- [Instructor] After the Civil War
there were enormous changes in American life.
With industrialization, urbanization,
and immigration changing the composition of who lived
in the United States, where they lived,
and what they did for a living.
But city living and factory work came with new
social problems like poverty and unsafe working
and living conditions.
The rise of big business had also led to practices
that limited competition, like monopolies and price fixing.
Starting in the 1890s a number of reformers
began to advocate for remedies to these social problems.
They were known as the Progressives.
This era of reform, which lasted through the 1920s,
has come to be known as the Progressive Era.
But the difficult thing about the Progressive Era
was that these reformers worked on all sorts
of different things.
There were muckrakers, which were journalists,
writers, and photographers who tried to expose
corruption or unsanitary factory practices.
There were politicians who tried to reign in
big businesses and protect consumers.
There were conservationists who tried to preserve
national parks and wilderness from exploitation.
And there many influential female reformers
who tried to help women, children, and immigrants
achieve better working and living conditions.
So clearly Progressives didn't all share the same goals
or advocate for the same solutions to problems.
How can we even compare the goals and effects
of the Progressive reformers when they were so diverse?
Let's start by taking a look at some of the goals
and achievements of the Progressives.
Now, I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail
about individual reformers or pieces of legislation here.
What I'm interested in doing is taking a birds eye view
of the kinds of reforms that Progressives pursued
during this time period.
First, there were those who advocated for sanitation
and consumer protections like Upton Sinclair,
whose novel The Jungle exposed the unsanitary conditions
in factories that made food products.
The outrage that book generated led to the passage
of laws like the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
Then there were the Progressives who fought
for protections for workers.
They pushed for an eight hour workday
and for safer conditions for workers,
along with the right for workers
to bargain collectively through unions.
Along with those reforms were others aimed
at advancing the rights of women and children,
including limiting child labor, promoting access
to birth control, and granting women the right to vote
through the 19th Amendment.
Many of the Progressive reformers were interested
in reining in the excesses of big business.
Politicians, like President Teddy Roosevelt,
went after trusts and monopolies
for stifling competition and fixing prices.
Another avenue of reform was aimed at limiting
political corruption, particularly city political machines
that were dominated by party bosses.
One victory in this arena was the passage
of the 17th Amendment, which provided for
the popular election of senators.
Lastly, there was a push for moral reform
to make society more orderly and humane.
The major achievement of these reformers
was the passage of the 18th Amendment,
which prohibited the sale or consumption of alcohol.
Okay, so now that we've done a brief survey
of what the Progressives were up to,
let's think about what aspects these reformers
had in common with each other,
and where they differed with or contradicted each other.
So this might sound a little obvious,
but one thing that united the Progressives
was that they believed in progress.
That is, they thought it was possible to improve society
and to make people better human beings.
This is worth mentioning just because not everyone
felt that this was possible.
Many of the opponents of the Progressives
saw human nature as fixed and a society with
vast inequalities of wealth and opportunity
is just an inevitable consequence of industrialization.
A second shared belief was that it was the role
of government to step in and fix these social problems.
This was a big departure from the laissez-faire
or hands off approach of the Gilded Age.
In that era, attempting to improve sanitation
or morality would have been considered
work for private charities
or voluntary associations to take on.
But the Progressives thought that the problems
they were trying to solve were too big for that approach.
And they sought out the help of local, state,
and federal government to implement their measures.
They campaigned for laws and constitutional amendments
to bring about change.
So they really began a debate over whether
or to what extent the government should take an active role
in the welfare of its citizens that would continue
into the Great Depression.
But the Progressive Movement was also riddled
with divisions and internal contradictions.
One of these was around voting rights.
The Progressives expanded democracy by winning
the right to vote for women,
but they also advocated for restricting the vote
to who they considered good voters.
White, educated, native-born people.
They worked to impose literacy tests
and residency requirements in the North,
and made no effort to challenge Jim Crow Laws
preventing African Americans from voting in the South.
Progressives were also divided on the issue of immigration.
Although a few Progressives championed the rights
of immigrants and respect for immigrant's culture
like Hull-House founder, Jane Addams,
most Progressives thought the only way
forward for immigrants was complete assimilation
into American culture.
They also supported restrictions on the entry
of immigrants they considered undesirable,
like those from Southern and Eastern Europe,
Asia, and Mexico.
These beliefs around who was fit to vote
or to be an American citizen derived from
the flawed racial science of the day,
which categorized white Anglo-Saxons as the most
evolved race, and everyone else falling somewhere
along a continuum of less evolved peoples.
With the exception of African American activists,
like Ida B. Wells, Progressive reformers supported
segregation and pretty much turned a blind eye
towards the working and living conditions
of African Americans.
Some Progressives even advocated eugenics,
a plan to improve the American gene pool
by encouraging native white women to have more babies,
and discouraging undesirables from reproducing,
sometimes through forced sterilizations.
So taking these uniting and dividing factors
into consideration what conclusions can we come to
about the goals and effects
of the Progressive reform movement?
I think it's safe to say that the Progressives
wanted to improve society and find a remedy
for the social problems caused by
industrialization and urbanization.
And that they wanted to do so through
government intervention.
But their goals were also limited.
They only wanted these improvements for those
they deemed worthy to participate in American society.
As for how effective their reforms were at solving
the problems of industrialization and urbanization,
they did succeed in curbing some of the worst problems
of corruption, sanitation, and exploitation.
But we would also need to look ahead
to the '20s and '30s to see how much
things really changed.
Spoiler alert, this booming era of industry
was about to end with a crash.