The Progressive Era in the United States (c. 1890–1920)

Core Idea

The Progressive Era was a period of reform in which Americans tried to fix problems created by rapid industrialization, the growth of cities and the power of large corporations. Journalists called muckrakers exposed unsafe factories, impure food and political corruption, and middle-class reformers, workers and women's groups pushed governments to act. City, state and federal governments regulated business, broke up some monopolies, protected consumers and workers, and conserved public lands. Four constitutional amendments ratified between 1913 and 1920 created a federal income tax, direct election of senators, Prohibition and women's suffrage, but most reformers did little to challenge racial segregation.

How It's Best Learned

Pair each problem of the Gilded Age with a Progressive response, such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle with the Meat Inspection Act. Read a short muckraking passage and discuss how investigative journalism shaped public opinion. Compare the programs of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and ask whose interests reform served and whose it ignored.

Common Misconceptions

• Progressivism was a single, organized movement with one program. (It was a loose collection of reformers, from urban settlement-house workers to rural voters and business leaders, who often disagreed about goals.)
• Progressive reformers worked for equality for all Americans. (Many Progressives accepted or supported racial segregation, and some backed immigration restriction and eugenics; Black activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought for civil rights largely outside mainstream Progressivism.)
• The federal government led reform from the start. (Much early Progressive reform happened in cities and states, such as Wisconsin under Robert La Follette, before national laws followed.)

Explainer

By the 1890s the United States had become an industrial giant. You have studied how steel, oil, railroads and electricity transformed production. The same changes brought crowded city slums, dangerous factories, child labor, giant monopolies called trusts, and city governments run by party machines that traded jobs for votes. The reform response to these problems is called Progressivism.

Journalists did much to start it. Jacob Riis photographed New York tenements in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Ida Tarbell exposed the methods of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) described meatpacking plants so vividly that Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act that year. Theodore Roosevelt called such writers "muckrakers."

Reformers worked at every level of government. Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago in 1889, a settlement house offering classes and services to immigrants. Cities hired professional managers to replace machine politicians. States adopted direct primaries, with Wisconsin under Robert La Follette holding the first statewide primary in 1903, and many, starting with Oregon, gave voters the initiative, referendum and recall. After 146 workers died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, New York passed strict factory laws.

At the national level, President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) used the Sherman Antitrust Act against monopolies, supported regulation of railroads and set aside millions of acres of public land. Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) signed the Federal Reserve Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act and created the Federal Trade Commission. Four amendments changed the Constitution: a federal income tax and direct election of senators in 1913, Prohibition in 1919 and women's suffrage in 1920.

Progressivism had sharp limits. It rose at the same time as Jim Crow laws in the South, and many reformers accepted segregation. Wilson's government segregated federal offices. Some Progressives supported restricting immigration and eugenics. Black Americans organized for their own rights: Ida B. Wells campaigned against lynching, and in 1909 W. E. B. Du Bois and others founded the NAACP. The Progressive belief that government should act to protect people from the market later shaped the New Deal.