The Progressive Era

Cheap printing and popular magazines such as McClure’s gave reporters a huge audience. In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt called the most aggressive of them muckrakers. He meant it partly as a warning not to go too far, but the writers took the name with pride.

Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant and police reporter, showed readers the inside of New York tenements in How the Other Half Lives (1890), using flash photography. Ida Tarbell spent years in the records to write The History of the Standard Oil Company, published in McClure’s from 1902 to 1904; it showed how John D. Rockefeller’s company crushed rivals, including Tarbell’s own father. Lincoln Steffens exposed bribery between businessmen and city bosses in articles collected as The Shame of the Cities (1904).

Upton Sinclair, a socialist, wrote The Jungle (1906), a novel about an immigrant family working in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. He hoped to win sympathy for the workers. Instead, readers were most horrified by what went into their meat. Sinclair later joked that he had aimed at the public’s heart and hit its stomach.

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in a crowded immigrant neighborhood of Chicago. It was a settlement house: educated, mostly middle-class women and men lived there and offered English classes, a kindergarten, a gym, clubs and art. Hull House residents also studied the neighborhood and lobbied for laws on child labor, factory safety and juvenile courts. By 1910 there were hundreds of settlements around the country. Addams later won the Nobel Peace Prize (1931), the first American woman to do so.

At the same time, Protestant ministers such as Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden preached the Social Gospel, the idea that Christians had a duty to fight poverty and injustice, not just save individual souls. Many Catholic and Jewish reformers did similar work through their own charities and organizations.

Progressives often started close to home. After a hurricane destroyed much of Galveston, Texas, in 1900, the city replaced its mayor and council with a small commission of experts, and other cities copied the idea. Reform mayors fought machines and took over water and gas companies.

In Wisconsin, Governor Robert La Follette (1901–1906) won a direct primary, so that voters instead of party bosses chose candidates. He also pushed railroad regulation and higher taxes on railroads. His Wisconsin Idea used professors from the state university as experts to help write laws.

Other states gave voters new tools. The initiative lets citizens propose a law by petition; the referendum lets them vote on a law; the recall lets them remove an official before the term ends. South Dakota adopted the initiative and referendum in 1898 and Oregon in 1902, and many Western states followed. States also passed laws on child labor, workplace injuries and working hours, though courts struck down some of them. In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the Supreme Court upheld a limit on women’s working hours, a decision that helped women workers but rested on the idea that women were weaker than men.

Roosevelt became president in 1901 after McKinley was assassinated. He promised a Square Deal, fair treatment for business, workers and consumers.

• Trust-busting. In 1902 his administration sued to break up the Northern Securities Company, a giant railroad combination. The Supreme Court agreed in 1904. Roosevelt said he opposed only “bad” trusts that abused their power and preferred to regulate the rest.
• Labor. In the 1902 anthracite coal strike, Roosevelt brought owners and miners to arbitration instead of sending troops against the strikers, a break with earlier presidents. When the owners resisted, he prepared to have the army seize and run the mines, and they gave in.
• Railroads. The Hepburn Act (1906) let the Interstate Commerce Commission set maximum railroad rates.
• Consumers. After The Jungle and a government investigation, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act on June 30, 1906. Chemist Harvey Wiley had campaigned for years for food and drug safety.
• Conservation. With forester Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt expanded national forests, created the U.S. Forest Service (1905), and used the Antiquities Act (1906) to protect places such as Devils Tower and parts of the Grand Canyon. In all, about 230 million acres of public land were protected (the National Park Service’s estimate). Conservation could also mean pushing Native nations and local users off land.

Roosevelt’s chosen successor, William Howard Taft (1909–1913), brought more antitrust cases than Roosevelt did (the Miller Center counts 99; other counts are lower), including the case that broke up Standard Oil in 1911. But Taft angered Progressives by signing a tariff that kept rates high and by firing Pinchot in a dispute over public lands.

In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft. When the Republicans renominated Taft, Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party, nicknamed the Bull Moose Party. Its platform called for woman suffrage, limits on child labor and social insurance. Roosevelt called his program the New Nationalism: accept big business, but regulate it with a strong federal government. The Democrat Woodrow Wilson answered with the New Freedom: break up monopolies and restore competition. Socialist Eugene V. Debs won about 6 percent of the vote. With the Republicans split, Wilson won with about 42 percent of the popular vote and 435 electoral votes; Roosevelt won 88 and Taft 8.

Wilson moved quickly. The Underwood Tariff (1913) cut tariff rates and added a federal income tax. The Federal Reserve Act (December 1913) created a system of regional banks overseen by a board in Washington, to make the money supply more flexible and help prevent panics. In 1914 the Federal Trade Commission was created to investigate unfair business practices, and the Clayton Antitrust Act named specific illegal practices and said labor unions were not illegal combinations in themselves. Courts later narrowed that protection for unions. In practice, Wilson’s program came to look more like Roosevelt’s regulation than he had promised in 1912.

• 16th Amendment (ratified 1913): allows a federal income tax.
• 17th Amendment (1913): voters, not state legislatures, elect U.S. senators.
• 18th Amendment (ratified 1919, in effect 1920): bans making, selling and shipping alcohol. Many Progressives saw drinking as a cause of poverty and family violence. Prohibition was hard to enforce and was repealed by the 21st Amendment in 1933.
• 19th Amendment (1920): forbids denying the vote on account of sex. It came after decades of work by suffragists such as Carrie Chapman Catt and, with more confrontational tactics, Alice Paul. In practice, many Black women in the South were still kept from voting.

The Progressive Era was also a high point of Jim Crow. Southern states finished taking the vote away from most Black men with poll taxes, literacy tests and white primaries, and many white Progressives in the South called this “reform.” Lynching was common, and Congress passed no law against it.

Wilson, the first Southern-born president since the Civil War, allowed several federal departments to segregate their offices, lunchrooms and restrooms starting in 1913, and some Black officials lost their jobs. When the editor William Monroe Trotter protested at the White House in 1914, Wilson defended the policy.

Black leaders disagreed about how to respond. Booker T. Washington, head of Tuskegee Institute, urged Black Southerners in his 1895 Atlanta speech to focus on job training and owning property and to put off the demand for social equality. W. E. B. Du Bois, a Harvard-trained historian, argued in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that Black Americans must demand the vote, civil rights and higher education now. In 1905 Du Bois and others founded the Niagara Movement, and in 1909 Black and white reformers founded the NAACP, which fought segregation in the courts. Ida B. Wells, a journalist from Memphis, led a campaign against lynching and was among the NAACP’s founders.

Other limits: some Progressives backed laws to restrict immigration, and some supported eugenics, the false idea that society could be improved by preventing “unfit” people from having children; many states passed forced sterilization laws. Many Progressives also trusted experts more than ordinary voters.

Progressives changed what Americans expected from government. Food and drug inspection, antitrust law, the income tax, the Federal Reserve, national forests, direct election of senators and votes for women all date from these years. Later reformers in the New Deal of the 1930s and the civil rights movement built on Progressive tools, and on the NAACP. Historians still debate whether Progressives mainly helped ordinary people or mainly helped business and the middle class bring order to a messy economy; historians generally credit both.