0.1 The progressive era (part ii)  (Page 10/11)

Emma Smith DeVoe, an example of a Progressive era reformer and in the mold of her fellow reformers, did not quit when women were granted the right to vote in her new home state of Washington in 1910. DeVoe believed that women still lacked political rights, and in 1911 she helped create the National Council of Women Voters, the forerunner for today’s League of Women Voters. Rising to the position of president, DeVoe worked tirelessly for the adoption of women’s suffrage and was present when Washington voted in support of the Nineteenth Amendment on March 23, 1920. DeVoe died in 1927 at the age of 79. Announcing her death, a Seattle-area newspaper called DeVoe a “Mother of Woman Suffrage.”

CONCLUSION

The Progressive Era can be seen as the culmination of decades upon decades of attempts to change, alter, or otherwise address “problems” in American society. The seeds of every Progressive Era reform movement were planted between the Revolution and the Civil War from racial and gender equality to moral reform.

Some few view these reforms as attempts to improve or better American society. Others view Progressive reforms as social control of the massive immigrates. What separates help and control? A better question might be why did the Progressive era happen when it did? First, Progressive Era reformers moderately attacked much of the success and excess of the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts, Hills, and Carnegies left a wake of socio-economic disruption that American farmers attempted, but initially failed, to address. Thus, some people might look at the Progressive Era as a completion of many of the ideas of the Populists.

Second, the reader needs to consider the Jeffersonian ideal of independent, rural farmers versus the Hamiltonian idea on factory working urbanites. As the U.S. economy shifted from an agriculture-based to an industrial-based economy, massive changes effected this country. Many of those changes, such as overcrowding, health and safety issues, and social services inherent to city life had not been addressed. Americans also needed to change their ideas on the role of government. Typically, Americans had viewed government as the antithesis to their liberties, however, an industrial-based economy demanded more government intervention and thus Americans had to wrestle with the results of industrialism.

Finally, U.S. presidents supported moderate change. Teddy Roosevelt believed there were differences between good and bad monopolies, and thus one new role of the federal government was to protect American consumers from those bad monopolies. Wilson saw the necessity of change to the American financial institutions as a necessity of successful industrialization.

The role of immigration cannot be over estimated in the Progressive Era. Ever since Haymarket, Americans connected labor unions with anarchism and socialism. Socialists, who were overwhelmingly connected to central European immigrants (particularly Germans) were a growing and important body of voters in the U.S. during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Native-born Americans might have viewed their calls for change to be more extreme than those ideas that Americans farmers had promoted in the years immediately following the Civil War. Ideas of American Progressive reformers, who had a tendency of being Protestant, and who believed in the inherent value of American democracy and American capitalism, seemed much more moderate than the ideas of German Socialists. Those Muckrakers might be publishing explosive essays on Standard Oil or the American meat and dairy industries, but at least they were not lobbing actual bombs, unlike anarchists during the World War I era.