hoped to protect women and children from
exploitation, social scientists who believed
that academic research would help to solve
social problems, and members of an anxious
middle class who feared that their status was
threatened by the rise of big business.
Everywhere in early- twentieth- century
America the signs of economic and political
consolidation were apparent— in the power
of a small directorate of Wall Street bankers
and corporate executives, the manipulation
of democracy by corrupt political machines,
and the rise of new systems of managerial con-
trol in workplaces. In these circumstances,
wrote Benjamin P. DeWitt, in his 1915 book
The Progressive Movement, “the individual
could not hope to compete.... Slowly, Amer-
icans realized that they were not free.”
As this and the following chapter will
discuss, Progressive reformers responded
to the perception of declining freedom in
varied, contradictory ways. The era saw the
expansion of political and economic freedom
through the reinvigoration of the movement
for woman suffrage, the use of political power
to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to
improve democratic government by weaken-
ing the power of city bosses and giving ordi-
nary citizens more influence on legislation.
It witnessed the flowering of understandings
of freedom based on individual fulfillment
and personal self- determination— the abil-
ity to participate fully in the ever- expanding
consumer marketplace and, especially for
women, to enjoy economic and sexual free-
doms long considered the province of men. At
the same time, many Progressives supported
efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom
to those deemed fit to exercise it properly.
The new system of white supremacy born
in the 1890s became fully consolidated in
- CHRONOLOGY •
1889 Hull House founded
1898 Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Women and
Economics
1901 Socialist Party founded in
United States
President McKinley
assassinated
1902 President Theodore
Roose velt assists in coal
strike
1903 Women’s Trade Union
League founded
Ford Motor Company
established
1904 Northern Securities
dissolved
1905 Industrial Workers of the
World established
1906 Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle
Meat Inspection Act
Pure Food and
Drug Act
Hepburn Act
1908 Muller v. Oregon
1909 Uprising of the 20,000
1911 Triangle Shirtwaist
Company fire
Society of American
Indians founded
1912 Children’s Bureau
established
Theodore Roosevelt
orga nizes the Progressive
Party
1913 Sixteenth Amendment
Seventeenth AmendmentTHE PROGRESSIVE ERA ★^693