Progressive Era

The Progressive Era was a period of wide-ranging reform in the United States, usually dated from the 1890s to the 1920s. Reformers known as Progressives set out to tackle the problems of rapid industrialisation, urban growth and mass immigration: corrupt political machines, powerful monopolies, slums, dangerous workplaces and child labour. Their campaigns produced four constitutional amendments, new federal regulators and lasting changes to how Americans vote and are governed.

The movement took shape in the 1890s, a decade scarred by the severe depression that followed the Panic of 1893, and it reflected unease at the vast new fortunes of the industrial age; the number of millionaires rose from perhaps a hundred in the 1870s to 16,000 by 1916. Reform began locally. In 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house serving immigrants, and reforming mayors in the Midwest took on boss-run city halls. Ideas also came from abroad: after visiting Switzerland in 1888, the labour activist James W. Sullivan published an influential book in 1893 urging American adoption of the initiative and referendum. Progressive leaders were mostly educated, middle-class professionals who trusted experts, science and efficiency.

Cheap mass-circulation magazines carried the reform message. Investigative journalists, nicknamed "muckrakers" by Theodore Roosevelt, exposed corruption and abuse. Lincoln Steffens investigated city government, Ida Tarbell's 1904 history of Standard Oil turned opinion against the oil monopoly, and Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle, set in Chicago's meatpacking plants, helped bring about the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act that same year.

Much of the practical change happened in state capitals. Oregon adopted the initiative and referendum in 1902, the direct primary in 1904 and the recall in 1908, a package that became known as the "Oregon System". In Wisconsin, Governor Robert La Follette, elected in 1900, launched the "Wisconsin idea", drawing on university experts; between 1901 and 1911 the state introduced the first comprehensive statewide primary, an effective workplace injury law and the first state income tax. California built a strong grassroots movement, and by 1920, 177 cities had handed day-to-day government to professional city managers.

At the national level, Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, promised a "Square Deal", pursued antitrust cases, sought railway regulation and pure food laws, and created many new national parks, forests and monuments. His successor, William Howard Taft, brought even more antitrust suits, and in 1911 the Supreme Court ordered the break-up of Standard Oil. Roosevelt broke with Taft and, after losing the Republican nomination, ran in 1912 for a new Progressive Party. The winner, Woodrow Wilson, enacted his "New Freedom" programme: lower tariffs and an income tax in 1913, the Federal Reserve in 1913, and the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission in 1914. Wilson, however, accepted the further segregation of federal employees.

Progressives wrote their reforms into the Constitution. The Sixteenth Amendment of 1913 allowed a federal income tax, and the Seventeenth, also of 1913, required senators to be elected directly by voters. The Eighteenth introduced national prohibition from 1920, and the Nineteenth, ratified in 1920, gave women the vote after decades of campaigning by groups such as the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

Progressivism had a darker side. In the South, reform went hand in hand with Jim Crow segregation and the disfranchisement of Black voters, and in the West with hostility to Asian immigrants; many reformers backed immigration restriction, and some embraced eugenics. African Americans pursued their own reform agendas under leaders such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois. After the First World War and the upheavals of 1919 the crusading spirit faded, though historians debate how long it survived into the 1920s. Earlier historians saw the era mainly as a prelude to the New Deal.

Our 1900 and 1914 maps show the United States in the heart of the Progressive Era, and the 1920 map the country as the era drew to a close.