The Progressive Era and American Life

This research will examine the period of American history known as the Progressive Era. The research will set forth the social and political context in which Progressivism emerged and discuss what individuals and groups were identified with the phenomenon and why, what the trend achieved, and its significance as an outgrowth of previous movements in American culture and as a precursor of events and actions that followed.

Many of the features of American life that gave rise to the age of industry and enterprise known as the Gilded Age also fostered the development of a period in which society, politics, and culture converged so as to give to the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the years before the onset of World War I the term Progressive Era. How socially and politically progressive ideas of transformation and reform could have arisen in the context of such phenomena as robber barons, a transportation system with national scope, a diversified but also specialized production and distribution infrastructure critical to industrial processes, a shared national sense that natural resources were unlimited, and the government's practice of encouraging industrial and agricultural development and professionalization by way of laissez faire policies, land grants, and loans may seem paradoxical, unless it is also remembered that social experience has a conceptual as well as material component.

The extraordinary material success of a few proved an attractive objective for som

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ated to the task of curing society's ills, and it appears to have been more important in the long run than Social Darwinism because it has survived more or less intact as a method and structure of thought. According to its principal exponent, the American philosopher William James, the only way to test an idea was to apply it to experience (and not, for example, to the dogma of either religion or Social Darwinism). Pragmatism is "a method of carrying on abstract discussion [so that] . . . the serious meaning of a concept lies . . . in the concrete difference to someone which its being true will make." If an idea or principle was able to solve a practical problem, it was true and good. If an idea was not practical, it should be laid aside. That being so, and given the variety of states of evolved social experience, the shape of the practical experience of human society could be altered, perhaps toward a more evolved state but more fundamentally toward a state more closely approximating truth. Three strands of Progressivism emerged out of exposure of unpleasant truths about industrial society. One was associated with muckraking journalism and fiction and the discourse of American intellectual life that fostered organized political

Category: History - T