The Progressive Era: A History from Beginning to End

by Hourly History

Progressive Era * * *Download for FREE on Kindle Unlimited + Free BONUS Inside!* * * Read On Your Computer, MAC, Smartphone, Kindle Reader, iPad, or Tablet. The Progressive Era was the period of American history between the 1890s and 1920s. It was movement dedicated to political and social reform largely driven by the middle class. In a world that was dominated by wealthy industrialists and threatened by radical ideas of laborers, the middle class strived for order. Inside you will read about... ✓ Stirred to Action ✓ Women’s Suffrage ✓ Temperance and Anti-Alcohol Campaigns ✓ The Dark Side of Forced Sterilizations and Eugenics ✓ The African-American Experience ✓ Progressive Presidents and the Start of WWI And much more! Women played a prominent role in the movement. Their main objective was gaining the right to vote, but they also worked tirelessly on temperance, urban reform, and other social reforms. Women gained a strong influence even before they achieved suffrage. Progressivism was dominated by optimism for the future and the ability of civilization to find solutions to age-old problems. Those in the movement had an overriding faith particularly in Western civilization and its apparent greatness. The end of the era embodied a severe questioning of that faith. Ultimately, the Progressive Era left a legacy of hope, but also a warning against hubris.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Historical, American History

132 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 19, 2018

About the author

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Reviews

[Dr.J.G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author defines the term and describes the era well in the introduction, and while author ends it with saying that it ended suddenly with WWI, explaining why, one realises that that amounted to, not progress ending, but people as a whole losing faith in it and enthusiasm for it, although much wrong did come about over the decades in name of progress, chiefly because it was easier to let it be rather than insist on right and values.

A prime example is situation of education in US.
***


"The first trait that was shared by all progressives was anger. The people who were involved with progressive causes were stirred to anger over the excesses of industrial capitalism and urban growth. They were, however, optimistic about the future. With their righteous anger as fuel, progressives believed true American ideals would win the day and society would improve. They were not revolutionaries. They held deep convictions about the exceptionalism of the American Republic. Even though they saw great problems in need of fixing, the United States was still a beacon to the rest of the world. Reform was the watchword, not revolution."

So far, it seems a tenable hypothesis, even if not quite obvious. But next author says something not necessarily a must for social reform.

"Second, progressives rejected individualism, both as expressed by the “great man” idea and the notion that one had to pull oneself up by the bootstraps. Instead, they believed in social cohesion and community—the idea that what drew Americans, from its oldest citizens to its newest arrivals, together was in greater supply than what drove people apart. By understanding the commonality of Americanism, society could reform and improve."

It's not necessary that a social reform concept must begin with rejection of individualistic efforts and progress. Obviously individuals would find it difficult to survive if left in middle of a forest at birth, and equally obviously, all help by an excellent social structure is of little use if someone is determined to do nothing. Individuals and society have to function together, while being neither coercive nor its extreme opposite.
***

Next bit is just as surprising.

"Third, because of this belief in social cohesion and that commonality formed the bonds that created a better, more just society, any threat to such bonds was seen as a threat to society as a whole. For many of the middle-class Protestant progressives, this meant many of the institutions that were part of the immigrant’s experience were detrimental to a peaceful society. Machine politics, inner-city slums, labor unions, saloons, and Catholicism struck many progressives as anti-American."

One can see some of it, such as progressive thinkers would look at church of Rome askance, latter having opposed freedom of thought and fought it with inquisition for centuries - with burning dissenters at stake.

Similarly slums and saloons are obviously not conducive to good social structure.

But labour unions?

"Fourth, progressives believed in action. It wasn’t enough to be an observer or remote social critic. Activism was needed to combat society’s problems. Furthermore, in a radical shift, progressives believed in a stronger government to deal with economic and social problems. Previously, the ideal of laissez-faire (letting people do as they please) was almost sacrosanct to Americans. While a socialist or communist solution was not close to being on the table, government involvement was desired."

Most would think that progressives were inspired by benefits of left-wing thought, but apprehensive of restrictions on freedom such a society brings, and seeking to find the golden path along a ridge line that might avoid both excesses, of right and left, by taking one reform at a time.

Die-hard proponents of old-fashioned laissez-faire did, and do, indeed, lump progressives with leftists, not discriminating between shades of red.
***

"Finally, many progressives had great faith in technology and the human ability to find solutions. Especially in the Progressive Age, expertise was not only strived for but also respected and revered. Gathering of data and studying a problem and then executing a well-thought plan of action was the standard approach to combating just about any issue the progressives wanted to face and defeat. This was one of the attitudes that underpinned so much of what the progressives believed—a faith that natural and social science would make the world a more efficient, orderly place."

Surely some problems were more obvious than needing a gathering of data, to be considered worthy of solutions to be found, or if obvious, implemented - such as evils of alcohol addiction?
***

"However, the trust in the power of science, the righteous anger, and the belief in the importance of community needed a moral compass and inspiration, which came in the form of Evangelical Protestantism. Christians were seen as the most capable to purge the world of poverty, inequality, and greed. Sometimes referred to as being part of the Third Great Awakening, evangelicals in the period between 1880 and 1920 were dedicated to social reform through the guiding philosophy of the Social Gospel. It wasn’t enough to push for moral reform, but to push for reform morally."

This wasn't due, obviously, to a well-thought choice between various belief systems, but due yo two considerations that were close and opposite.

One, Protestant creeds were born in a struggle against church of Rome, seeking freedom of thought, in the first place.

And two, more importantly, this is about a society that had been systematically deprived of every possible alternative creed, faith, belief, and possibilities of seeking for one, by church enforced indoctrination about alternatives leading to eternal hell. So reform couldn't go far enough beyond the extremely narrow line drawn by church, to circumvent it and find freedom of thought - except in matters considered beyond pale of creed, particularly science.
***

"Not every middle-class, college-educated woman could work in a settlement house. It was a distinct calling for a select, dedicated few. Many of these women, however, started other organizations to accomplish many of the same goals as the settlement house. The Chicago Women’s Club was one such group. The CWC helped to start the Legal Aid Society of Chicago and the Women’s and Children Protection Agency. On a national level, Josephine Lowell along with Jane Addams founded the National Consumers League which publicized labor abuses and worked toward the eight-hour work day and minimum wages.

"Women were engaged in this work not only because they cared about the issues present, but because it was one of the few political and social outlets they had available to them. Tending to children, the sick, and the poor was seen as somehow innately motherly. In order to effect real change, however, many of the women engaged in settlements or similar work were convinced they needed a stronger public voice. They needed the right to vote."
***

"Like the earlier suffrage movement, it was dominated by white, middle-class, northern women. Though there was enthusiasm from African-American women in both the north and south, Susan B. Anthony decided not to seat African-American delegates at their conventions as a means to reach out to southern whites. White northern and southern leaders of the suffrage movement promoted white women’s suffrage as a means to maintain white supremacy in the south—the assumption being that white women would vote to keep Jim Crow laws like white men already did.

"An even more egregious example of the inherent racism in the women’s movement was that, especially after 1900, many within the movement used the theory of Social Darwinism to make their argument for their brand of equal representation—which makes the career of Ida B. Wells even more impressive. Wells was born into slavery and from an early age worked on various civil rights issues, especially anti-lynching measures. She was also dedicated to full suffrage for women. To many, however, she was considered too radical because of her dedication to racial as well as gender equality. During a women’s march in 1913, when told African-American women needed to march in the back of the procession, Wells refused. She also had harsh words for Frances Willard, the president of the WCTU, for promoting segregation in the south and promoting stereotypes of black men as the reason temperance initiatives failed in the south."

Notice the distinct misogyny of the phrase "inherent racism in the women’s movement", as if racism was invented by women's movement, or unique to them!

That women demanding rights were part of the same society that, more in Confederate South than in Northern states in US, not only took racism for granted but couldn’t stand the idea of abolishing it, was a fact the women had to not only live with but navigate in their fight for equality.

Far more relevant would be to ask which evangelicals abhorred nazi atrocities, and who were determined that war criminals be judges as criminals, instead of being spirited away by CIA to safe haven across Atlantic, with or without help of Vatican.
***

"The cause of temperance, the abstention from alcohol, was the greatest social concern of the progressive movement. Considering that much of the reform centered on the cleaning up of the city and the locus of the machine was the saloon, the idea of curbing alcohol use went hand in glove with the overall mission of improving society. It was also a movement dominated by women, especially the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founded in 1873."

Perhaps the reason that they failed in US has more to do with social structure and breeding, and the key understanding that a saloon by any name isn't where those of good households go to drink, but only a place for local socialisation.

If understood, this would have promoted moderate alcohol at home shared by adults after or during dinner, as in Europe, while leaving saloon by any names - pib, bar - free for a moderate hour or so of an occasional evening for socialisation, chiefly of adult males.
***

"Willard and other WCTU activists argued that women and children suffered at the hands of drunken men, both physically and economically. Not only was the home made unsafe because of violence, but because of the propensity of drinking men to spend all of their wages on drinking and treating their friends, the families suffered as well. In a shift away from personal responsibility, that of men pledging not to drink, the WCTU wanted the government at the local, state, and national level to ban alcohol entirely. If the great scourge of the working class could be tamed then all of society would benefit."

It was a correct move even if it failed, because at the very least it generated an awareness of the evils of alcohol, even before addiction was understood medically.
***

"During Frances Willard’s tenure as president of the WCTU, the group took up other causes, most notably women’s suffrage. They argued that men were too much under the sway of alcohol and the machine-dominated saloons that women’s voices were needed in politics to save the republic. Willard also took up the cause of workers’ rights and promoted socialism through many of her writings and speeches. Most controversially, Willard tried to appeal to southern women by reaching out to Varina Davis, the widow of Jefferson Davis (the former president of the Confederate states). She also allowed southern meetings to remain segregated. Worst of all, creating a rift between her and Ida B. Wells, was equating white women with purity and the need to curb alcohol especially from black men in order to protect white women."

The last-mentioned seems racist, but kept uneducated and involved at only menial tasks as they were, the danger was real, even if fault was all the slavers' and not entirely or very little of victims of slavery.

In any institution where a set of people have dominated another, treating the latter to abominable conditions, the inherent fear of reprisals is centered mist often on males of the victim society exacting revenge against females of the enslaving section, as seen most predominantly in German accounts of fall of Berlin, or of their fear of US military raping German women.

Latter makes no sense, since Germans speaking of it mention only US forces - and instinctively one feels its a safe bet that such a fear was ridiculous.

It takes time to realise that this fear was partly of reprisals against German atrocities - against Europe, from France to Russia. And the ones who suffered most, Russians, did go on a spree in Berlin.

But why did the German women talking about this fear - in conversations of a new millennium - mention US, not other forces? That has explicitly to do with racism and nazis.
***

"The WCTU held equally prejudicial views on other ethnic minorities, especially the Irish who they saw as corrupt and using alcohol as a means to control city government. They were also very distressed by the new ethnic groups moving to the United States that seemed prone to drink as well. Protestant, middle-class women could not understand the carnival attitude of the new European immigrants on Sundays. One of the first major steps to abolishing alcohol was the elimination of alcohol sales on Sundays. After Frances Willard died in 1898, the WTCU moved away from many of the more radical ideas that Willard had favored. It retreated to an almost exclusive temperance movement, though still supported woman suffrage."

This gap of understanding was of geography and effects thereof - immigrants fresh from dark Northern latitudes of Europe weren't used to much more light of US, and would take a while; settled society of US had forgotten the dark Northern latitudes of Europe, and effects thereof against the psyche.
***

"“False facts are highly injurious to the progress of science.”

"—Charles Darwin, 1871"

Shouldn't he have said "falsification of facts", instead? Aren't facts factual by very definition of the word?
***

"In 1859, Charles Darwin published the first of his three most seminal works, On the Origin of Species. In it, Darwin described his theory of natural selection: All organisms reproduce, and within each species each organism differs slightly. All organisms compete for survival. As the environment changes, the organisms that best adapt to that change survive while those that didn’t die. In time, an entirely new species might evolve. This was a radical notion to say the least. It posited that the planet and its inhabitants were changed by natural forces and the environment. It was not a divine plan, which was the prevailing theory for centuries."

Here the author, as the then society, erred in the conclusion derived from theory- chiefly due to the flawed church indoctrination not allowing any freedom of thought.

For if Divine is all-powerful, all-encompassing, how can natural forces be outside the purview thereof?

This flaw helped divide science from church!
***

"Darwin did not mention human beings very much in the first book, but The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, published in 1871, brought up that issue head-on. He applied the evolutionary ideas he had first outlined in Origin of Species to human development. He demonstrated the connections between animal and human behaviors and physical transformation. Darwin’s final book, The Expression of the Emotions of Man and Animals, continued this discussion by investigating the continuity of emotional expression between humans and animals.

"These ideas caused a great deal of controversy almost from the time they were published. The discussion that humans were in any way descended from animals went against millennia of theology that humans were created by the divine. It is a debate that still occurs across the United States."

Again, this debate is chiefly due to thinking that creation must be an instant, one move process!

Why isn't everything, from evolution to black holes seen as creation, except due to ego of men thst make up the institution of church?
***

"Darwin’s theories, however, weren’t just used and debated on theological and scientific grounds. The idea of natural selection was most notably applied to society by English philosopher Herbert Spencer. The theory of Social Darwinism could more aptly be named Social Spencerism. In essence the theory is the idea that the society, like nature, is bent toward survival of the fittest. Spencer believed that the state and other public institutions shouldn’t interfere with the harsh processes of life. Events should unfold as they are intended, and the strongest will survive. As Spencer would surmise, “to aid the bad in multiplying is in effect the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.” In other words, let the weak fall away so our descendants won’t have to take care of them or provide for them. Spencer actually espoused these ideas before Darwin published his books, but Darwin gave Spencer a framework to apply to his theories."

No wonder his protégé George Eliot was not only racist enough to support racist colonialism, but even to suggest that Britain should get more colonies to support a bad financial state. (Looting India to starvation deaths in millions wasn't enough!)
***

"It does beg the question, was Darwin a Social Darwinist? It seems that the answer is a qualified yes. Darwin did believe that the idea of survival of the fittest applied to the social hierarchies of his contemporary world—namely that Western civilization, especially that of Great Britain, was the highest class of the modern world. ... "

Then he was neither well educated nor good at thinking.

After all brute force and fraud had a great deal to do with acquiring colonies, or migrants of Europe pushing all natives of Americas out into a corner, if not into slavery in all but name.

And it takes only a moment to realise that every beast of prey, or even virus, has the same power, against every great scientist and thinker - of inflicting physical damage, even death.

But a misogyny, as abrahmic societies are, wouldn't see that.
***

" ... He also believed that inherited wealth allowed the descendants of the upper class to focus on art and culture, which would in turn inspire the lower class. ... "

This is reverse thinking, making a European caste system seem inevitable.

India on the other hand places intellectual endeavours at top, not brute force or property, but separates the three; so top caste, while learned and intellectual, is largely poor. That does not stop it from being learned, erudite and thinkers.
***

[Margaret Staggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Progressive Era

I am a student of history and find most of these books very helpful. This one in particular expanded my knowledge of this segment of history batter than any before.

[George Polansky · Rating 4 out of 5]

A snapshot of the progressive era.

[James Crawford · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the 1890s through the 1920s a lot happened in this country and this book has a good summary of the main events. These included:
A time of anti-corruption feelings, concern for children workers and worker safety.
A time against drinking, gambling and prostitution..
The growth of industrialization.(although they worked around 10 hours a day, six days a week)
The growth of unions.
Shared traits of optimism and social cohesion.
Machine politics and slums.
A general dislike of Catholicism.
Women's suffrage.
Segregation and the concept of 'separate but equal.'
Woodrow Wilson and the American entry into World War I.
Plus other important things.

In some ways we've made progress. Work time in factories is down, safety is up. Women have the right to vote.

In many ways, though, we have not progressed and in some we've regressed. There is almost no social cohesion now. Segregation is still present although now the anti-Black feeling has been joined by the anti-immigrant feeling. Gambling is now endorsed as long as the places pay their taxes to the state. Women can vote but their representation in politics and business is still fairly low. Respect for politicians seems to be somehow even lower than that time. We now have shootings in schools and malls and road rage.

Maybe we've moved on to the Regressive Stage.

[Tess Ailshire · Rating 4 out of 5]

A concise account of the purpose of the Progressive movement and the actions taken to put the Progressives' desires in to place in the US. I felt it a bit biased toward "progressive = good", but I'd expect I'd get the same sense about the other side if the same author had written it. The idea, after all, was not to present the opponents' side.

This got me thinking about today's progressive/liberal political efforts vice those of libertarian/classical liberal/conservative/neocon factions, and the differences in today's society's pursuit versus those of a hundred years ago.

Well worth the read.

[Jean · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent overview

I wish everyone had required reading on this book. It certainly helps in understanding our politics today even though the issues are different like abortion instead of alcohol. We seem to be on a similar path. It is interesting that the Republican of the Progressive era are much like the Democrats today. The Deep South was solidly democrat and I'd now solidly republican. Only the labels have changed.

[Susan Baranoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hate to be the pronunciation quibbler, but..... if you are listening to a book that is intended to educate someone to things with which they might be unfamiliar, it might be a good idea to hire an editor for the audio version to check for correct pronunciations by the narrator!
i.e. learn the following:
Tammany Hall = TAMmeny - not ta-MANNY
W.E.B. DuBoise = Dooo-BOYS - not the French "duBwah"
and Suffrage = SUH-Fruhj - and I can't even get to the spelling of the wrong way....

[Rubin Carpenter · Rating 4 out of 5]

The progressive Era defined

This condensed introduction into the formation of the 20th century the social /political and scientific influences that defined it with the setbacks,drawbacks,
accomplishments,and mistakes of it's leaders and movements a great job done by Hourly History here

[Leon Olivier, Jr · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another well written summary of an important era.

Although like all of this series this book left me wanting more which is good. While some of the earlier hourly history book were poorly written this one was great. Grammar and facts on target. Recommended

[Lila · Rating 4 out of 5]

Worth the reading.

[David W. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Backwards

While their were several ‘causes’ that this era promoted, after reading, this rendition it almost seems that this period of history was in some respects ‘backwards’.

[Larry Farren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very Interesting History

This would be a good read for a teenager during these pandemic times. I liked the coverage of the 1890s and the beginning of the Twentieth Century.

[richard stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fair

Did not find anything new in the writing, however as a quick read it did refresh some history for me.

[DavidO · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kinda dull

Talking about a whole time period like this isn't that interesting because the scope is too large and few details if any get mentioned. Makes it hard to get interested.