Where was the progressive movement most successful?

The Progressive Movement was a widespread reform effort to cure the many social and political ills in the United States after the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States of America underwent tremendous change. One of the principal changes was the shift from a predominantly agricultural economy to a much more industrialized one. This change also brought stark social changes to the United States. Now millions of people in the U.S. relied on other people, such as business owners, for their livelihood. Oftentimes, the employers reinvested profits back into the company, rather than paying workers a fair wage. These business owners also had tremendous power within the federal government. Many in the U.S. believed that the business owners had undue influence over the government and that the employers had no desire to relinquish any power to the middle and working classes.

By the 1890s, a group of reformers known as the Progressives emerged to combat some of the ill effects of these changes. Most Progressives came from middle-class backgrounds, and many of them were college educated. Progressives generally believed that industrialization was good for the United States, but they also contended that human greed had overcome industrialization's more positive effects. They hoped to instill in U.S. residents moral values based upon Protestant religious beliefs. The Progressives wanted employers to treat their workers as the bosses wanted to be treated. They also hoped that, if working conditions improved, people in the U.S. would not engage in immoral activities, like drinking and gambling, to forget the difficulties that they faced.

Progressives sought better pay, safer working conditions, shorter hours, and increased benefits for workers. Believing that only education would allow people to lead successful lives, Progressives opposed child labor, wanting children to attend school rather than working in mines and factories. They supported Prohibition and succeeded in enacting a ban on the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol with the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919. Progressives also sought to reclaim government from the business owners and corrupt politicians partly by supporting the direct election of United States senators by the people. The Progressives succeeded in attaining this reform with the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1913. Other reforms included Initiative, which allowed voters to pass legislation on their own, Referendum, which allowed voters to repeal laws that they did not support, and Recall, which allowed voters to remove elected officials from office. Many Progressives supported women's suffrage, helping women secure the right to vote through the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1919. Progressives also battled against city bosses, including Cincinnati, Ohio's George Cox, by hiring city managers.

While Progressives enacted numerous positive reforms, some of their goals were questionable. While they did seek to make the United States government more democratic and to protect U.S. workers, they also sought to force their social and political beliefs on others. Progressives opposed immigration and enacted several immigration restrictions during the 1920s. Progressives also tried to force immigrants to adopt Progressive moral beliefs. One way they tried to accomplish this was through settlement houses. Settlement houses existed in most major cities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were places where immigrants could go to receive free food, clothing, job training, and educational classes. While all of these items greatly helped immigrants, Progressives also used the settlement houses to convince immigrants to adopt Progressive beliefs, causing the foreigners to forsake their own culture. During the 1920s, many Progressives also joined the Ku Klux Klan, a self-proclaimed religious group that was to enforce morality, based on Progressive beliefs, on other people. Due to the Progressives' support for Prohibition and immigration restrictions, many in the U.S. stopped supporting the Progressive Movement. While aspects of its beliefs remain today, as a functioning and clearly identifiable group, the Progressive Movement began to weaken by the late 1920s and the early 1930s.

The Progressive movement was a turn-of-the-century political movement interested in furthering social and political reform, curbing political corruption caused by political machines, and limiting the political influence of large corporations. Although many Progressives saw U.S. power in a foreign arena as an opportunity to enact the Progressive domestic agenda overseas, and to improve foreign societies, others were concerned about the adverse effects of U.S. interventions and colonialism.

The Progressive movement began with a domestic agenda. Progressives were interested in establishing a more transparent and accountable government which would work to improve U.S. society. These reformers favored such policies as civil service reform, food safety laws, and increased political rights for women and U.S. workers. In the 1890s, the Progressive movement also began to question the power of large businesses and monopolies after a series of journalistic expos�s that revealed questionable business practices.

Throughout the 1890s, the U.S. Government became increasingly likely to rely on its military and economic power to pursue foreign policy goals. The most prominent action during this period, the Spanish-American War, resulted in U.S. rule of the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, as well as increased influence over Cuba. These territories captured in the Spanish-American war had a varied response toward U.S. occupation. In the Philippines, American forces faced armed insurgency, while in Puerto Rico, working-class and Progressive Puerto Ricans saw the United States as a successful counterweight to local sugar industry elites.

Many Progressives, including U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, saw no conflict between imperialism and reform at home -to them, both were forms of uplift, reform and improvement, and so they saw in these new colonies an opportunity to further the Progressive agenda around the world. However, especially after the violence of the Philippine-American War, other Progressives became increasingly vocal about their opposition to U.S. foreign intervention and imperialism. Still others argued that foreign ventures would detract from much-needed domestic political and social reforms. Under the leadership of U.S. Senator Robert La Follette, Progressive opposition to foreign intervention further increased under the Dollar Diplomacy policies of Republican President William Howard Taft and Secretary of State Philander Knox. However, Progressives remained mostly interested in domestic issues, and Republican Progressives sometimes hesitated to break party lines on foreign policy, hoping to ensure greater influence on domestic matters within the Republican Party. Similarly, after the election of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, Democratic Progressives also tended to follow Wilson's lead on foreign policy issues, while the partisan reaction against them was led by Republican Progressives. Wilson also faced opposition from John Barrett, Director-General of the Pan-American Union, whom Wilson eventually forced out of office in 1919.

President Wilson may have had greater reservations about U.S. foreign intervention in the Americas than President Theodore Roosevelt, but he was willing to intervene in the Mexican Revolution. Concerns about possible German submarine warfare also caused him to order U.S. military interventions in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and also led to the purchase of the U.S. Virgin Islands from Denmark. The military occupations incorporated elements of the Progressive program, attempting to establish effective local police forces, reform land laws, build public infrastructure, and increase public access to education. However, these programs were hampered by local opposition to U.S. occupation and U.S. policies that inadvertently proved counterproductive. Where Progressive policies threatened to destabilize U.S. authority, U.S. officials in charge of occupying forces opted for stability rather than authentic Progressive changes.

In foreign policy, the Progressive movement also split over the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. Progressive U.S. Senator William Borah led the campaign against ratification, and he would increasingly become the champion of the isolationist movement until his death in 1940. Other Progressives viewed the treaty more favorably.

In the 1920s, the Progressive movement began to be supplanted by several different movements. In some cases, such as women's suffrage, Progressive victory caused activists to lose momentum to push for further change. The Progressive wing of the Republican Party was weakened by the party splits of 1912 and 1924, which were attempts to form a third, Progressive party. The Progressive wing of the Democratic Party would eventually be subsumed under the broader New Deal coalition of Franklin Roosevelt. Foreign policy matters would increasingly be focused on the buildup to the Second World War, and Progressive issues took a back seat to the interventionist/isolationist split.

What was the biggest success of the Progressive Era?

How successful was the Progressive movement?

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Where was the movement most successful?