Overview of the Progressive Era
The 20th Century
Many far-reaching economic and social changes transformed American
society in the 20th century, including innovations in science and technology,
economic productivity, mass communication and mass entertainment,
health and living standards, the role of government, gender roles, and
conceptions of freedom.
The Progressive Era
Progressivism is an umbrella label for a wide range of economic, political,
social, and moral reforms. These included efforts to outlaw the sale of
alcohol; regulate child labor and sweatshops; scientifically manage natural
resources; insure pure and wholesome water and milk; Americanize
immigrants or restrict immigration altogether; and bust or regulate trusts.
Drawing support from the urban, college-educated middle class, Progressive
reformers sought to eliminate corruption in government, regulate business
practices, address health hazards, and improve working conditions. They
also fought to give the public more direct control over government through
direct primaries to nominate candidates for public office, direct election of
senators, the initiative, referendum, and recall, and women's suffrage.
By the beginning of the 20th century, muckraking journalists were calling
attention to the exploitation of child labor, corruption in city governments,
the horror of lynching, and the ruthless business practices employed by
businessmen, like John D. Rockefeller. At the local level, many Progressives
sought to suppress red-light districts, expand high schools, construct
playgrounds, and replace corrupt urban political machines with more
efficient systems of municipal government. At the state level, Progressives
enacted minimum wage laws for women workers, instituted industrial
accident insurance, restricted child labor, and improved factory regulation.
At the national level, Congress passed laws establishing federal regulation
of the meat-packing, drug, and railroad industries, and strengthened anti-
trust laws. It also lowered the tariff, established federal control over the
banking system, and enacted legislation to improve working conditions.
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.
Along the Color Line
The period between the late 19th and early 20th centuries represented the
nadir of American race relations. Nine-tenths of African Americans lived in
the South, and most supported themselves as tenant farmers or
sharecroppers. Most southern and border states instituted a legal system of
segregation, relegating African Americans to separate schools and other
public accommodations. Under the Mississippi Plan, which involved the use
of poll taxes and literacy tests, African Americans were deprived of the vote.
The Supreme Court stripped the 14th and 15th Amendments of their
meaning, especially in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared
that “separate but equal” facilities were permissible under the 14th
Amendment. Each year approximately a hundred African Americans were
lynched.
Booker T. Washington, the most prominent black leader, argued that African
Americans should make themselves economically indispensable to southern
whites, cooperate with whites, and accommodate themselves to white
supremacy. But other figures adopted a more activist stance, such as the
anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. DuBois, a founder of the
NAACP, who demanded an end to caste distinctions based on race.
A tight labor market during World War I triggered the “Great Migration” of
African Americans to the North, which continued into the 1920s. But the
movement of blacks out of the South was met by racial violence in Chicago,
East St. Louis, Houston, Tulsa, and other cities.
The Great Migration was accompanied by new efforts at black political and
economic organization and cultural expression. Marcus Garvey's Universal
Negro Improvement Association emphasized racial pride and economic self-
help, and the Harlem Renaissance launched a literary and artistic
movement.
The Struggle for Women's Suffrage
Among the most radical of all struggles in American history is the on-going
struggle of women for full equality. The ideals of the American Revolution
raised women's expectations, inspired some of the first explicit demands for
equality, and witnessed the establishment of female academies to improve
women's education. By the early 19th century, American women had the
highest female literacy rate in the world.
As American states widened suffrage to include virtually all white males,
however, they began denying the vote to free blacks and, in New Jersey, to
women, who had briefly won this privilege following the Revolution. In the
1820s and for decades to come, married women could not own property,
make contracts, bring suits, or sit on juries. They could be legally beaten by
their husbands and were required to submit to their husbands' sexual
demands.
During the early 19th century, however, a growing number of women
became convinced that they had a special mission and a responsibility to
purify and reform American society. Women were at the forefront of efforts
to establish public schools, abolish slavery, and curb drinking. But faced
with discrimination within the anti-slavery movement, Elizabeth Cady
Stanton and others organized the first Women's Rights Convention in
Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848.
The quest for full equality involved not only the struggle for the vote, but
for divorce, access to higher education, the professions, and other
occupations, as well as birth control and abortion. Women have had to
overcome laws and customs that discriminated on the basis of sex in order
to overcome the oldest form of exploitation and subordination.
