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The American Yawp, Volume 2, edited by Joseph Locke and Ben Wright, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the original free This shelf’s study material is shared under the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Chapter 6 · pp. 166–200
The Progressive Era was a time of reform in the United States, when many groups tried to fix the problems caused by rapid industrial growth. This chapter looks at the workers, writers, ministers, women's groups, and Black activists who pushed for change. It also covers the fight over big business and monopolies, early environmental policy, and the clash between reform and racial discrimination in the South.
The Progressive Era was a period of reform. It takes its name from the many "progressive" movements that tried to repair the problems of industrial America. These movements did not share one program. Some reformers wanted cleaner politics. Black Americans kept up their struggle for civil rights. Women demanded the vote and a more equal role in society. Workers wanted higher pay, safer workplaces, and union recognition. Reform was the key word of the age, and all these efforts together gave the era its name. (p. 167)
The Gilded Age left many problems behind. A few people held huge fortunes while many others lived in deep poverty. Cities were crowded and filthy. Capital and labor were nearly at open war. Food was produced in unsanitary ways, immigration surged, and the environment was being damaged. The novelist Jack London wrote in 1908 that society was changing at a frightening speed. (pp. 166–167)
Farmers and workers had fought business owners and conservative politicians for decades. Near the end of the 1800s, a new group joined them: middle-class Americans. They entered public life to bring an industrial order that seemed out of control under some regulation. Unsafe food and unsafe factories were two things that convinced them the nation needed it. (p. 167)
The clearest example of unsafe industry was the 1911 fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan. Managers had chained the doors shut to stop workers from taking unauthorized breaks. The fire ladder on the building collapsed at once. Many workers, mostly young women, jumped from the ten-story building. The fire killed 146 people and injured 71. (p. 167)
The disaster was not a complete surprise. A year earlier the same workers had gone on strike for union recognition, higher pay, and safer conditions. The owners called in the police to break up the strike instead of paying for a workable fire escape and unlocked doors. Afterward, a reporter described the dead bodies as the answer to the strike demands. Organizer Rose Schneiderman said that workers' lives were cheap and property was treated as sacred. (pp. 167–168)
The owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, were tried for manslaughter. A jury acquitted them after less than two hours. This fit a pattern: owners rarely faced punishment when workers died in dangerous conditions. As tragedies piled up and inequality grew, it became harder to defend the new industrial order, and calls for reform grew louder. (p. 168)
Events like the fire convinced many people that reform was needed. But activists still had to build a lasting commitment to political action and to government involvement in the economy. Politicians, journalists, novelists, and religious leaders all helped. Reformers used books and mass-circulation magazines to show the public how the poor lived and how widespread corruption was. (p. 168)
Journalists who exposed business abuses, poverty, and political corruption were called "muckrakers," a label from Theodore Roosevelt. Magazines such as McClure's printed their investigations. Ray Stannard Baker, for example, wrote reports on US Steel. Baker later explained why these articles had such force. For years the public had heard charges of corruption from soapbox speakers and campaigns. People suspected the charges were true, but little was proven. Muckrakers supplied documented evidence, which turned suspicion into demands for change. (p. 169)
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906). Sinclair was a socialist. He told the story of a Lithuanian immigrant family working in Chicago's stockyards. He wanted to expose how workers were exploited in meatpacking and to win support for socialism. Readers, however, were struck by his description of how meat was produced. Slaughterhouses were hidden from city consumers, which had allowed filthy and unsafe conditions. The public outcry led Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. So a book meant to help workers ended up producing food safety laws. (pp. 169–170)
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888). This was one of the most popular novels of the century. A man falls asleep in Boston in 1887 and wakes in the year 2000. He finds a cooperative utopia in which poverty, disease, and competition have disappeared. The book inspired hundreds of Bellamy clubs. It also made many readers, especially young ones, doubt the realities of nineteenth-century life and turn toward reform. (p. 170)
Charles Sheldon's In His Steps (1896). Sheldon was a Congregational minister in Topeka, Kansas. His novel follows a pastor, Henry Maxwell. An unemployed migrant criticizes Maxwell's congregation for ignoring the poor. Moved by this, Maxwell asks his listeners to imagine how society and even politics would change if every Christian did what Jesus would do. The novel became a bestseller. Part of its success came from its link to a growing religious movement, the social gospel. (pp. 170–171)
The social gospel was a Protestant movement that began near the end of the 1800s. Its core claim was that Christians should care about saving society, not only saving individual souls. Earlier, many believers focused on their own families and congregations. Social gospel supporters wanted them to look outward. They urged Christians to question unfair social, political, and economic arrangements and to help people who had less. (p. 171)
The movement was a reaction to the industrial revolution. Factories drew large numbers of people into cities, and crowding brought poverty and other problems. Most social gospelers wanted Americans to face the sins of their society. Some went further and supported a form of Christian socialism. (p. 171)
Walter Rauschenbusch was one of its best-known leaders. He graduated from seminary in 1886 and became pastor of a German Baptist church in Hell's Kitchen, New York City. There he saw heavy crime and deep poverty that the city's political leaders were not handling. He worked with other reformers to help elect a new mayor. He also decided that Christian thinking itself had to change so that it could deal with social problems. (p. 171)
His answer was to bring back Jesus's phrase "the Kingdom of God." Rauschenbusch said it covered all of life, so every part of society was a proper concern for a Christian. He thought every believer should ask what he or she could do to build the kingdom on Earth. This applied to a business owner, a politician, or a parent at home. He took the same view as the hero of Charles Sheldon's novel, who asks what Jesus would do. (p. 171)
Rauschenbusch did not throw out the older message of personal salvation. He called the social gospel that message "enlarged and intensified." He argued that the individual-centered gospel had taught people to see sin in each human heart. But it had missed the sinfulness of the social order, such as oppression and extortion built into lasting institutions. He wanted people to repent of their shared, collective sins. (p. 171)
Limits and legacy. The movement had serious blind spots. Its leaders were mostly men, and they often ignored women's problems. Most did not support women's suffrage. Many said little about the suffering of African Americans, Native Americans, and other oppressed groups. Even so, the writings of Rauschenbusch and others strongly influenced the twentieth century. First, they fueled progressive reform. Later, they inspired activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. His "beloved community" was much like Rauschenbusch's "Kingdom of God." (p. 172)
Reform gave women new ways to take part in public life and gave fresh energy to the long fight for the vote. Much of that energy came from women's clubs, social groups with many different purposes. Some focused on learning, and others on charity. Over time, many looked beyond self-improvement to their communities and to women's place in politics. (pp. 172–173)
In the 1890s, clubs joined into national federations. Two were especially important for suffrage and women's rights:
Both were led mostly by educated, upper-middle-class women from the North. Few clubs were biracial. Growing prejudice led many white activists to shut Black women out completely. (p. 173)
Black women therefore built their own strong organizations. These groups aimed for racial uplift and civil rights for all Black Americans, and for equal rights for all women. Mary Jane Richardson Jones organized Black women in Chicago around settlement work, moral uplift, and suffrage. Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, who had worked for abolition and suffrage, organized the First National Conference of the Colored Women of America in Boston in 1895. A year later, Mary Church Terrell and others formed the National Association of Colored Women. These service-minded networks helped women win the vote. They also fought discrimination and supported Black communities nationwide. (p. 173)
Other women worked through churches and moral reform groups. Some acted as moral vigilantes. Carrie Nation believed she was doing God's will, and she won headlines for wrecking saloons. On December 27, 1900, in Wichita, Kansas, she used a hatchet to smash bottles and bars at the Carey Hotel. She was charged with $3,000 in damage and spent a month in jail. The charges were then dismissed. Her "hatchetation" brought national attention, and she attacked two more Wichita bars within days. (p. 173)
Few women copied her. Most worked in respected organizations. Nation had started a chapter of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), yet the group's leaders called her "unwomanly and unchristian." (p. 174)
The WCTU began in 1874 as a small group against drunkenness. From 1879 to 1898, Frances Willard turned it into a national political organization. She adopted a "do everything" policy, which welcomed any reasonable reform that would improve social welfare and women's rights. Members worked on these goals:
Still, temperance, and later total prohibition of alcohol, stayed at the center. (p. 174) By the 1890s the WCTU was the largest women's organization in America, and it had endorsed suffrage. (p. 177)
Why alcohol was the target. Reformers blamed drink for domestic abuse, poverty, crime, and disease. The WCTU called alcohol a "home wrecker." In 1912 an Anti-Saloon League publication used charts to show alcohol use rising alongside divorce. Reformers expected that ending "strong drink" would reduce the need for prisons and asylums, protect women and children, and create a fairer society. (p. 174)
There was a harmful side. Reformers tied alcohol to cities and immigrants, so the crusade also painted immigrants, Catholics, and the working class as problems. A cause meant to protect families thus fed prejudice against whole groups. (p. 174)
A settlement house was a community center in a poor neighborhood. Reformers, often educated middle- or upper-class women, moved in and lived there. They offered services to their neighbors. The idea came from England. Jane Addams toured Europe and was drawn to English settlements, which were an early form of social work. After she visited Toynbee Hall in London in 1887, she decided to build something similar at home (p. 174).
In 1889 Addams and her companion Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago. Residents ran a nursery and a kindergarten. They taught classes for parents, led clubs for children, and organized social and cultural events (p. 175). Addams described the settlement as an experiment. Its aim was to ease the problems of big-city life, and it rested on the idea that all people share a common humanity (p. 175).
Hundreds of settlements appeared across the country, and many served particular immigrant or minority groups. Three examples:
Helping neighbors made residents ask why so many people were poor. Florence Kelley lived at Hull House from 1891 to 1899 and pushed Addams to move into social reform. Residents surveyed the neighborhood and gathered statistics on poverty, disease, and living conditions. They also exposed sweatshops, where workers labored long hours in poor conditions for low pay. Kelley called the effects of urban poverty and industrialization a "social crime" (p. 175).
Gathering facts led to action. Kelley and Addams petitioned lawmakers for anti-sweatshop laws that would cap work for women and children at eight hours a day. Addams also began pressuring politicians directly (p. 175).
Addams was cautious, though. She called labor organizing a "social obligation," but she warned unions against a "constant temptation towards class warfare." She hoped rich and poor, and bosses and workers, could cooperate. Like many reformers, she favored this approach even when it was not clear that cooperation was realistic (p. 175).
Addams became a celebrity. In 1912 she seconded Theodore Roosevelt's nomination as the Progressive Party's presidential candidate. This made her the first woman to give a nominating speech at a major party convention. Her work for reform and women's rights kept her in the headlines (pp. 175–176).
Her interests later widened to peace. She worked with the Anti-Imperialist League during the Spanish-American War. She came to see militarism as a drain on money that could pay for social reform. Her 1907 book Newer Ideals of Peace became a philosophical foundation of pacifism for many readers. She opposed US entry into World War I and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931 (p. 176).
Women's suffrage was the clearest sign that women had entered public life. Progress in the late 1800s was slow but real. The first big wins came in the West, where suffragists mobilized large numbers of women and male politicians were open to new kinds of government. By 1912, nine western states had amended their constitutions to allow women to vote (p. 176).
Different groups wanted the vote for different reasons:
In 1890 two suffrage groups merged into the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Susan B. Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt led it, and it gave the national movement new energy. Activists still disagreed. Some wanted moderate persuasion and "respectability." Others wanted direct action for a national amendment (p. 177).
On March 3, 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns led an eight-thousand-person parade in Washington, D.C. Paul had learned from British suffragists that processions won publicity. Marchers walked in groups by state, occupation, or organization and demanded a federal amendment. NAWSA leaders tried to segregate Black marchers. Ida B. Wells refused and joined her Illinois delegation. About forty Black women marched with state or professional groups (p. 177).
Hecklers attacked the marchers. When police could not control the crowd, the army cavalry cleared a path. The parade still worked: Congress began to consider an amendment (pp. 177–178).
Before World War I, two approaches ran side by side. NAWSA used a dual strategy, working for state voting laws and for ratification of a federal amendment. Paul's more militant National Woman's Party staged marches and protests that mobilized thousands of women. Together, the two pressed officials from different directions (p. 178).
From January 1917 the National Woman's Party's "Silent Sentinels" picketed the White House. More than 150 women were arrested and jailed. Some went on hunger strikes, and guards force-fed them. On November 14, 1917, the "Night of Terror," guards beat suffragists held at the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia. In March 1918 the D.C. Court of Appeals ruled the protests legal and ordered the jailed women released (p. 178).
State victories and protest pressure moved federal leaders. Wilson announced his support for the amendment in January 1918. Congress passed what became the Nineteenth Amendment the following summer. Ratification was completed in August 1920, and women's suffrage became law (pp. 178–179).
Afterward, women from all walks of life mobilized to vote. Some were driven by hope, others by worry about the future. The country had become more industrial and more urban than ever, and city life was starting to produce a new American culture (p. 179).
A trust was a monopoly or cartel run by large corporations. Through agreements (legal or not) or by merging, one entity gained exclusive control over a product or a whole industry (p. 179). Some monopolies were accepted. The Constitution protects them for intellectual property such as patents and copyrights. But one company controlling an entire national market was new, and many Americans found it unsettling (p. 179).
The writer Herbert Croly spoke for many reformers. He argued that millionaires and trusts had taken economic opportunities that once belonged to ordinary people. Extreme wealth inequality, in this view, weakened democracy (p. 179).
Why trusts grew. The Second Industrial Revolution of the 1870s and 1880s rested on several things: natural resources, immigrant labor, growing capital, new kinds of legal business entities, new ways of producing goods, and a national market. Supporters said this growth came from the federal government's laissez-faire (
Progressive environmentalism was not only about parks and forests. Many reformers who worked on urban poverty were also doing environmental work, because they cared about how people's surroundings affected their health.
The Progressive Era did not help African Americans in the South. Southern elections were full of fraud, intimidation, and race-baiting, and lynching was common. Remaining Black voters threatened Democratic control, so white southern leaders turned to two measures they called reforms: disenfranchisement (taking away the vote) and segregation (legal separation of the races). They claimed disenfranchisement would purify elections, just as northern reformers aimed to clean up city machines, and that segregation would prevent racial conflict. Progressive Democrats and former Populists were among the strongest supporters. Leaders in the North and South even spoke of reuniting the nation on white supremacy, and northerners began to see the South as a model for controlling nonwhite people. (pp. 186–187)
The Mississippi plan (1890). The Fifteenth Amendment forbade denying the vote because of race, so Mississippi needed rules that looked colorblind. Its new constitution used:
Local registrars judged who passed, so they could admit or reject anyone. The fight moved from the ballot box, where the public watched, to the registrar's office, where denial did not look like fraud. (pp. 187–188)
Spread of the system. Between 1895 and 1908 the other southern states adopted similar constitutions. Six added grandfather clauses, which gave the vote to men whose grandfathers could vote in 1867. The Supreme Court struck these down in 1915. Every state also created an all-white Democratic primary, which mattered because the Democratic primary decided most elections. The results were dramatic. In 1900 Alabama had only 3,742 Black men registered out of 121,159 literate ones. Louisiana's Black voters dropped from 130,000 in 1896 to 5,320 in 1900. Some poor whites also lost the vote, but many white leaders accepted that cost. (p. 188)
Segregation was mainly a modern, urban system. In the countryside, white supremacy rested on personal ties, the threat of violence, the crop lien, and convict leasing, so separation was not needed. Cities were different. Railroads and urban growth gave Black southerners more anonymity and freedom, and a Black middle class appeared. White southerners answered by separating the races in restaurants, theaters, schools, train cars, and hospitals, building white superiority into public space. (pp. 188–189)
The Supreme Court gave this system legal cover:
Racial uplift was a strategy of middle-class Black Americans, working through clubs, churches, and societies. They stressed education, property ownership, tidiness, and respectability to prove they deserved white respect. The goal was to show worthiness, not to demand particular rights. Black Baptist women ran Negro Doll Clubs and opened the National Negro Doll Company (1908) to build race pride in children. A drawback was that uplift often separated reformers from working-class Black people. (p. 189)
Oscar Micheaux (born 1884) wrote seven novels and made forty-five films showing Black characters in dignified roles. His 1920 film Within Our Gates answered The Birth of a Nation. It condemned lynching, sexual assault against Black women, and sharecropping poverty. (pp. 189–190)
Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856 and founded the Tuskegee Institute. He promoted industrial education and economic self-reliance, believing job skills would bring independence and pride even under Jim Crow. In his 1895 Atlanta Compromise speech he said the races could be "as separate as the fingers" yet united like a hand. Critics called him an accommodationist, though he secretly supported legal and economic efforts for justice. (pp. 191, 193)
W.E.B. Du Bois, born free in Massachusetts in 1868, became in 1895 the first Black American with a Harvard Ph.D. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he attacked Washington's approach. He helped found the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, and edited the NAACP's magazine The Crisis from 1909 to 1934. He urged Black Americans to compromise on nothing: protest, sue, and use research to expose discrimination. (pp. 193, 195)
In short, Washington favored gradual change and self-sufficiency, while Du Bois demanded immediate civil rights. Their upbringings shaped these views, yet both wanted better lives for African Americans, shared a lectern in 1907, and pushed the nation toward its democratic ideals. (pp. 195–196)
