1. Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10.
2. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902).
3. Michael Les Benedict, “Law and Regulation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era,” in Law as Culture and Culture as Law: Essays in Honor of John Philip Reid, ed. Hendrick Hartog and William E. Nelson (Madison, WI: Madison House Publishers, 2000), 227–263; Christopher L. Tomlins, The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in American 1880–1960 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
4. Michael Willrich, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 100–103.
5. Nancy Woloch, Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996).
6. Victoria Getis, The Juvenile Court and the Progressives (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
7. Jennifer Koslow, Cultivating Health: Los Angeles Women and Public Health Reform (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); Anne Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992); and Judith N. McArthur, Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women’s Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893–1918 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998).
8. Nancy C. Unger, Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 86, for the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. See Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 38; Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 191; Vincent P. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America, 1877–1920 (Arlington Heights, IL: Forum Press), 184; and Daniel Block, “Saving Milk through Masculinity: Public Health Officers and Pure Milk, 1880–1930,” Food and Foodways: History and Culture of Human Nourishment 15 (January–June 2005): 115–135.
9. Kriste Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood”: The U.S. Children’s Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912–46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 10–29 and 114–132.
10. Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Scott, Natural Allies, 159–174.
11. Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 132–150, 152–154; Lindenmeyer, “A Right to Childhood,” chap. 4, esp. 100–103; and Lynne Curry, Modern Mothers in the Heartland: Gender, Health, and Progress in Illinois, 1900–1930 (Columbus: Ohio State University, 1999), 120–131.
12. Scott, Natural Allies, 147
13. Landon R. Y. Storrs, Civilizing Capitalism: The National Consumers’ League, Women’s Activism, and Labor Standards in the New Deal (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), chap. 1.
14. Elizabeth Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
15. Kevin Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 45.
16. Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public, includes a chapter on Follett, but the rest of the book focuses on men. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 102, shortchanges women’s Progressivism, saying it “merely extended the boundaries of women’s sphere to the realm of ‘social housekeeping’”; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 19–20, 239–240, calls them “social maternalists” rather than social justice Progressives and claims that they were motivated by “sentiment” and focused on protecting “women’s weakness.” For Chicago women’s clubs, see Elizabeth Belanger, “The Neighborhood Ideal: Local Planning-Practices in Progressive-Era Women’s Clubs,” Journal of Planning History 8.2 (May 2009): 87–110.
17. Nancy Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Charles McCarthy, The Wisconsin Idea (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
18. Robert D. Johnston, The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 123.
19. Martin J. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency: Municipal Administration and Reform in American, 1880–1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), provides the clearest overall picture of these elements of this political Progressivism.
20. Committee on Municipal Program of the National Municipal League, A Model City Charter and Municipal Home Rule (Philadelphia: National Municipal League, 1916).
21. Amy Bridges, Morning Glories: Municipal Reform in the Southwest (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Bradley R. Rice, “The Galveston Plan of City Government by Commission: The Birth of a Progressive Idea,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 78.4 (April 1975): 365–408; and Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency, 136–137 for Des Moines.
22. Kenneth Finegold, Experts and Politicians: Reform Challenges to Machine Politics in New York, Cleveland, and Chicago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 82–88 for Johnson and 107–111 for charter reform in Cleveland.
23. Maureen A. Flanagan, Charter Reform in Chicago (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1987).
24. James J. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 106–107.
25. David Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881–1951 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21–36.
26. Angela Gugliotta, “How, When, and for Whom Was Smoke a Problem?” in Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region, ed. Joel Tarr (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003), 118–120.
27. Stradling, Smokestacks and Progressives, 63–67 and 108–137, provides a comprehensive overview of the political Progressivism of smoke pollution.
28. Angela Gugliotta, “Class, Gender, and Coal Smoke: Gender Ideology and Environmental Injustice in Pittsburgh, 1868–1914,” Environmental History 6.2 (April 2000): 173–176.
29. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts, 100–102 and America Reformed, 173–179. See Scott, Natural Allies, 143–145 for more on women’s health protective associations.
30. Anne-Marie Szymanski, “Regulatory Transformations in a Changing City: The Anti-Smoke Movement in Baltimore, 1895–1931,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13.3 (July 2014): 364–366.
31. William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), Parts 2 and 3.
32. Carl A. Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
33. Max Page, The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), Parts 2, 3, and 4.
34. Eric Sandweiss, St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001).
35. Susan Marie Wirka, “The City Social Movement: Progressive Women Reformers and Early Social Planning,” in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, ed. Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 55–75; and Maureen A. Flanagan, “City Profitable, City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s,” Journal of Urban History 22.2 (January 1996): 163–190.
36. Frederic Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1905).
37. Mary Parker Follett, The New State: Group Organization the Solution of Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918).
38. Connolly, The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism.
39. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 236–238, 251–254.
40. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 108–109.
41. Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158–159.
42. Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
43. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 183.
44. Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade, 40–44, 80, 82, and 90–91.
45. Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
46. Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Movement, 1890–1920 (repr., New York: Atheneum, 1969), chap. 7.
47. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, chap. 8.
48. DeSantis, The Shaping of Modern America, 194–199.
49. Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 189–200.
50. Morton Keller, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 194–196.
51. Julie Greene, Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 219, 279; and Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing the “People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 66.
52. Greene, Pure and Simple Politics, 9, 235.
53. Fr. John Ryan, The Living Wage: Its Ethical and Economic Aspects (New York: Macmillan, 1906), 283–285. Richard Ely wrote the book’s introduction.
54. Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism, 95–107.
55. Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History 23.2 (January 1997): 192–220.
56. Daniel J. Johnson, “‘No Make-Believe Class Struggle’: The Socialist Municipal Campaign in Los Angeles, 1922,” Labor History 41.1 (February 2000): 25–45; Douglas E. Booth, “Municipal Socialism and City Government Reform: The Milwaukee Experience, 1910–1940,” Journal of Urban History 12.1 (November 1985): 51–71; and Josephine Kaneko, “What a Socialist Alderman Would Do,” Coming Nation (March 1914).
57. Gail Radford, “From Municipal Socialism to Public Authorities: Institutional Factors in the Shaping of American Public Enterprise,” Journal of American History 90.3 (December 2003): 863–890.
58. Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 150.
59. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909).
60. Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
61. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000), 227.
62. Alan Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 81.
63. Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: Century, 1903).
64. George F. Becker, “Conditions Requisite to Our Success in the Philippine Islands,” address to the American Geographical Society, February 20, 1901, Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (1901): 112–123.
65. Albert Beveridge, The Young Man and the World (New York: Appleton, 1905), 338; and Kristen Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
66. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, is the most complete analysis of this internationalism.
67. Jane Addams, Newer Ideals of Peace (New York: Macmillan, 1907); Robert La Follette, LaFollette’s Weekly 5.1 (March 29, 1913); Kristen Hoganson, “‘As Badly-Off As the Filipinos’: U.S. Women Suffragists and the Imperial Issue at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Journal of Women’s History 13.2 (Summer 2001): 9–33; and Nancy C. Unger, Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer (New York: Routledge, 2015).
68. David Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
69. Harriet Hyman, introduction to Women at The Hague, by Jane Addams, Emily Greene Balch, and Alice Hamilton (repr., Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, “‘Some of Us Who Deal with the Social Fabric’: Jane Addams Blends Peace and Social Justice,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2.1 (January 2003): 80–96.
70. Julia F. Irwin, Making the World Safe: The American Red Cross and a Nation’s Humanitarian Awakening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
71. Jane Addams, Peace and Bread in Time of War (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 4–5.
72. Unger, Fighting Bob La Follette, chap. 14.
73. Kennedy, Over Here, 34; New Republic 10 (February 10 and 17, 1917); and Dawley, Changing the World, 122, 147, 165–169.
74. Walter Lippmann, “The World Conflict in Relation to American Democracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 72 (July 1917): 1–10; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 283–285, 288–289; and Dawley, Changing the World, 147.
75. Christine Lunardini, From Equal Suffrage to Equal Rights: Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party, 1910–1928 (New York: New York University Press, 1986).
76. LeeAnn Whites, “Love, Hate, Rape, and Lynching: Rebecca Latimer Fulton and the Gender Politics of Racial Violence,” in Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy, ed. David Cecelski and Timothy B. Tyron (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
77. Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade, 180–181.
78. Mattson, Creating a Democratic Public, 44.
79. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois: A Biography, 1868–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 276–277; and Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 77–78, for Addams.
80. Lisa G. Masterson, Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877–1932 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 101–106.
81. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1869–1925 (1955; repr. New York: Atheneum, 1974), 129–130, 222–224; and Gerstle, American Crucible, 55–56.
82. Robert D. Johnston, “Long Live Teddy/Death to Woodrow: The Polarized Politics of the Progressive Era in the 2012 Election,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13.3 (July 2014): 411–443.
83. Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904); Frank Norris, The Octopus: A Story of California (New York: Doubleday, 1901); and Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (New York: Jungle Publishing, 1906).
84. Benjamin De Witt, The Progressive Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1915); and Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1927).
85. George E. Mowry, The California Progressives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951); and Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955).
86. Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” Pacific Historical Review 55.4 (October 1964): 157–159.
87. Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962); and Wiebe, The Search for Order.
88. Schiesl, The Politics of Efficiency; and Finegold, Experts and Politicians.
89. John Louis Recchiuti, Social Science and Progressive Era Reform in New York City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science.
90. Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York: Free Press, 1963).
91. John D. Buenker, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1973).
92. Peter G. Filene, “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” American Quarterly 22.1 (Spring 1970): 20–34; and Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10.4 (December 1982): 113–132.
93. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003); and Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009).
94. Daniel T. Rodgers, “Capitalism and Politics in the Progressive Era and in Ours,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 13.3 (July 2014): 379–386; Robert D. Johnston, “Long Live Teddy/Death to Woodrow, 411–443; and Stromquist, Reinventing the “People.”
95. Robyn Muncy, Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).
FAQs
What were the progressive reforms during the Progressive Era? ›
Progressives were interested in establishing a more transparent and accountable government which would work to improve U.S. society. These reformers favored such policies as civil service reform, food safety laws, and increased political rights for women and U.S. workers.
How did progressives want to reform education during the Progressive Era? ›In Progressive education, universal education was emphasized. Standardized teaching skills were taught in normal schools, which instructed in pedagogical methods for elementary school teachers. An emphasis was placed on urban education, as a large density of Americans were centered in cities.
What is the meaning of progressivism? ›Progressivism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to advance the human condition through social reform – primarily based on purported advancements in social organization, science, and technology.
Was the Progressive Era successful? ›Cities During the Progressive Era In the early 1900s, the United States entered a period of peace, prosperity, and progress. In the nation's growing cities, factory output grew, small businesses flourished, and incomes rose.
What were three important things of the Progressive Era? ›Multiple overlapping progressive movements fought perceived social, political, and economic ills by advancing democracy, scientific methods, and professionalism; regulating business; protecting the natural environment; and improving working and living conditions of the urban poor.
What were the problems in the Progressive Era? ›With few city services to rely upon, the working class lived daily with overcrowding, inadequate water facilities, unpaved streets, and disease. Lagging far behind the middle class, working class wages provided little more than subsistence living and few, if any, opportunities for movement out of the city slums.
How did progressives bring reform to child labor? ›They met with some success on the state levels, as states passed stricter laws that limited the amount of hours that a child could work, set minimum working ages, and also passed compulsory education laws that required children to be in school.
What were the working conditions reforms of the Progressive Era? ›At the state level, Progressives enacted minimum wage laws for women workers, instituted industrial accident insurance, restricted child labor, and improved factory regulation.
How did progressives work to help the urban poor? ›Through settlement houses and other urban social work, reformers aided workers and their families and entreated employers to eliminate dangerous working conditions and other abuses. Muckraking journalists and others gave nation‑wide publicity to accidents and unsafe conditions.
What are some examples of progressivism? ›Specific economic policies that are considered progressive include progressive taxes, income redistribution aimed at reducing inequalities of wealth, a comprehensive package of public services, universal health care, resisting involuntary unemployment, public education, social security, minimum wage laws, antitrust ...
What does progressivism focus on? ›
Progressivism is a student centered philosophy that believes that ideas should be tested by experimentation, and learning comes from finding answers from questions.
What is progressivism in education in simple words? ›Progressive education is a response to traditional methods of teaching. It is defined as an educational movement which gives more value to experience than formal learning. It is based more on experiential learning that concentrate on the development of a child's talents.
What were the civil rights in the Progressive Era? ›Four constitutional amendments were adopted during the Progressive era including: authorizing an income tax; providing for the direct election of senators; extending the vote to women; and prohibiting the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages.
What were the inventions of the Progressive Era? ›The Progressive Era saw inventions, such as automobiles and airplanes, telephone and radio, that required mass production and brought people together. It also spawned many political and legislative innovations that we now take for granted.
Which of the following sentences best describes the Progressive Era? ›Explanation: The best sentence that describes the Progressive Era is: A) It was a period in which many social reforms occurred. The Progressive Era, which took place from the 1890s to the 1920s, was a period of social activism and political reform in the United States.
What are some examples of reforms? ›Reforms on many issues — temperance, abolition, prison reform, women's rights, missionary work in the West — fomented groups dedicated to social improvements. Often these efforts had their roots in Protestant churches.
What are examples of progressive policies? ›Specific economic policies that are considered progressive include progressive taxes, income redistribution aimed at reducing inequalities of wealth, a comprehensive package of public services, universal health care, resisting involuntary unemployment, public education, social security, minimum wage laws, antitrust ...
What are the three amendments of the Progressive Era? ›A progressive amendment is a law passed at the federal level and is considered an amendment to the Constitution. There were multiple progressive amendments. The 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th amendments were progressive amendments passed under Presidents Taft and Wilson.
What was the urban reform in the Progressive Era? ›Municipal market reform in the Progressive Era generated state and local projects that used public markets for combatting the urban "evils" of high food costs, lack of fresh food, traffic congestion, and unsanitary conditions.