Q.

Comment on the role of Muckrakers and discuss the different phases of urban reform
Introduced during the Progressive era.

Or Discuss the different phases of urban reform Introduced during the Progressive era.

In the history of American society and politics, “Progressivism” was a many-sided reform
movement that emerged in the final years of the nineteenth century, flourished from about 1900
to 1920, and faded away by the early 1920s. In national politics, its greatest achievements
occurred between 1910 and 1917. In state and local politics and in private reform efforts—
churches, settlement houses, campaigns to fight diseases, for example—Progressive changes
began appearing in the 1890s and continued into the 1920s. This movement was the successor of
the Populist Movement which focused much on rural development and agrarian concerns.
Scholars have debated much about the nature of the movement being limited to Urban sphere.
The reforms they introduced were implemented in different phases, each with its own focus and
goals. However, though Progressivism found its expression much amongst urban intellectual
class, rural concerns were never ignored.

The main leadership was provided by the newly emerging politicians, university professors,
students and clergymen. Legions of activist women, despite lacking the suffrage, were
enormously effective. Most prominent in national politics were the “big four”: William Jennings
Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson. Mayors Tom Johnson
and Sam “Golden Rule” Jones in Ohio led change in their cities, as did governors Hiram Johnson
of California and James Vardaman of Mississippi. A new leadership was provided by
Muckrakers who were a group of writers, including the likes of Upton Sinclair, Lincoln
Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, during the this era who tried to expose the problems that existed in
American society as a result of the rise of big business, urbanization, and immigration. Most of
the muckrakers were journalists. The work of muckrakers influenced the passage of key
legislation that strengthened protections for workers and consumers.

The role of muckrakers in the Progressive Era was significant in bringing about social and
political reforms. Muckrakers used investigative journalism to uncover and report on issues such
as child labor, unsafe working conditions, political corruption, and monopolistic practices in
industries such as oil, railroads, and steel. Their work helped to create public awareness and
outrage over these issues, and put pressure on government officials and businesses to take action.
For example, Upton Sinclair’s book “The Jungle,” which exposed the unsanitary and inhumane
conditions in the meatpacking industry, led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the
Meat Inspection Act in 1906. In addition to exposing problems, muckrakers also proposed
solutions to these issues, often advocating for government intervention and regulation. They
helped to lay the groundwork for the Progressive movement, which sought to improve society
through political and social reforms.
In order to understand the nature of the Progressive movement, it is very important to look at the
works of Richard Hofstadter’s – The Age of reform. Progressivism, Hofstadter argued, differed
from populism in its location primarily urban), its constituency (largely middle-class
professionals), and much of its program. But Hofstadter did not share the view of more recent
scholars that progressivism was an impulse fundamentally different from, indeed antithetical to,
populism. Instead, he portrayed the two movements as part of the same broad current of reform.
Hofstadter conceded that progressivism "had the adherence of a heterogeneous public whose
various segments responded to various needs." But there was, he argued, a core group of
Progressives "upon whose contributions the movement was politically and intellectually as well
as financially dependent, and whose members did much to formulate its ideals".

A major leadership came from the clerical class, although a few such as the Episcopal priest The
Revd. William D. P. Bliss embraced the title of “Christian Socialist,” most academics preferred
to be seen not as socialists but as social scientists—although Christian ones. In this they were
part of a developing movement in many Protestant denominations called the Social Gospel. A
sense that unregulated, monopoly-tending capitalism was not only socially harmful but also
unjust and anti-Christian began welling up in the 1880s and 1890s, especially among Protestant
pastors with pulpits in larger cities who worked daily amid slum conditions and the urban poor.
The Social Gospel’s common theme was that much of urban and industrial life was sinfully
wrong and needed to be changed.

Successful reform movements need followers as well as leaders. Progressivism had millions of
followers across the country, electing legislators who put Progressive statutes on the books from
Massachusetts to Kansas to California. In Kansas, another state that led in Progressive reform,
Governor Edward W. Hoch in 1905 supported a primary election bill including direct election of
candidates for the Senate. Hoch backed further civil service reform, juvenile courts, a pure food
law, and many other measures reflecting a more pro-active state government. Kansas also passed
a comprehensive child labor law in 1905. The South developed its own brand of progressive
reform. The region had never built cities and industries and remained heavily rural and agrarian.
The rise of the People’s Party in the 1890s frightened leaders of the entrenched Democratic Party
across the South, and from Texas to Virginia they passed Jim Crow restrictions. Black men and
poor whites and black women were disfranchised but they cooperated wherever they could with
white women to win suffrage for all women. Progressivism flourished in the West. In California,
reform had many faces. Conservation was one—the protection of the state’s natural beauty. That
brought up the question of whether private interests or local governments should control water
and hydroelectric power etc.

Progressivism reflected a growing, if temporary, consensus among Americans that major changes
in the late nineteenth century had produced unwelcome, un-American imbalances in their society.
Evidences of this were a new class of ostentatious millionaires, monopolistic and out-of-control
corporations, conflict between workers and capitalists, and supine responses from governments.
Cities seemed to produce social ills—poverty, prostitution, disease, drunkenness, despair—not
that the countryside, especially in the South, was free of such things. But cities, especially large
ones, drew more attention.

Most of them favored using some form and degree of government— local, state, or federal—to
regulate economic problems, ameliorate social ills, and reconcile change with tradition. Such
willingness to use governments broke with the anti-regulatory attitude of the “Gilded Age” that
preceded the Progressive era. Because Progressivism manifested itself in everything from
railroad regulation to woman suffrage to immigration control to realist art and literature the
movement’s core theme became “Reform”. But much of the Progressive spirit lay in that very
openness to change, that conviction that “something needs to be done.” At root, Progressivism
was reformist, not radical. It crossed the lines of party, class, gender, and even race. In the
industrializing and urbanizing Northeast and Midwest, Progressives fought against corruption
and cronyism in city and state government, and repression of workers in factories and mines;
they also fought for public education, clean cities, and responsive governments. In the
predominantly agrarian South and Great Plains, Progressives fought against railroad monopolies,
scarce credit, exploitation of child labor, and chronic diseases. In many states they promoted
woman suffrage.

Eventually, by the second decade of the 1900s, most of the progressives agreed on broad
measures such as the graduated income tax, the direct election of U.S. senators, and woman
suffrage, though not always on the details. The majority also supported two policies that were not
part of the liberalism of the New Deal and later, immigration restriction and prohibition of
alcoholic beverages. Some Progressives joined to create the NAACP and the Urban League. No
one favored American imperialism more than Theodore Roosevelt, yet he was undeniably a
Progressive leader. Many favored entering World War I against Germany, yet Jane Addams,
William Jennings Bryan, and many other Progressives opposed it strongly.

However, Hofstadter faced criticism on the theory of “displaced elites” . The Critics argued that
such people did not constitute the whole, or even the most important segment, of the reform
constituency. David P. Thelen provided perhaps the boldest challenge by arguing that social
tensions played almost no role in generating support for Progressive reform. Wisconsin
Progressives, he argued, emerged from all classes and all social groups more or less equally and
thus the question of who the Progressives were was far less important than the question of what
the Progressives wanted and what they did to achieve it. Herbert Gutman, J. Joseph
Hutmacher, and John D. Buenker, for example, demonstrated how workers, immigrants, and
urban machine politicians were central to some of the most important reform crusades of the era.
Others looked "above" Hofstadter's constituency: to the same corporate elites and agents of
organization against whom Hofstadter had claimed the Progressives were reacting. Samuel P.
Hays showed how upper-class business leaders dominated several municipal reform movements.
Gabriel Kolko described Progressive regulatory reforms as an effort by corporate moguls to
limit competition and strengthen their own economic hegemony.

Ultimately, however, neither Hofstadter's "traditionalist" model of progressivism nor the

"modernizing" view of some of his critics has satisfied scholars attempting to explain the
enormous range and variety of early twentieth-century reform. No single class or interest group,
most historians tend now to argue, can lay exclusive claim to the mantle of progressivism, just as
no single ideology can account for the sweep of its concerns. Instead of identifying a single,
dominant Progressive constituency or a clear, common Progressive program, scholars now tend
to argue for a more pluralistic view that leaves room for many different groups and many
different impulses.

To Conclude- The first phase of urban reform was characterized by the belief that the physical
environment had a direct impact on the moral and physical health of the city’s inhabitants.
Reformers during this phase focused on improving housing conditions, sanitation, and public
health. The aim was to create a more hygienic and healthy environment for city dwellers. The
second phase of urban reform focused on addressing the social problems that were prevalent in
urban areas. Reformers during this phase aimed to improve the living conditions of the urban
poor by addressing issues such as poverty, crime, and education. The third phase of urban reform
focused on the issue of government corruption. Reformers during this phase aimed to reduce the
influence of political machines and to increase transparency in government. They believed that
the corrupt practices of politicians and their allies were a major obstacle to reform. In conclusion,
the Progressive Era in the United States was a period of social and political reform that saw the
introduction of many different phases of urban reform. Each phase had its own focus and goals,
but all aimed to improve the lives of city dwellers by addressing issues such as housing,
sanitation, public health, poverty, crime, education, and government corruption. Many of the
reforms introduced during this era had a lasting. And The role of muckrakers in the Progressive
Era was to bring about greater transparency and accountability in American society, and to push
for reforms that would improve the lives of ordinary people. Their work paved the way for many
of the social and political changes that occurred in the 20th century.