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 transporta tion 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 some but a conceptual example for the many. This was after all the period of Andrew Carnegie's declaration of the Gospel of Wealth and his well-documented embrace of Social Darwinism, each of which provided popular explanation of why and how the industrial giants nationalized industry and acquired vast wealth. The views of John D. Rockefeller, who built the Standard Oil Company, were also very much in line with Darwinism. As he told his Sunday School class:
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