progressive reforms the movement still made a big change. After the Progressive Era there was now active governments that would take the initiative in reform. There was now the right of labor to have a decent salary and safe working conditions to des who worked in big factories such as the meat industry. There has been more economic and political rights for women other than having the right to vote. Women could own property now. There has also been regulations of child labor in which kids should not work at such a young age and have to work long hours.

.Progressives were in all levels of society, some were very wealthy, very poor, the middle class or in the minority group. Progressives were politicians, businessmen, workers, artists and professionals.Progressives helped America to become stronger and a better place. For example Roosevelt, taft, and Wilson, these three men made many changes in terms of making society and our environment better. They passed child labor laws and helped unions.

If there had not been no progressive era, no income would have been passed, it would have taken women longer to earn the right to vote, our meat for all we know would have dirt, wood shavings, even be contaminated with diseases from lying on the floor at the slaughterhouse. The progressive has done so much improvement to America and has helped many people. Without the progressive era i do not know what America would be like today.

America would have probably been worse today than it was before the progressive era if it wouldn’t had happened. Women would still not be able to vote nor get a job , kids would be working long hours instead of being in school, and our meat would be disgustingly dirty, the world would be upside down.

Cite this page

The Progressive Era: A Catalyst for Social Reform and Change. (2021, Mar 18). Retrieved from https://papersowl.com/examples/the-progressive-era-a-catalyst-for-social-reform-and-change/

"The Progressive Era: A Catalyst for Social Reform and Change." PapersOwl.com , 18 Mar 2021, https://papersowl.com/examples/the-progressive-era-a-catalyst-for-social-reform-and-change/

PapersOwl.com. (2021). The Progressive Era: A Catalyst for Social Reform and Change . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-progressive-era-a-catalyst-for-social-reform-and-change/ [Accessed: 27 Aug. 2024]

"The Progressive Era: A Catalyst for Social Reform and Change." PapersOwl.com, Mar 18, 2021. Accessed August 27, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-progressive-era-a-catalyst-for-social-reform-and-change/

"The Progressive Era: A Catalyst for Social Reform and Change," PapersOwl.com , 18-Mar-2021. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-progressive-era-a-catalyst-for-social-reform-and-change/. [Accessed: 27-Aug-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2021). The Progressive Era: A Catalyst for Social Reform and Change . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-progressive-era-a-catalyst-for-social-reform-and-change/ [Accessed: 27-Aug-2024]

Don't let plagiarism ruin your grade

Hire a writer to get a unique paper crafted to your needs.

Our writers will help you fix any mistakes and get an A+!

Please check your inbox.

You can order an original essay written according to your instructions.

Trusted by over 1 million students worldwide

1. Tell Us Your Requirements

2. Pick your perfect writer

3. Get Your Paper and Pay

Hi! I'm Amy, your personal assistant!

Don't know where to start? Give me your paper requirements and I connect you to an academic expert.

short deadlines

100% Plagiarism-Free

Certified writers

• Authentic custom writing service
• Confidential and secure
• Only custom written work
• Essay on The Progressive Era (1880 - 1920)

Essay on Progressivism

Thesis statement : it is hypothesized that Progressivism was a wide and varied movement that changed American values and lifestyles having everlasting impact on American history.

Progressivism

Progressivism, ranging from 1880 to 1920, was a well-planned and well-organized movement in the United States having wide as well as diversified goals. Leaders of progressivism movement focused on humanity element and tried to make advancements by promoting liberation to stimulate human force along with exploiting human potential to remove restraints imposed by contemporary liberalization. The paper will present an overview of Progressivism as a wide and varied movement. It will also discuss the goals of movement and mention some of the prominent people who took part in it. At the end, the significance of Progressivism to America will also be highlighted.

Progressivism - A Wide and Varied Movement

Progressivism expanded in American cities and confronted political mechanism full of monopolies and corrupt leaders. For the resolution of diversified problems existing at the local and state levels, progressivism focused on promoting idea of public ownership of government run by professional city bosses. Leaders of the movement strived to resolve the issues created by the wave of industrialization. At the time of movement the main problems confronted by the American society was the gigantic growth of cities and industries. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans started migrating to the northern cities. This huge wave of migration being main cause of growth coupled with disastrous working conditions presented a worse scenario.

The new comers strived to adapt to entirely new conditions at one hand while trying hard to maintain their distinctive culture and language system on the other creating a complex situation. Wealth concentrated in few hands and a large segment of people were caught in the vicious circle of poverty. Low wage-rates, dangerous working conditions, and long working hours were among several grave problems faced by most of the Americans. Swift technological advancements and rapid speed of industrialization altered the life styles of Americans.

In this context, progressive leaders advocated and strived to introduce reforms for solving the grave issues. Progressivism movement was wide in nature with varying goals. It introduced urban reforms and had offensive attitude towards dishonest leaders and corrupt political system. Leaders of progressive movement favored taking ownership of public utilities by government supporting different social welfare programs to resolve mainly the problems of immigrants, working class, and poor. At the state level, Progressive movement introduced specific democratic reforms. The purpose of democratic reforms was to allow American citizens to select leaders as per their choice, independently and freely.

Basically, the roots of Progressivism had been in the transitional era of United States from a nation comprising farmers to a nation of consumers and employees manipulated by large firms, exploiting and misusing resources, supported by the corrupt government. Progressive movement started with the intentions to rectify these problems. Moreover, it focused on providing solutions to the issues raised by urbanization and industrialization, as discussed above.

Progressive leaders felt that their democratic reforms were threatened by the corrupt governmental policies and dishonest leaders. Progressivism confronted ending corporate power and to abolish monopolies. Democracy, they believed, was the solution of problems faced by most of the Americans, especially lower class. They tried to protect working people and aimed to break the vicious circle of poverty by eliminating the gap between different social classes.

It is pertinent to mention that Progressive movement was wide in a sense that it included both Democrats and Republicans. The movement heavily impacted the political structure at local, state, and national levels. It had significant influence on cultural and social life of America. It was, in fact, a dynamic movement introducing reforms at varied platforms including democratic, social, and political fronts. The agenda also had variety and diversification. It comprises social as well as political agenda. However, the main aims were elimination of corruption, protecting common people especially lower- class, elimination the continuous gap between different social classes, and promoting scientific as well as technological developments ensuring welfare of people.

With varying nature and wider in scope, Progressivism concentrated on providing effective tools to build trust of people in government and business organizations. However, a small group in the Progressive movement also supported ownership of production by government. Amendments to the Constitution showed their priorities at the political front as they provided new ways for electing senators and tried to eliminate monopolies. The wide spectrum of Progressivism can be viewed from the fact that not only it focused on fighting at the political platform, the movement tried to address the problem of urbanization. It is also pertinent to highlight the shortcomings of Progressive movement as their failure in the areas of limiting child labor and not addressing racial problems of blacks especially African Americans who had migrated from South. At the end of first phase of Progressive movement ranging from 1880 to 1920, the election of 1912 was fought by contenders with Progressive approach having varied goals from different labor issues to problems at political as well as social level. More power was given to Congress in this era. Election of Senators was to be made by the public and women gained voting powers in this particular era.

Goals of Progressivism and People who Took Part in It

Progressivism was a movement starting at the end of nineteenth century (1880) and ended in the second decade of twentieth century (1920). In this era tremendous changes at the economic, social, and political level were made. People taking part in the movement had diversified backgrounds, different political views, and varied social interests. It included political leaders from both Democrats and Republicans. The movement was led by people of different groups comprising teachers, political leaders, labor leaders, religious leaders, journalists, from both genders. It included famous people like; Theodore Roosevelt- President of the United States; Woodrow Wilson- President of the United States; Robert M. La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin.

Muckrakers, a group of journalists such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, exposed corruption practices in government and highlighted business scandals. They portrayed the miserable working conditions of poor and exploitations of large industries along with issues of concentration of wealth. Henry Ford introduced a lucrative pay scale for his workers during Progressive era. Among prominent ladies were Lucy Burns- an advocate of women's rights, and Jane Adams- a social worker and first women winner of the Noble Peace Prize. As regards goals of Progressivism, one of them was 'social welfare' aiming to provide social justice to everyone irrespective of social class. It strived to eliminate differences in social classes and supported attaining social justice by promoting the idea of charity and welfare by large organizations. For this purpose a large force comprising social workers was prepared and trained to perform their task effectively. Second goal of Progressivism was 'promotion of moral improvement', for example women's Suffrage by providing women the right to vote. Certain prohibition laws were introduced, for example Progressive leaders were of the view that usage of alcohol limited thinking and working of a person. Third goal was to provide 'economic reforms' by regulating especially large corporations to ensure independence and remove restrictions imposed by capitalism. The fourth main goal of Progressivism was 'efficiency'. Among other ideas, it included creating professional city manager to run affairs at local, state, and national level more effectively. Moreover, leaders of Progressivism reduced powers given to local wards through effective organization of city governments.

Lasting Significance of Progressivism to American History

The Progressive period is known for its tremendous successful efforts having everlasting impact on American economy and society by making remarkable changes at the social, economical, and political levels. Although, reformers of this movement belonged to a diversified group from labor and religious leaders, journalists, politicians, and teachers- both men and women- one thing common among them was to protect people, especially working class, solve problems of urbanization and industrialization, and concentrate on social welfare of American people. At the end of the movement by 1920, newly formed laws at state, local, and national level changed the entire scenario of America in all three major areas; economic, social, and political, having everlasting impact on the country.

Efforts have been made in the paper to present everlasting impact of Progressivism - a wide and varied movement from 1880 to 1920- that brought tremendous changes at the economic, social, and political levels of America. Goals of the movement and people who took part in it have also been highlighted. On the basis of arguments presented in paper it is concluded that Progressivism movement had an everlasting impact on America changing American values and lifestyles.

Progressivism Essays

Essay on progressivism, popular essay topics.

• American Dream
• Artificial Intelligence
• Black Lives Matter
• Bullying Essay
• Career Goals Essay
• Causes of the Civil War
• Child Abusing
• Civil Rights Movement
• Community Service
• Cultural Identity
• Cyber Bullying
• Death Penalty
• Depression Essay
• Domestic Violence
• Freedom of Speech
• Global Warming
• Gun Control
• Human Trafficking
• I Believe Essay
• Immigration
• Importance of Education
• Israel and Palestine Conflict
• Leadership Essay
• Legalizing Marijuanas
• Mental Health
• National Honor Society
• Police Brutality
• Pollution Essay
• Racism Essay
• Romeo and Juliet
• Same Sex Marriages
• Social Media
• The Great Gatsby
• The Yellow Wallpaper
• Time Management
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Violent Video Games
• What Makes You Unique
• Why I Want to Be a Nurse
• Send us an e-mail

We use cookies to enhance our website for you. Proceed if you agree to this policy or learn more about it.

• Essay Database >
• Essays Examples >
• Essay Topics

Essays on Progressivism

4 samples on this topic

Writing tons of Progressivism papers is an essential part of modern studying, be it in high-school, college, or university. If you can do that all by yourself, that's just awesome; yet, other students might not be that skilled, as Progressivism writing can be quite difficult. The database of free sample Progressivism papers introduced below was formed in order to help embattled students rise up to the challenge.

On the one hand, Progressivism essays we showcase here precisely demonstrate how a really well-written academic piece of writing should be developed. On the other hand, upon your request and for a reasonable price, an expert essay helper with the relevant academic background can put together a fine paper example on Progressivism from scratch.

Scholar’s Name: Essay Examples

Elections of 1912

Expertly Written Essay On Essays On American History To Follow

Progressivism in the 1970s

Court Process Report

Introduction

275 words = 1 page double-spaced

Password recovery email has been sent to [email protected]

Use your new password to log in

You are not register!

By clicking Register, you agree to our Terms of Service and that you have read our Privacy Policy .

Now you can download documents directly to your device!

Check your email! An email with your password has already been sent to you! Now you can download documents directly to your device.

or Use the QR code to Save this Paper to Your Phone

The sample is NOT original!

Short on a deadline?

Don't waste time. Get help with 11% off using code - GETWOWED

No, thanks! I'm fine with missing my deadline

Cleveland Guardians vs. Texas Rangers; Guards lineup explodes for 13 runs

CLEVELAND — Live from Cleveland, it's Saturday Night (Baseball).

The Guardians and Texas Rangers continue their three-game series after Cleveland dropped Friday night's game, making it six losses in their last seven games after a rough road trip to Milwaukee and New York.

Ben Lively and his warm-up song of "Yellow Submarine" will start opposite Rangers pitcher Jon Gray.

Check back here for live score updates, analysis and highlights from Saturday night's game at Progressive Field.

Guardians beat the Rangers with blowout win

The Guardians were almost desperate for some scoring production and got all of it Saturday night, beating the Rangers 13-5.

Josh and Bo Naylor became the sixth pair of brothers to have at least three games with home runs on the same night.

Bo Naylor home run keeps Guardians big night going against Rangers

The Naylor brothers have homered on the same night yet again, as Bo added a solo homer in the seventh to put the Guardians up 12-3.

Ben Lively exits game in seventh inning

Considering he had a 33-pitch first inning, Ben Lively went on to turn in a tremendous outing, as he tossed 6⅔ innings. He was credited with three runs allowed (two earned) and four strikeouts.

Josh Naylor, Jose Ramirez go back-to-back

A few pitches later, Josh Naylor followed Ramirez with a solo home run of his own.

The Guardians are cruising, up 11-1.

Jose Ramirez hits home run No. 33 of 2024

The Guardians offense, which has been sputtering, has a double-digit scoring night.

Jose Ramirez drilled a solo home run, his No. 33 this season, to give the Guardians a 10-1 lead in the sixth inning.

Jhonkensy Noel blasts three-run home run

The time might be coming for Jhonkensy Noel to have a spot in the everyday lineup.

Noel just absolutely crushed a three-run home run that has chased Jon Gray from the game in the third inning.

The Guardians have opened up a 7-1 lead, and this is a night the offense badly needed. That was Noel's 11th home run in 40 games this season.

Steven Kwan two-run double gives Guardians the lead vs. Rangers

The Guardians offense is showing signs of life.

In the second inning and with two runners already on base, Steven Kwan drilled a double to the gap in right-center field to score both and put the Guardians on top 3-1.

Andres Gimenez followed with a single to center field to score Kwan, extending the Guardians' lead to 4-1.

Guardians, Rangers score update: Josh Naylor ties it against Jon Gray

Jose Ramirez made up for the defensive miscue in the bottom of the first.

With Steven Kwan already on first, Ramirez singled to right field to put runners on the corners with one out. Ramirez then took off for second base as Josh Naylor hit a ground ball to the right side. Ramirez running took the doubleplay out of the equation, allowing Kwan to score and tie it 1-1.

Jose Ramirez error gives Rangers the lead over Guardians; Texas scores in first inning

It was a busy beginning for Guardians starter Ben Lively, who threw 33 pitches in the first inning alone.

With the bases loaded and two out, Lively was nearly able to escape the inning unscathed, but Jose Ramirez couldn't corral a ground ball, and that error allowed the Rangers to take a 1-0 lead.

Below is some pregame information.

Jose Ramirez has 30/30 season in 2024

Jose Ramirez became the first Cleveland hitter in franchise history with multiple 30/30 seasons.

Watch: Machine Gun Kelly throws out first pitch at Guardians-Cubs game

MGK tossed the ceremonial first pitch, but he did so in an interesting manner that was anything but traditional .

Jhonkensy Noel's renewed approach on putting the ball in play has led to breakout 2024 season

Jhonkensy knows he has the power. It took a new focus on contact and mobility to lead to his great rookie season thus far.

Guardians name CC Sabathia to team Hall-of-Fame

CC Sabathia is now in the Guardians' Hall-of-Fame, and he offered a two-part message to Cleveland fans .

Guardians No. 1 overall draft pick Travis Bazzana meets Jose Ramirez, wants to grow the game in Australia

It all finally sank in for Travis Bazzana , the top overall draft pick in the draft, when he stepped onto the field at Progressive Field and met Jose Ramirez and others.

Cleveland Guardians 2025 schedule

Major League Baseball released the 2025 schedules .

2024 National Sports Card Convention comes to Cleveland

The National Sports Card Convention was in Cleveland recently. We broke down how we'd spend $100 , ranked the most mind-blowing items we could find and listed the top collectibles for under $50 .

How can I watch, listen or stream the Cleveland Guardians game today?

The game will be televised on Bally Sports. It'll be broadcast on the radio by WTAM (1100-AM) and WMMS (100.7-FM).

Guardians schedule

The Guardians begin a 10-game homestand against the Texas Rangers, Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates Monday.