The Progressives, 1890–1920

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the diverse reform impulses (muckraking journalism, settlement-house and women's-club activism, organized labor, scientific management, and university-trained policy professionalism) that produced the Progressive coalition between 1890 and 1920.
• Explain how four named muckraking works (Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Tarbell, History of the Standard Oil Company; Steffens, The Shame of the Cities; Sinclair, The Jungle) translated investigative reporting into federal legislation, including the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of 1906.
• Account for the political consequences of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, including the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, state workplace-safety legislation, and the political career of Frances Perkins.
• Describe the goals, leadership, and outcomes of the women's suffrage movement from the National American Woman Suffrage Association under Carrie Chapman Catt and the more militant National Woman's Party under Alice Paul through the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.
• Identify and account for the four constitutional amendments ratified during the Progressive Era (the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments).
• Compare the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt with the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson, with attention to trust-busting, the Hepburn Act of 1906, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914.
• Explain the federal conservation movement (the Antiquities Act of 1906, the United States Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot, the National Park Service Act of 1916, John Muir and the Sierra Club, and the Hetch Hetchy controversy) and account for the way Topic 7.4's GEO half organizes these developments.
• Use Skill 2.C (Sourcing and Situation) to account for why the point of view, purpose, historical situation, and audience of a Progressive Era source matter, including the ways those features may constrain how the source can be used as evidence about reform legislation or the conservation movement.

The Progressive Era takes its name from the loose national coalition of journalists, social workers, women's-club members, university-trained experts, organized labor, and reform-minded politicians who set out between roughly 1890 and 1920 to discipline an industrial economy that the Gilded Age had built but had refused to police. Progressives never agreed on a single program. They split over race, over Prohibition, over the proper role of organized labor, and over whether the reformer's first audience should be the urban factory worker, the southern sharecropper, the middle-class consumer, or the rural farmer. What unified them was the conviction that twentieth-century industrial conditions had outgrown nineteenth-century laissez-faire and that government, at the municipal, state, or federal level, would now have to step in. The Progressive coalition broke through Republican and Democratic lines, claimed Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in turn, and produced the largest expansion of federal regulatory authority the country had yet seen (KC-7.1.II.A; Theme PCE).

Muckrakers and the moral case for reform

The reform argument reached the public through the new mass-circulation magazines and a generation of investigative journalists Theodore Roosevelt himself nicknamed muckrakers in a 1906 speech. Four works are most often tested. Jacob Riis opened the genre with How the Other Half Lives in 1890, a photo essay on tenement conditions on the Lower East Side of New York that helped produce the city's first housing-reform laws. Ida Tarbell serialized her History of the Standard Oil Company in McClure's Magazine from 1902 through 1904, documenting John D. Rockefeller's predatory pricing and railway-rebate tactics in granular detail and supplying the public with the case that would underpin the 1911 Supreme Court decision dissolving Standard Oil. Lincoln Steffens published The Shame of the Cities in 1904, a study of the alliances between machine politicians and corporate franchise holders in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in 1906, a novel set among Lithuanian immigrant workers in the Chicago meatpacking houses; Sinclair had aimed at the labor question, but the public reaction targeted the product, and within six months Theodore Roosevelt had signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act on the same day in June 1906 (KC-7.1.II.A).

Settlement houses, women's clubs, and the moral economy of urban reform

Reform also moved through institutions outside electoral politics. Jane Addams opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889 in a former mansion on the city's Near West Side; over the next thirty years it served as a kindergarten, a public bath, a labor exchange, an immigrant-aid bureau, and a base for the social investigation work of Florence Kelley, the future architect of the National Consumers' League and the Children's Bureau. By 1910 some four hundred settlement houses were operating in American cities, and their staff supplied the data that pressed state legislatures into the first child-labor laws, the first maximum-hour laws for women workers, and the first juvenile courts. The women's-club movement carried the same agenda into rural and small-town America. The General Federation of Women's Clubs, founded in 1890, claimed roughly two million members by 1920 and organized at the national level for pure-food legislation, public-library construction, and child-protection laws. The 1908 Supreme Court decision Muller v. Oregon, which upheld a state law limiting laundry workdays for women to ten hours and which Louis Brandeis defended with a brief built on the social science of the women's-club and settlement-house movement, provided the constitutional opening on which much subsequent state-level workplace regulation rested (KC-7.1.II.B).

Triangle Shirtwaist and the rise of state workplace regulation

The single event that did the most to weld this coalition into a political force was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911. The blaze on the upper floors of a garment factory near Washington Square killed 146 workers, most of them young women born in Italy or the Russian Empire, when locked exits and an unusable fire escape trapped them on burning floors. Frances Perkins, a thirty-year-old reformer, watched workers leap from the windows. Out of the public outrage came the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, on which Perkins served as the leading staff researcher; out of the Commission came a wave of state laws covering fire codes, building inspection, working-hour limits, and workers' compensation; out of the Commission's working coalition came the political alliance between organized labor, urban reform Democrats, and middle-class women's-club activists that would carry New York governor Alfred E. Smith and, a generation later, Franklin Roosevelt into the New Deal. Roosevelt would name Perkins his Secretary of Labor in 1933, the first woman in a presidential cabinet (KC-7.1.II.B; Theme PCE).

Women's suffrage and the Nineteenth Amendment

Women's suffrage was the longest single campaign of the Progressive Era, dating to the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 and producing the Fifteenth Amendment quarrel of 1869 between Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Frederick Douglass. By 1900 the campaign had narrowed onto the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) under Carrie Chapman Catt, a coalition built around state-by-state ballot initiatives in the western states where women had already begun voting in territorial and state elections. By 1916 Catt had developed a "Winning Plan" that paired continued state-level work with a federal-amendment push. A more militant wing led by Alice Paul broke off in 1916 to form the National Woman's Party, picketed the Wilson White House continuously through 1917, endured arrests, hunger strikes, and forced feedings, and made the suffrage demand a question of the country's wartime democratic credibility. Wilson, who had opposed federal action through 1916, endorsed the amendment in a 1918 message to Congress as a "vitally necessary war measure." The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920, when the Tennessee state legislature provided the thirty-sixth and decisive vote (KC-7.1.II.C; Theme PCE).

Four amendments to the Constitution

Few decades in American history have produced as many amendments to the Constitution as the Progressive Era, and the four amendments together rewrote the country's federal architecture.

State-level reform and the Wisconsin Idea

Federal reform was joined to a state-level laboratory. Robert La Follette, governor of Wisconsin from 1901 through 1906 and then a United States senator, paired with the University of Wisconsin to build what became known as the Wisconsin Idea: a primary system that took candidate selection out of the hands of party bosses, a state railroad commission with rate-setting authority, the first state income tax in the country, and the procedural triad of the initiative, the referendum, and the recall that gave voters direct legislative and electoral powers. State-level work mattered for two reasons. First, the federal courts before the New Deal limited what Congress could do; signature Progressive measures, including workplace safety, working-hour regulation, and pure-food laws, were first established as state law. Second, the Wisconsin model became the template for both Theodore Roosevelt's federal program after 1901 and Woodrow Wilson's after 1913 (KC-7.1.II.C).

The Square Deal: Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1909

Theodore Roosevelt entered the presidency in September 1901 after the assassination of William McKinley and named his program the Square Deal the next year, framing it as the federal government's promise of fair conditions to capital, labor, and the consumer alike. The signature Square Deal interventions came in three areas. In the regulation of corporate power, Roosevelt brought a federal antitrust suit against J. P. Morgan's Northern Securities railroad combine in 1902 and secured the Supreme Court ruling that dissolved it in 1904, establishing the federal precedent for trust-busting. In the regulation of railroads, the Hepburn Act of 1906 gave the Interstate Commerce Commission authority to set maximum railway rates and to inspect company books, plugging the loophole that the original 1887 Act had left. In the regulation of the food supply, Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act on the same day in June 1906, the public response to The Jungle. Roosevelt's labor record was less consistent, but his decision in the 1902 anthracite coal strike to invite both operators and miners to the White House and to threaten federal seizure of the mines if the operators refused arbitration is conventionally read as the first time a sitting president used federal authority on the labor side of an industrial dispute (KC-7.1.II.D; Theme PCE).

The New Freedom: Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921

Woodrow Wilson won the four-way election of 1912 against Roosevelt's Progressive Party and Taft's Republicans by running on a program he called the New Freedom, which proposed less concentrated federal regulation and more aggressive antitrust enforcement than Roosevelt's New Nationalism. Once in office Wilson pushed through three signature pieces of legislation. The Federal Reserve Act of December 1913 created the country's first central banking system since the 1830s, organizing twelve regional Federal Reserve Banks under a presidentially appointed Board of Governors and giving the federal government a tool for managing the money supply. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 strengthened the Sherman Antitrust framework, prohibited specific corporate practices including price discrimination and interlocking directorates, and exempted labor unions and farmer cooperatives from antitrust prosecution. The Federal Trade Commission Act, also of 1914, established a permanent federal regulatory agency to investigate and police unfair trade practices, providing the administrative backbone that the Sherman Act had lacked. The Underwood Tariff of 1913 lowered tariff rates and used the new income-tax authority of the Sixteenth Amendment to replace the lost revenue (KC-7.1.II.D; Theme PCE).

Conservation: the GEO half of Topic 7.4

The Geography and the Environment half of Topic 7.4 covers the federal conservation movement and the wider American argument over the public lands that the closing frontier of 1890 had left in federal hands. The political work was done largely by Theodore Roosevelt and his chief forester Gifford Pinchot, who together set aside roughly 230 million acres of public land as national forests, national wildlife refuges, and national monuments between 1901 and 1909. The legal architecture was built piece by piece: the National Forest System came under a single United States Forest Service in 1905; the Antiquities Act of June 1906 gave the president unilateral authority to designate national monuments by proclamation, an authority Roosevelt used eighteen times, including for the Grand Canyon; and the National Park Service Act of 1916 organized Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the rest of the older national parks under a single federal agency for the first time (KC-7.1.II.D; Theme GEO).

Conservation was not a single doctrine. Pinchot, a forester trained in Germany and France, defined conservation as the scientific management of natural resources for sustained yield, the Progressive ideal of efficient use under expert direction. John Muir, the Scottish-born naturalist who had founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and whose writings had helped persuade Congress to establish Yosemite as a national park in 1890, defined the goal as preservation: keeping wild places unaltered for their own sake. The split broke open after 1908 over the proposed dam at Hetch Hetchy, a glacier-cut valley inside Yosemite National Park that the city of San Francisco wanted to flood for a municipal water reservoir after the 1906 earthquake had wrecked the city's water system. Pinchot supported the dam as the highest sustained-yield use of the valley; Muir spent the last six years of his life fighting it. Congress authorized the dam in 1913 by passing the Raker Act; the reservoir was completed in 1923. The conservationists had won the legislative battle but lost the principle, and the Sierra Club's defeat at Hetch Hetchy did more than any single victory to consolidate the modern American preservation movement (KC-7.1.II.D; Theme GEO).

Limits and the unfinished business of Progressivism

The Progressive Era's reach had hard limits. Almost no Progressive at the federal level pressed for civil-rights legislation; Wilson, a Virginia-born Democrat, presided over the formal segregation of the federal civil service. Mexican American agricultural workers were largely outside the protective scope of state-level labor laws. Reservation policy under the 1887 Dawes Act continued to break up tribal landholding through allotment. The Eighteenth Amendment carried both the energy of the Progressive coalition and the cultural prejudices of the rural and small-town wing that would help split that coalition in the 1920s. Progressivism is best read not as a finished revolution but as the first sustained attempt to use the federal government as the regulator of industrial capitalism, an attempt Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal would resume after 1933 (KC-7.1.II.A through D; Themes PCE and GEO).

Topic 7.4 is a dual-theme topic, so the four excerpts below pair two PCE-side sources with two GEO-side sources. Three are public-domain texts hosted at the Library of Congress or the Avalon Project at Yale. The fourth is a public-domain photograph from the Bain News Service collection at the Library of Congress.

1. (Comparison) Compare the muckraking work of Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil with that of Upton Sinclair on the Chicago meatpacking houses. Account for why Tarbell's investigation produced an antitrust case while Sinclair's produced a regulatory statute, and what that difference reveals about how the Progressive coalition translated journalism into legislation.
2. (Causation) Trace the causal chain that runs from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, through the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, through the political career of Frances Perkins, to the New Deal of 1933. At which step in the chain do you think a different decision could have produced a different outcome, and why?
3. (Comparison) Compare Theodore Roosevelt's Square Deal with Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom on the regulation of corporate power. Account for how the Hepburn Act of 1906, the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 fit together as a single Progressive program.
4. (Continuity and Change) Assess the four constitutional amendments ratified during the Progressive Era (the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments). Which amendment had the largest long-run consequences for the relationship between the federal government and the American citizen, and on what grounds?
5. (Comparison) The Hetch Hetchy controversy is conventionally taught as a defeat for the preservation wing of the conservation movement. Compare the longer-run cultural consequences of Muir's loss at Hetch Hetchy with the longer-run consequences of Pinchot's win, and account for which side of the conservation-versus-preservation split mattered more for the two halves of Topic 7.4.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.