Author Insight Video

Transcript

During the late 19th century a wave of reform movements rolled across the landscape of American life. By the early 20th century scholars and commentators were referring to this as a Progressive Movement and that the reformers were themselves Progressives.

They were progressive in the sense that they represented a common assumption. That common assumption was that American life had developed tremendous social problems, social ills that needed to be addressed. Many of the reformers were progressive in the sense that they were confident that society could be improved, that it could progress by human intervention.

Progressives were very diverse in terms of their backgrounds, motives, and the types of reforms they embraced. But overarching this Progressive Movement was this confidence that government could be used to help society, to improve society, to ensure social progress. At a local, state, and federal level, people began to view government differently from the way in which they had viewed it in the 18th century. Government was no longer something to be feared. Rather, government was needed to regulate the excesses of runaway capitalism and a corrupt political system that had developed in the late 19th century.

And so throughout the United States, first at a local level, then at a state level, and by the early 20th century at the federal level, progressives began to emerge in both parties. They focused on cleaning up City Hall, cleaning up corrupt political machines in the cities, and cleaning up state governments from corrupt corporate influences. Then, of course, the reforms broadened well beyond that. They focused on political reforms to enable greater participation in the political process. They focused on social reforms such as child labor. Most Americans today don’t realize that there were no child labor laws in the first half of the 19th century. In fact, children as young as seven or eight were working fourteen-hour days in mills and mines across the country. Likewise there were no laws governing women’s labor, particularly women who were pregnant at the time. They, too, were working long hours six days per week.

And so, Progressivism included a wide array of efforts to improve the quality of American life by incorporating new regulatory powers at the local, state, and federal levels. It also included a great deal of energy at the grassroots level, provided by reformers, many of them motivated by religious reasons, who were eager to intervene in American life so as to improve the quality of life for all.