Progressive Era

Progressive Era

1. Improvements

   • Working conditions - During the Progressive Era, state legislatures and Congress passed laws establishing maximum working hours and workers' compensation schemes for workplace injury and illness. Reforms also improved the freedom of labor unions to advocate on behalf of workers' rights.
   • Immigrant living conditions- In the cities, immigrants were faced with overcrowding, inadequate water facilities, poor sanitation, and disease.
   • Big business- The early 20th century was an era of business expansion and progressive reform in the United States. The progressives, as they called themselves, worked to make American society a better and safer place in which to live. They tried to make big business more responsible through regulations of various kinds.
   • Environmentalism- There was movement for environmental reform during this era through things such as Conservation of the nation's resources, putting an end to wasteful uses of raw materials, and the reclamation of large areas of neglected land which had been identified as some of the major problems.
   • Women’s rights- The Progressive Era was a turning point for women's rights in the United States. During this period, women's right to vote was recognized, giving them unprecedented influence in politics and legislation. Other important reforms to women's property, economic, and labor rights were reached.
   • Racial discrimination- . In the South, electoral politics remained a parade of electoral fraud, voter intimidation, and race-baiting. Democratic Party candidates stirred southern whites into frenzies with warnings of “negro domination” and of Black men violating white women. The region’s culture of racial violence and the rise of lynching as a mass public spectacle accelerated. And as the remaining African American voters threatened the dominance of Democratic leadership in the South, southern Democrats turned to what many white southerners understood as a series of progressive electoral and social reforms—disenfranchisement and segregation.
   • Improvement acts
     • Sherman Antitrust-Approved July 2, 1890, The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. The Sherman Anti-trust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act declared that not all monopolies were illegal, only those that “unreasonably” stifled free trade.
     • Clayton Antitrust Act- The courts seized on Sherman Anti-Trust law’s vague language, however, and the act was turned against itself, manipulated and used, for instance, to limit the growing power of labor unions. Only in 1914, with the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, did Congress attempt to close loopholes in previous legislation.
     • Meat Inspection Act- The passage of the Meat Inspection Act was a major victory for Roosevelt and for the Progressive movement, which sought to promote government regulation and oversight of various industries in the interest of public health and safety.
     • Pure Food and Drug Act- The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 prohibited the sale of misbranded or adulterated food and drugs in interstate commerce and laid a foundation for the nation's first consumer protection agency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
     • 19th Amendment- Women in the Progressive Era-Suffrage, or the right to vote, became the most recognizable achievement for women reformers of the Progressive Era and to seal that The ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920 forbade the states from denying a woman the right to vote.
     • Reformations
       • Hull House- Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House to offer social services to the community. Some of those services included legal aid, an employment office, childcare, and training in crafting and domestic skills. The house tried to better a country battered by industrialization, the explosive growth of cities, and the sudden arrival of millions of immigrants, mostly poor.
       • Hull House- Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House to offer social services to the community. Some of those services included legal aid, an employment office, childcare, and training in crafting and domestic skills. The house tried to better a country battered by industrialization, the explosive growth of cities, and the sudden arrival of millions of immigrants, mostly poor.
       • NAACP- Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest civil rights organization. The association was founded during the Progressive Era in response to widespread racial discrimination and violence against African Americans.
       • Tuskegee Institute- Tuskegee Normal School was established by the state of Alabama, influenced by a former slave and a former slave owner to educate newly freed people and their children. The Normal school, later Institute, became a beacon of hope for African Americans to reach their goal of acceptance.
       • National American Suffrage Assoc.- The National American Woman Suffrage Association was an organization formed on February 18, 1890, to advocate in favor of women's suffrage in the United States. . During this era, the National American Woman Suffrage Association initially emphasized state-level efforts to secure voting rights for women.
       • Important Figures
         • Theodore Roosevelt- President Theodore Roosevelt was a leader of the Progressive movement, and he championed his "Square Deal" domestic policies, promising the average citizen fairness, breaking of trusts, regulation of railroads, and pure food and drugs. Aggression against the trusts—and the progressive vogue for “trust busting”—took on new meaning under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, a reform-minded Republican who ascended to the presidency after the death of William McKinley in 1901. Roosevelt’s youthful energy and confrontational politics captivated the nation.
         • Upton Sinclair- Many writers became investigative reporters called muckrakers. They contributed to the Progressive Movement by investigating and exposing some of the ills of society. One of the writers of this time was Upton Sinclair, who wrote the novel The Jungle.
         • Jane Addams- no American reformer matched Jane Addams in fame, energy, and innovation. After four years at Rockford, Addams embarked on a multiyear “grand tour” of Europe. She found herself drawn to English settlement houses, a kind of prototype for social work in which philanthropists embedded themselves among communities and offered services to disadvantaged populations. Jane Addams cofounded and led Hull House, one of the first settlement houses in North America. . During this era, the National American Woman Suffrage Association initially emphasized state-level efforts to secure voting rights for women.
         • Jacob Riis wanted to bring attention to New York City's suffering poor who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side.In 1890, New York City journalist Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives, a scathing indictment of living and working conditions in the city’s slums. Riis not only vividly described the squalor he saw, he documented it with photography, giving readers an unflinching view of urban poverty. Riis’s book led to housing reform in New York and other cities and helped instill the idea that society bore at least some responsibility for alleviating poverty
         • Alice Paul- . During this era, the National American Woman Suffrage Association initially emphasized state-level efforts to secure voting rights for women.Alice Paul was one of the most prominent activists of the 20th-century women's rights movement. An outspoken suffragist and feminist, she tirelessly led the charge for women's suffrage and equal rights in the United States. John Muir- John Muir was a naturalist whose love of nature, led to the conservation of national resources. His organization, the Sierra Club, was formed to help preserve forest. His camping trip with Theodore Roosevelt was important for the Progressive Era as he helped create several national parks.
         • Gifford Pinchot- When Roosevelt failed to win the Republican presidential nomination from Taft in 1912, Pinchot took an active role in founding the new Progressive Party, commonly known as the Bull Moose Party.Gifford Pinchot was an important figure in the American conservation movement. As the first chief of the US Forest Service, Pinchot tripled the nation's forest reserves, protecting their long term health for both conservation and recreational use
         • Woodrow Wilson- In January 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared his support for the women’s suffrage amendment, and two years later women’s suffrage became a reality. After the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. Booker T. Washington- Born into the world of bondage in Virginia in 1856, Booker Taliaferro Washington was subjected to the degradation and exploitation of slavery early in life. But Washington also developed an insatiable thirst to learn. Working against tremendous odds, Washington matriculated into Hampton University in Virginia and thereafter established a southern institution that would educate many Black Americans, the Tuskegee Institute, located in Alabama.
         • William Howard Taft- Roosevelt was more interested in regulating corporations than breaking them apart. Besides, the courts were slow and unpredictable. However, his successor after 1908, William Howard Taft, firmly believed in court-oriented trust busting and during his four years in office more than doubled the number of monopoly breakups that occurred during Roosevelt’s seven years in office. Taft notably went after U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation formed from the consolidation of nearly every major American steel producer.