ocial Darwinism, Progressivism from 1900 to 1918 sought to promote urban reform, conservation, social improvement in the status of labor, women and minorities and even to regulate government trusts. Yet while the project of these reforms frequently was the amelioration of the impoverished classes, it was committed to a social philosophy that attributed poverty to individual failings rather than environmental conditions, an essentially 19th century Christian view.
The success of Progressivism is evident in its social legislation (worker's compensation, regulated working hours, child labor laws, wage laws for women, prohibition), women's suffrage, the reform of local government, and settlement houses, all of which it was believed would save America from the glaring inequality of industrial capitalism. Progressivism, concludes Patterson, did little to prevent the social up
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