Progressivism Essay

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Progressivism is a time of change, a time for reform, that has helped shape America to be the nation it is today. Progressivism is defined as “the political orientation of those who favor progress toward better conditions in government and society (WordNet Search).” Between this era, and World War One, a lot of time and effort when into what the influences the country went under between the power of Woodrow Wilson and the society along with Europe, Russia, France, and everyone else involved in this war. The progressive era was a thirty year span from 1890s until the 1920s. People saw that there was many horrible things occurring in society and the government and they wanted these things to be fixed. Some examples of these things are living conditions, work conditions, and the wrong that the government was doing. Reformers wanted to solve issues with efficiency, nonpartisanship, morality, democratization, education, and expertise. People do not know exactly where these progressives came from, but it was more or less a group effort that grew and grew with the ideas of bettering the country as a whole, even if some of these choices and solutions were not that great. Yes, the motives for the reform were good but sometimes included horrible actions which excluded people or discriminated others. The Progressive Era was important because it cleared up a lot of issues that the Nation was facing at the time. It did things such as, establish labor laws. It stopped child labor and it also cut back on the time that people should work daily. It went down to eight hours a day rather than sixteen hour days of hard manual labor. The era also helped with women's rights. These included voting rights and equality rights; to be treated more equally... ... middle of paper ... ...n the war. “He felt that the rich abused the poor and that they should help them; he believed that anybody making a profit was abusing everybody else; he believed that everybody was equal; he wanted a government that truly represented the people; he wanted the overthrow of the Russian government as it supported a system that kept the huge majority of Russian people in misery” ("Vladimir Lenin") He believed that his own kind of government in mind called Leninism which was his own rendition of Marxism. It is a foundation of socialism and communism mixed together. Imperialism is the highest stage of Capitalism. Communism can come only from the workers in the Communist party. Lenin was against the war because he thought that the peasants and workers were fighting the battle of the bourgeoisie. This is how he believed we should live in a modern industrial society.

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