Progressive era (part i)

Dakota Territory was booming in 1881 when John Henry and Emma Smith DeVoe moved from their home in Washington, Illinois, in large measure due to the extension of the railroad. The railroad brought settlers, many of whom were Civil War veterans, widows, or orphans, to the region to make their fortunes in gold, while others came on the promise of free, fertile land in central Dakota. The DeVoes came because John Henry had accepted a position with the railroad.

The young couple settled in the newly established town of Huron. Gambling dens and saloons thrived in the town, and men frequently discharged their weapons in the city limits and engaged in drunken scuffles. Women filed complaints against men who had seduced them with promises of marriage, but then—after illicit love affairs—refused to marry them. Houses of prostitution openly operated on the main thoroughfares, which were nothing but wide dirt paths dotted with animal waste and human refuse.

Given their interest in prohibition as well as their affiliation with the Baptists, ties between the Dakota Baptist Convention and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) were solid, and so over the next few years, the DeVoes served as Christian soldiers working to create a city dedicated to the social mores they subscribed to: prohibition and the elimination of gambling halls, saloons, and brothels in town. Troubled by the lack of morals in their new community, Emma and John Henry helped to establish many of Huron’s voluntary groups, including Huron’s literary association. Volunteerism was all the rage out West in the decades following the Civil War.

Likeminded reformers joined the organization such as Edwin G. Wheeler, the owner of a drug store and deacon of the First Baptist Church. They and other Huronites established the association for the purpose of keeping “young people away from the haunts whose influence destroys mind, body, and soul,” in other words working class forms of leisure—bars, billiard rooms, and gambling dens. The Dakota Huronite, whose editors supported prohibition, praised the organizations for their efforts saying, “It will at least remove the excuse of those who spend their time in places of ill repute, that there is no place else to go.”

These Gilded Age moral reform efforts, although more aligned in philosophy with American reform movements of the early nineteenth century, opened the door and paved the way for Emma to become involved with other, broader political campaigns in Dakota Territory and eventually as a major organizer for the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and a central figure in western states passing legislation that allowed women the right to vote. The story of the DeVoes demonstrates a turning point in U.S history when Americans’ focus on moral reform takes a new approach and a new focus that we call today Progressivism.

No time period in American history is possibly as misunderstood, convoluted, and nebulous, yet important to clearly understand to better appreciate the economic, political, and social liberties of American society in the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the Progressive Era. Neither a national movement, nor a singular ideology, or a coherent time frame, the Progressive Era usually falls under the umbrellic Gilded Age at its earliest roots by the rise of agrarian reform measures in the 1870s and, at its demise, the end of the Woodrow Wilson administration shortly after “the war to make the world safe for democracy.” Yet the Progressive seeds will bloom in the 1940s and again in the 1960s under the presidencies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon Baines Johnson.