The American Yawp — Chapter Eighteen: The Progressive Era
Abridged for Intermediate-High Learners

By 1900, the wealth of the Gilded Age had brought terrible problems: corrupt politics, unsafe factories, dirty cities, and giant monopolies called trusts. A new generation of reformers and activists decided to fix them, giving the era its name — the Progressive Era. In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York killed 146 workers, most of them young women. The factory doors had been chained shut, and the owners were found not guilty. Across the country, workers went on strike for better pay and safer conditions.

A journalist called a muckraker exposed corruption and suffering. In 1906, Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle described the horrors of Chicago's meatpacking plants. Shocked readers demanded action, and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Religious leaders joined the cause through the social gospel movement, which taught that Christians should fight poverty and injustice.

Women's clubs gave each activist new power in public life. The Woman's Christian Temperance Union fought against alcohol, which reformers blamed for poverty and family violence. Jane Addams opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889, a settlement house offering schools, clubs, and health care to poor immigrants. Addams also fought for an eight-hour workday and limits on child labor, and she later won the Nobel Peace Prize. The greatest goal was women's suffrage — the right to vote. Alice Paul led a militant wing of the movement whose followers marched, picketed the White House, and went to jail. In 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment finally gave American women the vote.

Progressive presidents also attacked the trusts. A trust was a monopoly — one company or group controlling a whole industry. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and Andrew Carnegie's steel companies crushed competitors and bribed politicians. President Theodore Roosevelt, who took office in 1901, won fame as a "trustbuster." His government broke up the Northern Securities railroad trust in 1904. Roosevelt believed some trusts were good and some were bad, so he preferred regulation to breaking companies apart. His successor, William Howard Taft, broke up even more trusts through the courts. In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson signed the stronger Clayton Anti-Trust Act.

Progressives also fought to protect nature, but they disagreed about how. John Muir believed in preservation: protecting beautiful wild places for their own sake. Conservationists like Gifford Pinchot wanted to use natural resources wisely for the greatest number of people. The two sides clashed over a dam in California's Hetch Hetchy Valley. Conservation won, and the valley was flooded to supply San Francisco with water. Meanwhile, hunters drove the passenger pigeon to extinction, and women in the Audubon Society helped win new laws protecting wildlife.

The Progressive Era brought little progress for Black Americans — in many ways, life grew worse. Southern states wrote new constitutions that used poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses for the disenfranchisement of Black voters. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" segregation was legal. Many middle-class Black Americans believed in racial uplift — improving their communities through education. But leaders disagreed about strategy. Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute, urged Black Americans to build economic skills and accept segregation for now, a position his critics called accommodationist. W. E. B. Du Bois, the first Black American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, demanded full and immediate equality. Du Bois helped found the NAACP in 1909 and edited its magazine, The Crisis.

Progressive reform did not solve every problem, but it changed the relationship between Americans and their government. New laws protected workers, consumers, and nature, and women won the vote. When World War I pulled the nation's attention overseas, the Progressive Era came to an end.