The Progressive Era

From about 1890 to 1920, Progressive reformers set out to fix problems created by industrialization, urbanization, and political corruption. Muckraking journalists exposed abuses: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) revealed filthy meatpacking plants, helping pass the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act that year. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson broke up or regulated monopolies, protected natural resources, and created the Federal Reserve (1913). Reformers fought for workplace safety, especially after the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire killed 146 workers, as well as child labor laws. Progressives also changed the Constitution: the 16th Amendment allowed a federal income tax, the 17th provided for direct election of senators, the 18th began Prohibition, and the 19th, ratified in 1920 after decades of work by suffragists like Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul, barred states from denying the vote on the basis of sex, though many women of color still faced major barriers to voting for decades. The era had real limits: most white Progressives did little to challenge racial segregation, which spread in the federal government under Wilson.

This explanation is AI-generated and can occasionally be wrong. 🚩 Report