556 Chapter 21 The Age of Reform
Orchard Street, a tenement in lower Manhattan in New York City. The unpaved street, ankle-deep in mud, is lined with garbage. It resembles the
scene painted by Everett Shinn shown at the opening of the chapter. But while reformers deplored life in such slums, many who lived there
enjoyed the sociability of the congested streets.
Roots of Progressivism
The progressives were never a single group seeking a
single objective. The movement sprang from many
sources. One was the fight against corruption and
inefficiency in government, which began with the
Liberal Republicans of the Grant era and was contin-
ued by the mugwumps of the 1880s. The struggle for
civil service reform was only the first skirmish in
thisbattle; the continuing power of corrupt political
machines and the growing influence of large corpora-
tions and their lobbyists on municipal and state gov-
ernments outraged thousands of citizens and led
them to seek ways of purifying politics and making
the machinery of government at all levels responsive
to the majority rather than to special-interest groups.
Progressivismalso had roots in the effort to
regulate and control big business, which character-
ized the Granger and Populist agitation of the
1870s and 1890s. The failure of the Interstate
Commerce Act to end railroad abuses and of the
Sherman Antitrust Act to check the growth of large
corporations became increasingly apparent after- The return of prosperity after the depression
of the 1890s encouraged reformers by removing the
inhibiting fear, so influential in the 1896 presiden-
tial campaign, that an assault on the industrial
giants might lead to the collapse of the economy.
Between 1897 and 1904 the trend toward concen-
tration in industry accelerated. Such new giants as
Amalgamated Copper (1899), U.S. Steel (1901), and
International Harvester (1902) attracted most of the
attention, but even more alarming were the overall sta-
tistics. In a single year (1899) more than 1,200 firms
were absorbed in mergers, the resulting combinations
being capitalized at $2.2 billion. By 1904 there were
318 industrial combinations in the country with an
aggregate capital of $7.5 billion. People who consid-
ered bigness inherently evil demanded that the huge
new “trusts” be broken up or at least strictly controlled.
Settlement house workers and other reformers
concerned about the welfare of the urban poor made
up a third battalion in the progressive army. This was
an area in which women made the most important