The Successes and Failures of the Progressive Era

The Progressive Era was a time of great reforms in government and in factories. There were a few different forms of Progressivism: the muckrakers (from a character in John Bunyan's book Pilgrim's Progress) were the type of Progressives who exposed corruption. For example, Collier's and McClure's journalists, some of them secretly went as far as moving into the slums to get the full sense of what life was like for the downtrodden, and shed light on what the slumlords were allowing to happen in their buildings. Women's Suffragists were progressive, as well, they picketed, wrote letters, to officials at all levels of government, staged women's suffrage parades, sent out pamphlets, and made speeches to anyone who would listen, and eventually, in halls of government, in from of Congress. One other type of progressive was those who were for the temperance movement (their goal was to ban alcohol, they saw it as corrupting society). Settlement house workers were progressives, too, their cause fought to improve immigrant relations in the United States. Progressives sought to change society, for the better, through their activism. Progressives hoped for stronger local governments at the level of the American people. Theodore Roosevelt's “Who is a Progressive” speech he stated that “A well-meaning man may vaguely think of himself as a Progressive without having even the faintest conception of what a Progressive is" (Bowels, 2011). Additionally, Roosevelt would consider a person progressive if he or she had sympathy for the common man and was a forward-thinker.

The Populists (I suppose could be considered a sub-sect of progressives), were people who were for earnings taxes for farmers, instead of tariffs. They were for election ...

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...nment and in reducing unfair business practices). Likewise, we still support the most of the amendments (with the exception of the Eighteenth Amendment, which was later revised by the Twenty-first Amendment) that were brought about through progressivism (the Fifteenth Amendment-voting rights for every race, the Sixteenth Amendment-income tax, the Seventeenth Amendment-difining how Senators were elected, and the Nineteenth Amendment-women's right to vote). Great improvements to health and sanitation, with the “Pure Food and Drug Act” and the founding of the NAACP, (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) were products of “the people's” involvement in daily life, and politics (2002, The Progressive Era). These accomplishments prove to us that if enough people care enough, and take on an active role in society, almost anything is possible.