The Progressives

By 1900 industrial capitalism had produced filthy cities, dangerous workplaces, adulterated food, and city and state governments often run by political machines answering to corporations, not voters. The urban middle class, reading newspapers and magazines, decided unregulated markets and unaccountable politicians could not be trusted to fix this on their own. Government, they concluded, needed to step in as referee.

One path ran through journalism. Muckrakers published detailed, documented exposes of specific abuses: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle described filth in meatpacking plants. Public disgust created political pressure that pushed Congress to act, producing the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. This expose-to-outrage-to-statute pattern repeated across child labor, tenement housing, and municipal corruption. A second path attacked the political process itself. States adopted the initiative, referendum, and recall so voters could propose laws, approve or reject them directly, and remove corrupt officials, bypassing machines and unresponsive legislatures.

A third path concerned corporate power, and here Progressives split. Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism accepted that big business and trusts were permanent features of a modern economy; the answer was strong federal regulation to distinguish good trusts from bad ones. Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom wanted to break up concentrated economic power through antitrust law and restore small-scale competition. Because Progressives disagreed on trusts, tariffs, race, and women's suffrage, and included businessmen, social workers, farmers, and politicians of both parties, Progressivism was never one movement with one platform or membership.