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Progressive Era to New Era, 1900-1929. Overview The early 20th century was an era of business expansion and progressive reform in the United States. Automobiles in the Progressive and New Eras The automobile transformed the lives of people living in the United States.
- Jennifer Rosenberg
- The 1900s. This decade opened the century with some amazing scientific and technological feats: the first flight by the Wright brothers, Henry Ford's first Model-T, and Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
- The 1910s. This decade was dominated by the first "total war"—World War I. It also saw other huge changes during the Russian Revolution and the beginning of Prohibition in the United States.
- The 1920s. The Roaring '20s were a time of a booming stock market, speakeasies, short skirts, the Charleston, and jazz. The '20s also showed great strides in women's suffrage—women got the vote in 1920.
- The 1930s. The Great Depression hit the world hard in the 1930s. The Nazis took advantage of this situation and came to power in Germany, established their first concentration camp, and began a systematic persecution of Jews in Europe.
- Overview
- The problems of industrialization
- The ideology and politics of progressivism
- The dark side of progressivism
- What do you think?
In the early twentieth century, reformers worked to improve American society and counteract the effect of industrialization.
Though industrialization in the United States raised standards of living for many, it had a dark side. Corporate bosses, sometimes referred to as “robber barons,” pursued unethical and unfair business practices aimed at eliminating competition and increasing profits. Factory workers, many of them recent immigrants, were frequently subjected to brutal and perilous working and living conditions. Political corruption enriched politicians at the expense of the lower and working classes, who struggled to make ends meet. The gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots” was widening.1
The Progressive movement arose as a response to these negative effects of industrialization. Progressive reformers sought to regulate private industry, strengthen protections for workers and consumers, expose corruption in both government and big business, and generally improve society.2
The worldview of Progressive reformers was based on certain key assumptions. The first was that human nature could be improved through the enlightened application of regulations, incentives, and punishments. The second key assumption was that the power of the federal government could be harnessed to improve the individual and transform society. These two assumptions were not shared by political conservatives, who tended to believe that human nature was unchanging, and that the federal government should remain limited in size and scope.3
Some of the most famous Progressive reformers were Jane Addams, who founded Hull House in Chicago to help immigrants adapt to life in the United States; Ida Tarbell, a “muckraker” who exposed the corrupt business practices of Standard Oil and became an early pioneer of investigative journalism; and Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, who both expanded the power of the federal government to impose regulations on private industry and implement protections for workers, consumers, and the natural environment.
Progressive reformers successfully influenced the passage of much substantive legislation, including several amendments to the US Constitution. The Sixteenth Amendment established a federal income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment allowed for the direct election of Senators, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited sales of alcohol, and the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteed women the right to vote.
Legislation aimed at strengthening protections for workers and consumers included the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the Food and Drug Administration to guarantee the safety and purity of all food products and pharmaceuticals, and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, which sought to curb business practices aimed at stifling competition.4
Though Progressive reformers achieved many noteworthy goals during this period, they also promoted discriminatory policies and espoused intolerant ideas. The Wilson administration, for instance, despite its embrace of modernity and progress, pursued a racial agenda that culminated in the segregation of the federal government. The years of Wilson’s presidency (1913-1921) witnessed a revival of the Ku Klux Klan and a viciously racist backlash against the economic and political gains of African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period.5
Labor unions, which were very active in Progressive politics, supported restrictions on immigration and spewed xenophobic rhetoric that blamed immigrants for low wages and harsh working conditions in factories across the nation. Federal immigration policies in the Progressive Era, including the Immigration Act of 1917 and the National Quota Law of 1921, severely limited immigration based on nationality, and excluded virtually all Asian immigrants.6
In line with their view of human nature as capable of being engineered and manipulated, many Progressive reformers advocated selective breeding, or eugenics. Eugenics was considered “the science of better breeding” and aimed to improve the genetic quality of the human population through policies that would encourage the more “desirable” elements of society to have more children while preventing “undesirables” from reproducing. Eugenics was based on a racial and class hierarchy that placed white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants at the top. Lower classes, ethnic minorities, recent immigrants, the mentally ill, and the developmentally disabled all occupied lower rungs on this hierarchy. In 1907, the United States became the first country to pass a compulsory sterilization law.
The genocidal policies of Nazi Germany ultimately discredited the “science” of eugenics, but not before over 60,000 American men and women were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from having children.7
How would you describe the Progressive worldview? Do you agree with the ideological assumptions of progressivism?
What were the most impressive achievements of Progressive reformers?
Overall, were the effects of progressivism more harmful or beneficial to American society?
[Notes and attributions]
Early 20th century America was flexing its economic muscle. Learn more about the temperance movement, the Titanic and business leaders like William Randolph Hearst and John D. Rockefeller.
The Progressive movement was a political and social-reform movement that brought major changes to the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, known as the Progressive Era, the movement’s goals involved strengthening the national government and addressing people’s economic, social, and political demands.
The 20th century began on 1 January 1901 (MCMI), and ended on 31 December 2000 (MM). It was the 10th and last century of the 2nd millennium and was marked by new models of scientific understanding, unprecedented scopes of warfare, new modes of communication that would operate at nearly instant speeds, and new forms of art and entertainment.
Oct 9, 2020 · In late 19th- and early 20th-century America, a new image of womanhood emerged that began to shape public views and understandings of women’s role in society. Identified by contemporaries as a Gibson Girl, a suffragist, a Progressive reformer, a bohemian feminist, a college girl, a bicyclist, a flapper, a working-class militant, or a ...
