The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era, roughly 1896 to 1917, was an American period of widespread social activism and political reform undertaken in direct response to the excesses of the preceding Gilded Age, including unregulated industrial monopolies, dangerous factory and food-safety conditions, urban political corruption, and the exclusion of women from the vote. Investigative journalists dubbed "muckrakers," including Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle exposed appalling meatpacking industry conditions and helped spur the Pure Food and Drug Act the same year, publicized abuses that fed a broad reform coalition spanning both major political parties, most visibly embodied in Republican president Theodore Roosevelt's trust-busting antitrust enforcement and Democrat Woodrow Wilson's subsequent banking and tariff reforms. The era produced major structural changes to American government and society, including the direct election of U.S. senators, the graduated federal income tax, the founding of the Federal Reserve System in 1913, and growing momentum for women's suffrage that would culminate in the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, alongside the separate and less uniformly progressive movement for alcohol prohibition. The era is generally considered to end with United States entry into the First World War in April 1917, which redirected national political energy toward the war effort.