Topic 7.4 Notes – The Progressives

What Progressivism Was

Progressivism grew out of frustration with the Gilded Age. Laissez-faire government had not stopped monopolies, machine corruption, unsafe work, bad housing, or widening inequality. Progressives thought modern problems needed modern solutions.

Different reformers wanted different things, but they usually shared faith in active government, investigation, and expert knowledge.

• Political reform tried to weaken party machines and give voters more power.
• Administrative reform trusted trained experts to run government efficiently.
• Economic reform aimed to regulate big business and protect workers and consumers.
• Social and moral reform targeted poverty, public health, education, alcohol, and city conditions.
• Conservation and preservation dealt with forests, land, water, and wilderness.

A lot of Progressives were middle class, and many were women. Key influences included the Social Gospel, muckraking journalists, settlement-house workers, labor activists, and African American reformers.

The tension that shows up everywhere is this. Progressives agreed old government was too weak, but they split over democracy vs. expertise, helping people vs. controlling them, and inclusion vs. exclusion.

Reformers and What They Tried to Fix

Public exposure drove reform. Once people could see corruption or suffering, pressure for laws grew.

That was especially true of urban poverty and overcrowded housing, the kind of conditions reformers tried to bring into public view.

Tenement and sweatshop conditions in an immigrant neighborhood

• Ida Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company → exposed monopoly abuses.
• Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities → exposed urban political corruption.
• Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives → showed tenements, poverty, and poor sanitation.
• Upton Sinclair, The Jungle → exposed meatpacking conditions and pushed consumer reform.
• Ida B. Wells → documented lynching as racial terrorism.

Settlement houses

Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, put reformers inside immigrant neighborhoods.

Services included childcare, education, English classes, health care, and legal aid. They also pushed housing, sanitation, playground, compulsory education, and public health reforms. The built-in tension was helping immigrants while also trying to Americanize them.

Labor reform

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire made unsafe work impossible to ignore.

• Reforms included factory inspection, workers’ compensation, child labor laws, maximum hours, and minimum wages.
• Lochner v. New York struck down a hours law using “liberty of contract.”
• Muller v. Oregon upheld women’s hours laws using the Brandeis brief and social-science evidence.
• Keating-Owen Child Labor Act tried to limit child labor federally, but Hammer v. Dagenhart struck it down.

Political and Federal Progressive Reform

Political reform tried to break machine power, but it also shifted power to experts.

• Direct primary let voters choose party nominees.
• Initiative, referendum, and recall expanded direct democracy.
• The Australian secret ballot weakened party pressure and intimidation.
• The Seventeenth Amendment created direct election of senators.
• Robert M. La Follette and the Wisconsin Idea linked government to university experts.

Progressive presidents

At the national level, Progressive reform is usually easiest to track through the three presidents below. Roosevelt in particular built a reputation as a “trust buster,” which is exactly what the cartoon here is highlighting.

Roosevelt as a “trust buster”

The Progressive amendment set is worth memorizing together:

• Sixteenth = income tax
• Seventeenth = direct election of senators
• Eighteenth = Prohibition, enforced by the Volstead Act
• Nineteenth = women’s suffrage

Women, Race, Immigration, and the Limits of Reform

Women drove much of reform work.

• Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon League backed temperance and Prohibition.
• Carrie Chapman Catt and NAWSA used state-by-state and lobbying strategies.
• Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party used more confrontational tactics.

The Nineteenth Amendment expanded voting, but Black women in the South still faced disfranchisement.

Progressivism had sharp racial limits. Many white Progressives ignored segregation or supported it. Woodrow Wilson segregated federal offices. Booker T. Washington emphasized vocational advancement, while W. E. B. Du Bois demanded immediate equality. The Niagara Movement and NAACP pushed African American reform.

Immigration showed the same split. Some Progressives helped immigrants through schools and settlement houses. Others backed restriction, literacy tests, and forced Americanization. The Immigration Act of 1917 added a literacy test. Eugenics showed the dark side of Progressive faith in expertise.

Conservation, Preservation, and Progressive Legacy

Progressives agreed resources needed protection, but they disagreed on use.

• Conservationists like Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot wanted scientific management and sustainable use.
• Preservationists like John Muir and the Sierra Club wanted wilderness protected from development.

Hetch Hetchy is the clearest example of conservation vs. preservation, and this pre-dam view of the valley helps show what preservationists were trying to protect.

Hetch Hetchy Valley before damming

Key examples include the U.S. Forest Service, Antiquities Act, expanded forests, parks, monuments, and wildlife refuges, and the National Park Service in 1916.