The Age of ReformThe Age of Reform 21

CONTENTS

■Like garbage being tossed from a window, this family, evicted from their

apartment by police, appears to be in the process of decomposing. Painted by

Everett Shinn when he was in his late twenties, Eviction(1904) was

characteristic of the so-called Ashcan School of artists, many of whom sought

to promote social awareness.

Source: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC / Art Resource, NY.

555

work. Over three-fourths said that they voted in the

2008 presidential election. In 2009 AmeriCorps, a feder-

ally sponsored public-service plan, received twice as

many applications from college graduates as the previ-

ous year. That same year, more than 168,000 college stu-

dents worked for Habitat for Humanity, far more than a

decade earlier.

Today’s college-age volunteers in many ways resem-

ble their counterparts during the “age of reform” a cen-

tury ago. Then, large numbers of young adults worked

to improve society in various ways. They investigated

tenements, factories, schools, municipal governments,

and consumer goods. They joined political movements to

fight city bosses and to restrain the excessive influence of

corporations on state, local, and federal governments.

They promoted legislation to protect children from

exploitative employers and to secure voting rights for

women. They advocated conservation of natural

resources. They swelled the ranks of the Socialist party,

the Progressive party, and of more radical movements. In

response to this sea change among younger voters, the

Republican and Democrat parties embraced some

reforms that earlier generations had regarded as wild-

eyed radicalism. ■

■Roots of Progressivism

■The Muckrakers

■The Progressive Mind

■“Radical” Progressives: The

Wave of the Future

■Political Reform: Cities First

■Political Reform: The States

■State Social Legislation

■Political Reform: The Woman

Suffrage Movement

■Theodore Roosevelt: Cowboy

in the White House

■Roosevelt and Big Business

■Roosevelt and the Coal Strike

■TR’s Triumphs

■Roosevelt Tilts Left

■William Howard Taft: The

Listless Progressive, or More

Is Less

■Breakup of the

Republican Party

■The Election of 1912

■Wilson: The New Freedom

■The Progressives and

Minority Rights

■Black Militancy

■American Lives:

Emma Goldman

■Debating the Past:

Were the Progressives

Forward-Looking?

HeartheAudio Chapter 21 at http://www.myhistorylab.com