The Progressive Era
The Progressive Era was a time of change. Many social issues became important such as women's suffrage and better conditions for the poor. It was also a time when many tried to fix political problems. They believed that the quick growth of business and industry led to many problems that needed to be addressed. It expanded the role of government and especially that of the president. Progressives were considered liberals, not revolutionaries, they only wanted to reform and regulate a capitalistic society, not destroy it. Progressive made a lot of gains during this time for workers and families, but it did little to reform the treatment of minorities and did not push for racial equality, so in a way progressives can be seen as both doing good and being hypocritical at the same time.
The Socialist Party of America
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One progressive organization that grew in influence during this time period was The Socialist Party of America. It was supported by militant farmers and immigrant Germans and Jews, and was considered a radical wing of the progressive movement. They focused on improving working conditions and closing the widening income gap between the rich and poor through "progressive" taxation. The socialists were unpopular with many Americans because they wanted too much government involvement in business and life.
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Progressivism developed newspapers and magazines in order to reach a wide audience and teach or inform the public about the political corruption and social problems of the day. Called muckrakers, they were America's first investigative journalists that reported on wrongdoing and the evils of big business in America. Photographers like Jacob Riis's took photographs of slums in cities and had them printed in magazines to gain support for legislation that would hopefully make life better for the poor. Muckrakers could be photographers, journalists, and authors.
Religious Activism
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Religious groups adopted an idea that they used to promote reform and progressive ideas. The social gospel was a religious belief that Christians should help the poor and bring the "kingdom of God," to Earth. Social gospels created organizations like the Young Men Christian Association (YMCA) and the Salvation Army to help the poor.
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The Salvation Army
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Jane Addams
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Some progressives chose to work in community centers called settlement houses. Jane Addams was a well known organizer of settlement houses. She created Hull House in Chicago that had a nursery for women that were learning how to be good mothers and workers in society. Hull House sponsored health clinics, lectures, music and art lessons, job training, and many other classes that would help the poor become better members of society. Addams believed that the social gospel fulfilled the Christian idea of justice and compassion. Jane Addams later became the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Hull House
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Women's Suffrage
 Susan B. Anthony
During the Progressive Era the number of women in the work force grew from 2.6 million to 8 million. More women became college educated and wanted to get involved with reforming society. In order to be full members of American society they needed the right to vote. Some states, like Wyoming, had already passed laws that allowed women to vote, but there still was a not a federal or national law that gave women the right to vote. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Caty Stanton formed the National Woman Suffrage Association to promote woman suffrage and gain an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that allowed for them to vote. Unfortunately the woman suffrage movement did not include the suffrage of black women. Suffragists were afraid that if they pushed for black female suffrage they would not get any support from Southern states which would be needed to get an amendment passed.
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Elizabeth Caty Stanton
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Political Reforms
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Progressives pushed for direct democracy, that is the idea that the people directly vote on legislation and who will represent them. They also wanted the federal government to have a bigger role in business and social life. They wanted to make the political process more open and one way they did that was through the promotion of the direct primary. This allowed all members of a political party to vote on the party's nominees, rather than the old way of doing that which was only the party elites or top people could nominate the party's candidates. For example: If there are three democrats running for president, the democrats want to make sure that only one of the three gets the nomination to run against a republican for president. In the old system, only the most important and powerful party members could choose who would be the nominee, but in a direct primary, ALL members of the party vote for the nominee they want.
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Another way that progressives made government more open to the public was through the creation of initiatives and referendums. In an initiative, citizens could have the public sign petitions that would put the vote for a law directly in the next election, thereby going around the legislative process. The process of voting for or against an initiative is called a referendum. Another major change that progressives made to the political process was the election of senators. Prior to 1913, senators were chosen by state legislators, but after 1913, the 17th Amendment was passed that made the election of senators a job done directly by the voting citizens of the U.S.
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Sherman Anti-Trust Act
Concerns over big business controlling entire industries and creating monopolies were addressed with the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890. It would take sometime, but eventually powers were given to the president in order to break up monopolies using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Women's Christian Temperance Union
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One of the most powerful progressive organizations ran by religious women was the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Originally founded in 1874, by 1900 it was the largest female group in the U.S. with 300,000 members. These women saw the use of alcohol as one of the primary reasons that family stability was threatened. They hoped to improve family life by preventing domestic violence, reduce crime on the streets, and ban alcohol from polling stations where voting occurred. They believed alcohol was at the root most domestic family issues. There were WCTU organizations in every community of Stoddard County by 1910.
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WCTU rally and parade in Bernie, Missouri
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Labor Legislation
Progressives were very active in the labor reform arena, but especially in prohibiting the use of child labor in factories and mines. In 1900 nearly 2 million American children worked away from the home to earn extra income for the family. The National Child Labor Committee was formed by progressives to campaign for laws that outlawed or at least limited the use of child labor in the workplace. By 1910 ten states had passed child labor laws, but it would be many years before a national law was created.
Bodies of women that jumped from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. Images like this helped gain support of the public for workplace reform.
Besides child labor, another major subject of progressives was workplace safety. One of the biggest factors in unnatural deaths in America prior to 1900 were deaths that occurred at work. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York City. Escapes routes were very limited because the factory owner kept the factory locked to prevent theft. When the fire broke out, 146 workers were trapped on the upper floors of the ten story building. Many leapt to their deaths to avoid burning to death. In the aftermath of the fire, many new laws were created in cities and states that regulated fire hazards and working conditions.
Progressive Income Tax
One way that progressives sought to fund social programs through the government was through a way to redistribute wealth through a progressive federal income tax. The more money a person made, the more they would pay in taxes. Many believed this would slow the concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest Americans. In 1913, Congress passed the 16th Amendment which made the progressive income tax law.
Roosevelt's Square Deal
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When Teddy Roosevelt became president he changed the way the office of the presidency had formally worked. During much of the Gilded Age, the president often deferred to Congress on most matters. Roosevelt believed that Congress took to long to solve problems and he intended to use the full might of his office to fix uncontrolled big business. He was the first to use executive power to limit big business. Roosevelt believed in capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, BUT, he was willing to adopt radical methods to ensure that the social unrest caused by insensitive business owners did not lead to a labor revolution. He declared war on corruption and cronyism. He pushed his Square Deal idea: greater gov't control of corporations, enhanced conservation of natural resources, and new regulations to protect consumers against contaminated food and medications. Roosevelt's version of progressivism was centered on the belief that government must ensure fairness.
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1902 Coal Strike
On May 12, 1902, 150,000 miners of the United Mine Workers Union walked off their jobs at coal mines in PA and WV. They wanted a wage increase, a shorter work day, and official recognition of their union by the mine owners. This shut down of the coal industry caused coal prices to soar and hospitals and schools were with out coal to heat their rooms. Roosevelt invited leaders of both sides to a conference in D.C. The mine owners in attendance refused to even speak to the members of the union. Angry at the owners' refusal to work out a settlement, Roosevelt threatened to bring in federal troops and run the mines themselves. On October 13, the bluff worked, the mine owners agreed to a nine hour work day and 10 percent pay increase on wages. Roosevelt was the first president to use his authority to referee a dispute between management and labor.
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Under Roosevelt's Square Deal, the federal government assumed the role of making sure that industries that impacted public health were doing what they were supposed to be doing. He created an organization to oversee meat packers, food processors, and the making of medicines. Again, he was expanding the role of the federal government, especially the executive department. One influential muckraker that helped to guide Roosevelt's thinking was Upton Sinclair who in 1906, wrote a very influential book about the Chicago meatpacking industry called, The Jungle. The Jungle revealed the nasty and unsanitary practices of the industry of butchering and packing beef. After reading the book, Roosevelt urged Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It required the executive department's Department of Agriculture to inspect every hog and steer carcass that crossed state lines. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, required makers of food and medicines to host government inspectors to make sure it was being done cleanly.
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Environmental Conservation
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As outdoorsman and naturalist, Roosevelt was the first president committed to environmental conservation. He promoted efforts to protect wilderness areas and manage and preserve the nation's natural resources for the benefit of future generations. He created fifty wildlife refuges, approved five new national parks, and fifty-one federal bird sanctuaries, and designated eighteen national monuments, including the Grand Canyon. He appointed the first professionally trained forest manager to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Division of Forestry. Roosevelt used the 1891, Forest Reserve Act to protect 172 million acres of federally owned forests from being logged. Eventually Roosevelt would save 234 million acres of natural land for preservation. He believed it was the single most important thing of his presidency.
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Woodrow Wilson
Elected to the presidency in 1912, Woodrow Wilson was a former college professor turned politician. He was raised in Georgia and North Carolina and went to college at the University of Virginia and Princeton. He enrolled in Johns Hopkins University and received on the nation's first doctoral degrees in history and political science. Wilson had campaigned against Teddy Roosevelt's attempt at a third term as president. Wilson promoted what he called his New Freedom plan that was designed to restore economic competition by eliminating all trusts rather than simply regulating them. Another candidate that ran against Wilson was Eugene V. Debs (a long time union organizer) of the Socialist party. He campaigned on the rights of workers that promoted government ownership of railroads and the sharing of profits of major corporations among the workers. Debs attracted attention of West Virginia coal miners, Oklahoma sharecroppers, lumberjacks, and immigrant workers in factories in cities around the U.S. Roosevelt and Wilson both warned the country of the evils of socialism and both had far more campaign funds than Debs, but sill, Debs received nearly a million votes in the 1912 election which illustrated that socialism was popular among many workers in the country.
President Woodrow Wilson
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Eugene V. Debs
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Wilson believed that the country needed a central reserve banking system that could distribute funds to banks if the country suffered another depression like that of 1893. He believed that the new system should be run by the government rather than by bankers to make sure that everyone would have access to the funds and not just large banks on Wall Street. Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913, it created a national banking system with twelve regional districts, each with its own federal reserve bank. The main purpose of the Federal Reserve System was to adjust the nation's currency supply to promote economic growth. It became one of the most successful programs of his presidency.
In order to fight trusts, Wilson created the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. It assumed the powers to define unfair trade practices and issued orders that broke up trusts or blocked them from becoming monopolies.
Votes For Women
 Alice Paul
Wilson believed that the issue of women's suffrage should be left to the states and therefore did not take an aggressive stand in support of women's suffrage (despite the fact that his two daughters were suffragettes). Seeing a lack of support and their movement sort of dying, a new personality began to take the wheel of women's suffrage in a different direction. Alice Paul, a New Jersey born and college educated Quaker, returned from England where she had been working with militant suffragists. There she learned to use civil disobedience to get support for the movement. Paul formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association where she urged more aggressive tactics such as picketing the White House, public parades, public arrests, and hunger strikes when jailed.
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Farm Legislation
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Wilson wanted to help rural farmers who he realized had suffered for a long time with low crop prices and lack of bank loans with low interest rates. He urged Congress to pass the first federal legislation directed at assisting framers, called The Federal Farm Loan Act, twelve Federal Land banks offered loans to farmers for five to forty years at low interest rates. That same year in 1916, Congress passed the Warehouse Act which allowed farmers to borrow money based on the crops they had put up in storage. The Federal Highways Act of 1916 helped to bring new highways to rural areas which farmers would benefit from.
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Conclusion
Eventually progressivism began to fade as a large movement in the U.S. The war in Europe began to gain more and more attention in the U.S. Many waited with uneasiness at whether or not the U.S. would get involved in what would be the largest war in the history of the world up to that point, WWI.