As the 20th century dawned and big business boomed, many had come to call the previous 20 years the Gilded Age.

Wealthy families, like the Carnegies, Vanderbilts, and Rockefellers enjoyed the fruits of big business and the fruits of other's labor.

But for most American families it was far from a Gilded Age as they incurred the harsh realities of sweatshops, slums, child labor, corruption in government and business, disease, and racial prejudice.

As Americans ushered in a new century, they began to demand change, equality, reform, and the Progressive Era was born.

[MUSIC] The roots of the Progressive Era reforms began many years earlier.

For over 80 years presidents and federal politicians had rewarded their supporters with lucrative government jobs.

It was called patronage or the spoils system from an old war slogan.

Following the Civil War at reconstruction the American public grew increasingly disgusted with government corruption and favoritism.

Some members of the Republican party began a reform movement nicknamed Mugwumps.

They were influential Republicans who refused to support their party's Presidential candidate who they believed opposed reform.

With the assassination of President James Garfield in 1881 by Charles Guiteau, whom he had refused to hire for a government position, the outcry for an end to patronage reached a crescendo.

Now President, Chester A.

Arthur convinced Congress to pass the Pendleton Act, establishing a Federal civil service.

Federal workers would now be hired based on competitive exams rather than political influence.

Slowly, civil service regulations were expanded to almost all government jobs.

The Mugwump concept of an honest government based on merit laid the groundwork for progressive reform, as did two other political groups, the Populists and the Socialists.

After the Civil War, many Americans returned to or began farming, but over the next decades, there was an overproduction of farm goods.

With more supply than demand, prices plummeted lower and lower.

At the same time, the cost of seed, fertilizer and railroad transportation increased leaving more and more farmers little money to support their families and still pay their debts to bankers.

In protest farmers began to organize political parties.

Of them, the Populist Party emerged as the most powerful.

The Populists supported an income tax, based on earnings, to support the government rather than the tariffs then charged to farmers and businesses.

They demanded a shorter workday, government loans to farmers, the direct election of state senators, secret ballot voting and other election reforms.

But Republican William McKinley defeated the Populist supported presidential candidate, Democrat William Jennings Bryan in 1896.

And the Populist Party, if not its causes, faded.

By 1900, another political movement emerged, demanding even more radical change, an end to capitalism itself.

Eugene V.

Debs was one of the founders of this new political force.

The Socialists.

Socialists felt that the Industrial Age and its capitalist culture was responsible for the wide disparity between the handful of rich and the working poor of America.

Debs's proposed solution was to eliminate private ownership.

Many middle and upper class Americans disagreed with the socialists.

They too felt that big business was out of control, and American workers were being taken advantage of.

These progressives felt they could improve capitalism by making government more responsive to social inequities.

Progressives wanted instead to reform government in business, insuring decent working conditions and wages and fair governmental rule.

[MUSIC] [SOUND] The progressive movement gained momentum and followers as Americans read the work of writers and journalists who exposed corruption in government and business.

And described the deplorable life of many working class Americans.

These writers became popularly known as muckrakers, from a character in John Bunyan's Pilgrims Progress who raked up the mud and the muck of the world.

>> Author Upton Sinclair shocked the nation with his graphic description of the filth and appalling working conditions in Chicago meat packing plants.

Ida Tarbell described the cut throat tactics used to eliminate competition by big businesses like Standard Oil.

Jacob Riis, an immigrant himself, wrote a first-hand account of life in the slums.

While, Lincoln Steffens, considered the leader of the muckraking movement exposed the corruption so rampant in city government.

As Americans read these muckraking books and magazine articles, they became not only aware of the country's problems, they demanded and supported reforms in both business and government.

A major reform governor, Robert M.

La Follette of Wisconsin enlisted experts to help him improve his state's government.

Soon, other states followed his lead.

>> My goal is not to smash corporations but to drive them out of politics.

>> Meanwhile on the local level, new forms of city government emerged.

After a tidal wave devastated the city of Galveston, Texas, a five-member commission was set up to rebuild the city rather than politicians.

This commission system of government proved so successful that in just 14 years some 400 other cities had followed Galveston's lead.

Still other cities adopted the council manager form of government.

Residents elect a city council to make laws, and the council appoints a manager, usually a professional public administrator, to run the city's various departments.

Both of these systems help to eliminate corruption in local government.

Meanwhile, state government reforms moved forward.

Other progressive governors, such as Charles Evan Hughes of New York, and Hiram Johnson of California, were joined by ordinary citizens like William S.

Uren of Oregon.

With his urging, Oregon adopted four election reforms.

The secret ballot, where voters individually get an official ballot and vote in a private booth.

The initiative, giving voters the right to put issues on a ballot for a vote.

The recall, which granted voters the right to remove an elected official, and perhaps most importantly, the direct primary, in which voters choose candidates for office, rather than political party leaders.

The direct primary led to the adoption of the 17th amendment to the Constitution giving Americans the ability to directly elect their Senators.

Many of the demands of the earlier populist movement were finally coming to fruition, as state and local governments became more responsive to citizens and tried to eliminate the influence of big business.

>> The growth of large business is merely survival of the fittest.

Although progressives wanted to preserve capitalism, they feared that the concentration of huge wealth and power in the hands of a few industrialists like Rockefeller, was dangerous.

As proof, they cited the millions of men, women and children who labored for low pay and long hours in hazardous working conditions.

[MUSIC] Progressives advocated government regulation of business, and over time, laws protecting workers and working conditions were adopted.

Still, it took until the late 1930's before the Supreme Court decided that a Federal minimum wage, was constitutional.

The turning point in awareness of the plight of working Americans occurred in 1911.

A tragic fire in a New York City garment factory left 126 young immigrant workers dead, trapped behind locked doors at their sowing machines.

Many of the women jumped to their deaths, or were burned beyond recognition.

The owners of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company were indicted for manslaughter, and new laws were passed to protect workers from slave labor conditions.

Other progressives felt that the problems of the country demanded moral, not legislative, solutions.

Believing that the drinking of alcohol led to moral collapse, crime and poverty organizations like the Women's Christian Temperance Union demanded, and received, a constitutional amendment, prohibiting the sale of alcohol in the United States.

Progressive Jane Adams took a slightly different view.

She co-founded a settlement house in the slums of Chicago, a grass roots approach to solving neighborhood problems.

Hall House and other settlement houses provided a kind of community center, where neighbors, especially immigrants could gather to learn English, obtain medical help, and learn to solve their own problems.

[MUSIC] Other progressive women concentrated on another moral issue, one that had plagued the nation since the reconstruction days following the Civil War, suffrage, the right for women to vote.

>> 1912, all along Fifth Avenue from Washington Square to 57th were gathered thousands of men and women of New York.

Women doctors, lawyers, architects, artists, actresses, sculptors, waitresses, domestic and industrial workers, all marched with in intensity and purpose that astonished the crowds that lined the street.

>> Founded in 1890, the leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, used three different approaches to try to win the vote for women.

First they attempted to get state governments to grant them suffrage.

But only Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and Idaho agreed.

Suffragettes then decided to take their cause to court, citing the 14th Amendment.

It said that states which denied their male citizens the right to vote would lose Congressional representation.

Women argued that they were citizens too, and therefore the states must allow them to vote, so Susan B Anthony and other women, made over 150 attempts to vote in ten different states, forcing the Supreme Court to decide their case.

But despite the fact the Supreme Court in 1875, agreed that women were citizens, they concluded that citizenship alone, did not automatically grant women the right to vote.

Their third approach was to rally support for a Constitutional amendment granting suffrage.

Time and again, the Senate defeated it.

The suffrage campaign marched on and with America's entry into World War I in 1917, the tide seemed to be turning.

Leaders of the women's movement redoubled their efforts.

Susan B Anthony and Carrie Chapman Catt continued the NAWSA's cautious approach.

While other women leaders, such as Lucy Burns and Alice Paul formed a more radical organization, he National Women's Party, which openly blamed the Democrats and used protest marches and even hunger strikes to try to win the vote.

Finally, in 1919, Congress approved the 19th Amendment, and the following year, the States ratified it, granting women suffrage.

The long battle for suffrage had taken 72 years.

[MUSIC] On the national political landscape, the times seemed right for a progressive United States president, and one emerged, if only by a twist of fate.

[MUSIC] Six months after being elected President, for the second time, William McKinley was assassinated, and his running mate, 42 year old, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt succeeded him 1901.

He was the youngest person ever to hold that office.

Roosevelt was born into a wealthy family, and although he suffered from asthma, he was determined to live an active life.

From marksmanship, to horseback riding and tennis, to boxing and hunting, to his heroic exploits with the Rough Riders, during the Spanish American War, Teddy Roosevelt proved a popular leader, first as governor of New York and then as president.

When asked why people so adored him, he said he thought it was because- >> I put into words, what is in their hearts and minds, but not their mouths.

>> Roosevelt outlined many progressive reforms to the American public, and gave his plan a name, the Square Deal.

When Roosevelt assumed office over 80% of American business was owned by trusts.

Although Congress had already enacted the Sherman Antitrust Act, it had not stopped the trusts from using unfair business practices to destroy their competition.

Roosevelt began by suing the Northern Securities Railroad Trust.

And in 1904 the Supreme Court agreed that the trust had become a monopoly and ordered it dissolved.

Roosevelt's administration filed over 40 more suits.

They pursued the beef industry, Standard Oil, the American Tobacco Company, and many other trusts.

Americans overwhelmingly returned Roosevelt to the presidency in 1904, as he continued his work as a trust-buster, and a staunch proponent of governmental regulation of business.

The many other progressives, who were serving in local, state, and federal government, helped Roosevelt get the support he needed, to get his proposed laws passed.

Like mayor Samuel Golden Rule Jones of Toledo Ohio.

Governors Charles Aycock of North Carolina.

Albert Cummins of Iowa.

And Fighting Bob LaFollette of Wisconsin.

Both of whom became United States senators.

Two years after his reelection, Roosevelt saw the Hepburn Act become law, which gave the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission the power to regulate the maximum fees railroads could charge.

Roosevelt next turned his attention to questions surrounding public health.

Like most Americans, he was horrified when he read Upton Sinclair's, The Jungle.

And even considered becoming a vegetarian.

He appointed a commission to investigate Sinclair's claims.

A man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats.

These rats were nuisances and the packers would put poison bread out for them.

They would die.

And then rats, bread and meat would go in the hoppers together.

Sinclair's charges unsanitary conditions proved to be true.

The Commission confirmed his description of potted ham as a hash containing ground rope and pig skin.

So in 1906 with Roosevelt's urging, Congress adopted the Meat Inspection Act.

Federal inspectors would now guarantee safe sanitary meat.

That same year more reforms followed.

With the passage of the pure food and drug act.

Manufacturers now had to list the contents of foods and drugs on labels.

And could not make exaggerated claims about a medicine's benefits.

No Deletarius drug, chemical, or preservative could be used in medicine's or foods.

Roosevelt brought the same enthusiasm to protecting America's natural resources that he did to leveling the business playing field.

After graduating from Harvard University, a young Theodore Roosevelt had worked as a cattle rancher in the Dakotas.

He quickly realized that ranchers were allowing cattle to overgraze the Great Plains, that farmers had cut down forests and plowed under the prairies and that America's natural resources were being squandered.

>> What will happen when our forests are gone?

When the coal, the iron, the oil and the gas are exhausted?

>> As president, Roosevelt withdrew 148 million acres of forest land from public sale, an area larger than Germany.

On the advice of his friend, naturalist John Muir.

Roosevelt established over 50 wildlife sanctuaries, five national parks, and designated 18 national monuments.

He also put fellow conservationist Gifford Pinchot in charge of supervising the national forests.

>> The nation was obsessed by a fury of development.

The American colossus was fiercely intent on appropriating and exploiting the riches of the richest of all continents.

>> Roosevelt was so determined that Americans realized that the country's resources were not endless, that he even banned Christmas trees in the White House.

Theodore Roosevelt ignored tradition and redefined the image and scope of the President of the United States.

He chose to be vibrant, visible, and accessible.

Roosevelt was the people's choice throughout America.

And in turn, America allowed him to use what he called his Bully Pulpit to accomplish his goals of reform and governmental regulation.

However, a third term as president wasn't in keeping with tradition.

So, bowing to president, Roosevelt instead handpicked his successor.

[MUSIC] William Howard Taft, who easily won the presidency in 1908.

Taft shared Roosevelt's progressive beliefs if not his overwhelming popularity.

His much more conservative approach to reform disappointed not only the more progressive members of his own party but the public at large.

The fact that the third party candidate, Socialist Eugene Debs, received almost a half a million votes for President.

Was a clear indication that a great many Americans wanted more radical change than even Roosevelt had pioneered.

Now under Taft's leadership they felt cheated.

Although he was physically large, six feet tall and 350 pounds, Taft was no match for the size of Roosevelt's personality and popularity with voters.

Taft was a distinguished lawyer and judge, but timid and uncomfortable as a politician.

When he lost re-election to Woodrow Wilson in 1912, he returned to his real love, the law.

And became the only ex-President to have been chosen as the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

He said the White House was the loneliest place in the world.

>> I don't remember that I ever was President.

>> Taft's one term as President was not without success.

But the bitter political wrangling within his own party.

Distracted the public's attention.

Taft actually broke up more than twice the number of trusts than Roosevelt during his presidency.

He convinced Congress to pass the Man Elkins Act.

Giving the Interstate Commerce Commission the ability to regulate telephone and telegraph companies.

And he urged Congress to pass the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, of federal income tax.

It was ratified by the states a year after he left office.

Still, Taft was more sympathetic to the demands of the conservatives in the Republican party than the progressives.

And the public believed he was failing to continue Roosevelt's reforms.

They were outraged when Taft signed a Pain Aldridge Tariff, raising prices on imported goods.

And incensed when Taft fired Gifford Pinchot.

When Theodore Roosevelt returned to America from overseas in 1910, he was given a hero's welcome.

The public urged him to seek a third term as President.

And two years later, he did.

However, the Republican Party refused to seat Roosevelt's delegates to their convention.

And as a result, Taft was renominated as a presidential candidate on the first ballot.

Furious, Roosevelt and his supporters formed their own political party, aptly named the Progressive Party.

After, Roosevelt posted.

>> I'm as strong as a bull moose.

And ready for the fight.

>> The Progressive Party then became known as the Bull Moose Party.

Former friends and party members, now political enemies, Taft and Roosevelt battled each other for votes.

Taft called Roosevelt a dangerous egotist, while Roosevelt said Taft was.

>> A fathead with a brain of a guinea pig.

Meanwhile, the democratic reform governor, now presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson championed his own progressive program called The New Freedom to American voters.

And wisely steered clear of the bickering between Roosevelt and Taft.

>> Don't interfere when your enemy is destroying itself >> With the Republican party vote split between Taft and Roosevelt.

Wilson won a majority of the electoral college votes and became President.

[MUSIC] Wilson set to work with much success.

He convinced the Senate to pass the Underwood Simmons Tariff, which for the first time since the Civil War, reduced tariff rates.

Next, he pursued financial reform by establishing a private banking systems under federal control to make credit more available throughout the county and quickly adjust the amount of money in circulation.

The Federal Reserve System was one of Wilson's greatest achievements, and is the cornerstone of our economy even today.

The next year, Wilson helped establish the Federal Trade Commission, and signed into law the Clayton Antitrust Act.

Both the commission and the act were aimed at stopping unfair business practices.

[MUSIC] Despite his admirable record of accomplishments, and his support of suffrage for women, Wilson, like Roosevelt and Taft, did little to improve African Americans' civil rights.

Perhaps it was his southern upbringing that influenced his decision to appoint segregationists as the heads of federal agencies.

Segregation expanded in the military.

And the practice returned to the Capitol and federal offices in Washington D.C.

that had been desegregated during reconstruction.

I have made no promises in particular to negroes, expect to do them justice.

>> Ida Wells-Barnett had joined W.E.B. DuBois, Mary Church Terrell, Jane Addams and others in founding the NAACP, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

In 1910, the NAACP had supported Wilson's bid for the presidency.

Now, the African Americans and their white supporters felt Wilson had betrayed their trust.

As editor of the Memphis Free Speech, Ida Wells Barnett had led a campaign to protest the lynching of African Americans in the United States.

Despite the fact that between 1892 and 1903, some 3000 African Americans were killed.

Wilson failed to support federal anti lynching legislation, or reverse the practice of segregation in his government.

William Monroe Trotter, editor of the Boston based newspaper, The Guardian asked him.

>> Have you a new freedom for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens?

God forbid.

>> There were limits to the success and scope of progressivism as evidenced by Wilson's inaction on civil rights.

Still, the progressive era did reflect the basic optimism of the American public.

A belief that any problem could be solved.

Despite Wilson's rhetoric, class struggles were emerging.

Unemployment was growing in America.

And by 1914, the first Wold War had broken out in Europe.

Woodrow Wilson was re-elected in 1916, and although his campaign slogan was, he kept us out of war.

America inevitably became involved.

The attention of the nation now turned from the reforms and inequalities of the Progressive Era to the reality and horror of war.

[MUSIC]