From “The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again” by Robert D. Putnam
The reformers responsible for turning the Gilded Age into the Progressive Era included immigrants and elites, women and men, blacks and whites, housewives and career politicians, unionists and capitalists, college graduates and factory workers, top-down bureaucrats and bottom-up activists, Republicans and Democrats, and nearly everyone in between. The movement was so diverse as to be barely coherent and was home to contradictory impulses, but together, the Americans who took up the nonpartisan mantle of “Progressives” ultimately put in place a stunningly diverse and sweeping set of reforms and innovations – many of which form the basis of American society as we know it today.
The secret ballot; the direct primary system; the popular election of senators; the initiative, referendum, and recall; women’s suffrage; new forms of municipal administration; the federal income tax; the Federal Reserve System; protective labor laws; the minimum wage; antitrust statutes; protected public lands and resources; food and drug regulation; sanitation infrastructure; public utilities; a vast proliferation of civic and voluntary societies; new advocacy organizations such as labor unions, the ACLU, and the NAACP; the widespread provision of free public high schools; and even the spread of public parks, libraries, and playgrounds all owe their origins to the efforts of a diverse array of Progressive reformers.
On average, since the Bill of Rights, constitutional amendments have been approved once every thirteen years. As a mark of how monumental the innovations of the Progressive Era were, the four amendments that traversed the hurdle-ridden path to ratification between 1913 and 1920 represent the biggest burst of amendments since the Bill of Rights, rivaled only by the three post-Civil war amendments on slavery.
In an attempt to understand its historical significance, many observers today look to the culmination of the Progressive Era – the enumeration of Teddy Roosevelt’s Square Deal domestic agenda (1910), the creation of the Progressive Party (1912), and the passage of sweeping federal legislation (1913-1920) – and conclude that it was a coordinated political project to expand the size, reach, and power of the federal government. However, this narrative fails to account for the vast, pluralistic upsurge of cultural critique, impassioned agitation, and citizen-led reform that began long before a Progressive occupied the White House.