Progressive Era through the Great Depression
Joana Lewis
Joel Goldstein, PhD.
Contemporary U.S. History
August 2, 2012

Although women spear headed many significant Progressive era reforms, they were still denied the right to vote. This became increasingly problematic once more and more women understood that individuals in the Industrial Age were buffeted by social and economic forces that were beyond their control and that required the involvement of the federal government. The denial of suffrage changed during the Progressive era, beginning in the western states.
To main groups furthered the cause of women’s suffrage: the National American Women Suffrage Association, founded in 1890, and the National Women’s Party, founded in 1913 and led by Alice Paul. The NAWSA worked state to state to convince opponents that were valuable assets to society and deserved to vote. Paul and the NWP, on the other hand, pursued a more aggressive national strategy. On the eve of President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, Alice Paul organized a rally of 5,000 women to demand a federal constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote. She also held a six-month vigil outside the White House to protest restrictions of women suffrage. The combined efforts of these two groups ultimately led to victory. In 1920 just after the end of World War 1, the Nineteenth amendment was passed, and women won the right to vote.
Woodrow Wilson became president in 1913, when Progressive ideas were at their most influential. But Wilson did not trust big business as much as Roosevelt. In his platform message entitled “The New Freedom,” Wilson pledged to use government power to destroy big businesses and give smaller ones greater ability to compete. He passed a series of laws that increased the size and power of the federal government, and he helped pass the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which established a regional banking system under the control of the federal government. The act included a massive tariff reduction, the first since the Civil War, known as the Underwood Tariff. Because Wilson believed that high protectionist tariffs were unfairly enriching America’s industrialists, this tariff reduction served as a symbol of his suspicion of big business.
In 1914, Wilson assisted in passing the Clayton antitrust act, which outlawed unfair practices among businesses. Also in 1914 Wilson supported the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, a government agency that had the right to investigate business practices and issue rulings to prevent businesses from continuing such practices.
Wilson focused on Progressive reforms to regulate businesses, but he never fully supported the social reforms that other Progressives rallied for, such as child labor reform, women’s suffrage, and regulation of laborer workdays. Because of the popularity of these ideas, however, Wilson eventually supported the passage of several bills, including the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act, which prevented the employment of children under the age of sixteen, and a bill that mandated a maximum eight-hour workday for American railroad laborers.
The muckrakers played a significant historical role, largely because late nineteenth-century America was a nation of readers. The muckrakers were reporters, authors, and critics who sought to expose the evils and injustices of Gilded Age society, hoping to expose such social ills before they strangled democracy. Continuing on a trend that began in the antebellum period and continues to the present, editors favored salacious stories about crime and scandal because those stories yielded greater sales. One of the most effective Progressive solutions to the problem of poverty was the creation of settlement houses, safe residences in poor neighborhoods where reformers could study local conditions. Much like a social scientist’s fieldwork, living in the middle of these neighborhoods gave reformers a firsthand look at what needed to be changed. The settlement houses also provided a place for residents to hold meetings and receive free health care. Settlement houses became fixtures in many cities, including Chicago, Boston, and New York. Hull House was the second but most renowned settlement house in the United States, founded in Chicago in 1889 by Jane Addams. It exemplified the type of contribution reformers could make. Women made up the majority of its residents, and they lobbied the government to pass better construction and safety laws to improve the conditions in the surrounding tenement houses. The women of Hull House also established a new, more effective process for collecting garbage and fought to eradicate prostitution in the cities by closing red-light districts.
In 1900, a devastating category-four hurricane produced a tidal wave that deluged the Gulf Coast community of Galveston, Texas. Natural disaster was compounded by a second tragedy of human making: Galveston’s City Council failed to effectively administer relief and provide for reconstruction. Appalled by the city’s lack of response to the hurricane crisis, the state stepped in, in 1901 to appoint a five-man commission of experts to assume the duties of municipal governance. The commission plan (or system) of government was a departure from the traditional municipal structure in that it replaced the traditional city council with an elected commission of three to seven people. Each commissioner served as the head of a city department, with the presiding commissioner serving as mayor. The commissioners were essentially municipal directors who were elected every two years, and who were supposed to be more accountable to the voters and therefore more focused on business and economics than the in preexisting system, which functioned on the basis of political patronage and corruption. The commission government of Galveston did so well that it stayed on after its immediate recovery responsibilities were concluded, and “Galveston system” became a Progressive model for effective local management.
Roosevelt believed that industrial society was threatened by the immorality of big businessmen, who were more interested in personal gain than in the good of society. Monopolies were the worst offenders, and yet Roosevelt did not believe in hastily breaking up concentrations of wealth and power. Rather he hoped that large corporations or trusts could benefit the nation by providing more equitable employment and economic expansion. Thus, in 1902, he arbitrated a coal strike in West Virginia by finding a middle ground between the miners and the owners. Similarly, in 1903, he asked Congress to create a Bureau of Corporations to examine the conduct of business in America. As a result of the bureau’s findings, Roosevelt prosecuted several companies for breaking the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which was the federals government’s first attempt to break up monopolies, but which was not widely used until Roosevelt took office. Roosevelt also developed and used the Hepburn Act of 1906, which limited prices that railroads could charge and allowed the federal government to monitor the financial books of the large railroad companies. Roosevelt’s actions showed that he was willing to put the force of the federal government behind antitrust laws.
Things were different out west. Pioneer women often worked alongside their husbands on the farm or establishing new businesses and were often seen as equal partners in the re3lationship. They were far more likely to speak up when wronged, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to own property in their own names. In that kind of environment, it was much harder for men to argue that women somehow inferior and a much larger percentage of men were open to the idea of giving their “partners” the same legal rights they had. East coast women existed in a more formalized society. Most women didn’t work, and most were forced by either social norms or their own families to exist in a subservient position to their husbands. The vast majority of these women were passive toward the idea of women’s liberation. They may have supported the idea internally, but the actual number who spoke up about it was fairly small. It was a social no-no.
Roosevelt created five new national parks and fifty wildlife refuges designed to protect local animal species, preserving millions of acres-the greatest amount of land ever protected by a U.S president. Roosevelt also created the government agency National Forest service. Which has influenced the way we conduct business today we are more aware of our environment today. Like the Clean Air Act, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Recycling to name a few. Woodrow Wilson Keating –Owen Child Labor Act has influenced child labor to today’s focus on child abuse and neglect prevention, foster care, and early emphasis on infant mortality.
In the summer of 1898, the United States fought Spain in one of the shortest and most pathetically one-sided wars in modern history. The war represented a powerful resurgence of the same doctrine of Manifest Destiny that had led the United States to expand westward by defeating Mexico in 1846-48. This impulse toward imperialism took place as major European nations were establishing colonies throughout Africa. As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States became a world power that controlled an empire stretching from the Caribbean Sea to the Far East.
The Federal Government in the 1920’s allowed people to invest in the stock market in something that was called “on margin”. This meant because the market was zooming up, you could buy stock for less than the market value say the stock was selling for $50 you could by that stock for only $10 promising to pay the balance later. But you never had to pay it, because in a short time, the stock was at $75, and you sold it and made a profit. In October 1929, steel prices crashed, and margins were called in, people did not have the money to pay up, so this forced the market lower, as there was no real money involved. As the market went down, more margins were called in, and more people could not pay up, forcing a further downward spiral. The Great depression led to the Federal Government supporting President Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal created a variety of programs, most importantly social security that allowed the federal government to play a bigger role in helping American Citizens.

Reference Page
Hist Volume ll
United States History