AP U.S. History 7.4: The Progressives

Progressives were reformers of the early 1900s who responded to political corruption, economic instability and social concerns by calling for government action. Some Progressive Era journalists attacked what they saw as political corruption, social injustice and economic inequality. Reformers, often from the middle and upper classes and including many women, worked for social change in cities and among immigrant families. Jane Addams, who co-founded Chicago's Hull-House settlement in 1889, was by 1905 one of the most influential women in America and a leader of the movement.

Child labor shows how investigators worked. In 1904 a group of progressive reformers founded the National Child Labor Committee. It hired investigators to gather evidence and then organized exhibitions of photographs and statistics. Its photographer, Lewis Hine, photographed children in coal mines, meatpacking houses, textile mills and canneries. In 1908 Hine put it this way: "There is work that profits children, and there is work that brings profit only to employers. The object of employing children is not to train them, but to get high profits from their work."

The children he found were often from immigrant and rural families who needed the wages. Exposure was a means, not the goal. Hine believed that if people could see the abuses for themselves, they would demand laws to end them, and in 1912 Congress created the Children's Bureau as a federal information clearinghouse. A federal child labor law followed in 1916.

Sources: Photographs of Lewis Hine; Jane Addams Papers (both National Archives).

On the national level, Progressives sought federal laws they believed would regulate the economy, expand democracy and bring moral reform. Four changes show each aim.

• Regulating the economy. The Keating-Owen Act, signed by President Woodrow Wilson on September 1, 1916, banned the interstate sale of goods from factories that employed children under 14 and mines that employed children under 16. In 1918, in Hammer v. Dagenhart, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
• Expanding democracy. Before 1913, state legislatures chose U.S. senators, and reformers called the Senate a "millionaires' club" serving private interests. The 17th Amendment, ratified April 8, 1913, made senators "elected by the people thereof."
• Moral reform. Temperance societies and Progressive reformers, with women strongly behind them, pushed for a national ban on alcohol. Congress sent the prohibition amendment, the 18th, to the states in 1917; it barred the manufacture, sale and transportation of alcoholic liquors.
• Women's suffrage. The 19th Amendment, ratified August 18, 1920, reads: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." Even so, discriminatory state voting laws kept many women from voting for decades.

Sources: Keating-Owen Act; 17th Amendment; Prohibition documents; 19th Amendment (all National Archives).

A National Archives lesson calls the reformers "a diverse group, frequently with different views." They were politicians, labor leaders, religious leaders and teachers, and they split on several questions.

Race. Some Progressives supported Southern segregation, while others ignored it. Wilson issued no executive order on it, but under his administration segregation became the de facto practice in many federal agencies. (A different National Archives page says he ordered it in 1913; when two sources disagree, check what each one rests on.) When the House passed amendments for direct election of senators in 1910 and 1911, they carried a "race rider" meant to bar federal intervention in racial discrimination among voters. A substitute by Senator Joseph Bristow of Kansas dropped it.

The people or the experts. In 1911 the National Progressive Republican League called for direct election of senators, direct primaries, and the initiative, referendum and recall. Other Progressives wanted government to rely more on professional and technical experts to make it efficient. When Wilson planned the peace after World War I, he relied on reports from about 150 political and social scientists.

Federal power. Wilson worried about states' rights and disagreed with Theodore Roosevelt's call for federal control of industry.

Immigration. Progressives also disagreed about whether to restrict it.

Sources: Election of 1912 (National Archives); Labor during World War I (National Archives); 17th Amendment (National Archives); Fourteen Points (National Archives).

Americans argued over natural resources from the 1890s through the New Deal. As background, in 1872 Congress made Yellowstone the first federally protected national park. The act said the land was "dedicated and set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people," and it called for "the preservation, from injury or spoliation, of all timber, mineral deposits, natural curiosities, or wonders within said park, and their retention in their natural condition."

Preservationists wanted wild places kept as nature left them. Conservationists wanted resources used, but planned and renewed so they would last. Theodore Roosevelt made conservation one of his issues. Wilson's 1913 inaugural made the conservationist complaint: "We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature." His list of wrongs included "watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at every mine."

Both groups supported national parks. They differed on what government should do about the overuse of resources everywhere else.

Sources: Yellowstone Act (National Archives); Wilson's first inaugural (Avalon Project).