7.4 Historians Evaluate Progressivism

EXCERPT 1:

“When the American national state began, in the late nineteenth century, to acquire the legal authority and the administrative capability to regulate a mature industrial economy and protect its citizens from the acknowledged pathologies* of large-scale capitalism, it did so in response to the demands of politically mobilized farmers… Although some of the features [of this regulation] were not of the farmers’ design, they nonetheless represented responses to the agrarians’ unremitting pressure for public control of private economic power. In pursuing this reformulation of the state, the agrarians reached out to fellow citizens… [An] alliance of ‘producers against plutocrats’** was central to the Progressive [Era]… Agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I.”

Source: Elizabeth Sanders, historian, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917, published in 1999

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EXCERPT 2:

“[By the early 1900s] Southern women focused on many needs of Afro-Americans… But the key to solving all these problems, leaders of black women were convinced, was education of the masses of black citizens. Education was seen as the first step toward racial equality… Throughout the period under consideration, the kind and quality of education appropriate for Afro-Americans in the South were subjects of continued debate…

“In the United States generally, 1895–1925 was an era of social change, during which many self-help and social service programs were initiated throughout the country. The Progressive Movement… helped to bring about needed reform and a restructuring of white society. Afro-Americans, however, were generally excluded from the Progressive Party and from the effort to change the American social order. Consequently, Afro-Americans had to create their own social service organizations to aid the victims of an oppressive society… The significant social, economic, and political gains made by Afro-Americans could not have been achieved without the diligent labor of countless black women who were dedicated to advancing the interests of all Afro-Americans.”

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Source: Cynthia Neverdon-Morton, historian, Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895–1925, published in 1989

* pathologies: social ills

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** plutocrats: rich elites