M03 Overview
The Progressive Era (1890-1920)
Figure 1. The Progressive Era is characterized by petitions for social and economic change. This image shows strikers involved with the New York shirtwaist strike of 1909, in which more than 20,000 garment workers, most between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five, protested their long hours and low wages, demanding a pay raise, better hours, and safer working conditions.
In this module, students will examine the progressive era, from its origins in the muckraker movement to Wilson’s New Freedom. While workers adjusted to harsh working conditions by organizing unions, reformers targeted social ills in cities and states. President Theodore Roosevelt symbolized the reform energies of the era, including its limitations in racial justice. The work of progressive reformers is also shown at the three political levels of American society—cities, states, and the national government—where the differences between the Square Deal of Theodore Roosevelt and the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson are described. The Progressive Era is also regarded as one of most confusing in U.S. history, but also one of the most exciting eras of experimentation in local and federal government.
Imagine this: It’s a Wednesday afternoon. You just finished your last class of the day and are heading off to your retail job, where you get paid $10 an hour to stock shelves and assist customers. During today’s shift, you had some safety modules to complete, which focused on preventing injuries at work and using proper safety materials. After work, you head home and cook up some hotdogs for a late-night dinner.
This may seem like a normal Wednesday evening, but ask yourself these questions:
- Why is your employer paying you $10 an hour instead of $3? Why is your employer concerned about workplace safety?
- Do you really know what’s in your hotdog? How do you know it’s safe to eat?
These are questions that you probably normally don’t think about, but assurances such as minimum wage, workplace safety, and ensuring that foods are safe to eat are a result of government intervention in the years during and following the Progressive Era.
Simply stated, the reforms and movements of the Progressive Era directly affect your life in the present day. “Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,” Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel, his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States. He wrote, “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.”
The many problems associated with the Gilded Age—the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism—confronted Americans. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle-class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age.
Widespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms. Americans had many different ideas about how the country’s development should be managed and whose interests required the greatest protection. Reformers sought to clean up politics; Black Americans continued their long struggle for civil rights; women demanded the vote with greater intensity while also demanding a more equal role in society at large; and workers demanded higher wages, safer workplaces, and the union recognition that would guarantee these rights. Whatever their goals, reform became the word of the age, and the sum of their efforts, whatever their ultimate impact or original intentions, gave the era its name.
America in World War I (1914-1919)
Figure 2. Return of the Useless (1918), by George Bellows, is an example of a kind of artistic imagery used to galvanize reluctant Americans into joining World War I. The scene shows German soldiers unloading and mistreating imprisoned civilians after their return home to Belgium from German forced-labor camps.
On the eve of World War I, the U.S. government under President Woodrow Wilson opposed any entanglement in international military conflicts. But as the war engulfed Europe and the belligerents’ total war strategies targeted commerce and travel across the Atlantic, as well as civilian lives, it became clear that the United States would not be able to maintain its position of neutrality. Still, the American public was of mixed opinion; many resisted the idea of American intervention and American lives lost, no matter how bad the circumstances. Others believed that it was America’s duty to intervene when the ideals of democracy and freedom were at risk. As tensions between America’s traditional European allies and the Central Powers ramped up, Wilson and his government had a difficult choice to make: push America into a foreign war in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” or save American lives and money by staying out of it.
In 1918, artist George Bellows created a series of paintings intended to strengthen public support for the war effort. His paintings depicted German war atrocities in explicit and expertly captured detail, from children run through with bayonets to torturers happily resting while their victims suffered. The image above, entitled Return of the Useless, shows Germans unloading sick or disabled labor camp prisoners from a boxcar. These paintings, while not regarded as Bellows’ most important artistic work, were typical for anti-German propaganda at the time. The U.S. government sponsored much of this propaganda out of concern that many American immigrants sympathized with the Central Powers and would not support the U.S. war effort. These types of home-front conflicts brought the European war back to the U.S. and left deep marks on American society which we can still see today.
This module also covers the eruption of World War I, U.S. efforts to remain neutral, and the impact of the war on the United States, both domestically and internationally. The Great War served to increase U.S. involvement in international affairs while enlarging the scope of the federal government in the daily lives of the American people. The global conflict also provided new opportunities for achieving greater economic, social, and political rights for women and ethnic minorities. The war years also represented the climax of the progressive movement. Once war was declared, the government carried on a gigantic propaganda campaign to persuade Americans of the war’s noble purpose. These overzealous patriotic efforts led to violations of civil rights and anti-foreign crusades at home.
When you are ready to get started on this module, click the button below.