Reforming the juvenile justice system was another way to limit the institutionalization of poor children. Prior to the Progressive era, children arrested for a whole host of crimes, including truancy and shoplifting, could end up tried as adults and placed in adult jails. Yet, increasingly, middle-class and prosperous Americans were adopting the view that children, including poor children, should be viewed not as miniature adults, but as human beings who needed proper teaching and nurturing in order to grow into responsible adults; such nurturing would preferably be done by parents, not outside institutions. In 1899, Hull House reformers such as Julia Lathrop and Louise DeKoven Bowen persuaded Illinois lawmakers to institute the first juvenile court; unlike the adult courts, it could exercise greater flexibility in sentencing and it could concentrate on rehabilitation rather than punishment. Soon after, such courts were instituted in cities across the United States.[7] Mothers’ pension campaigns exemplify how advocates for expanding social welfare appealed to the maternalist sensibilities of middle-class audiences. In writing in 1916 about the activities of their Propaganda Committee, Sophia Loeb of the Allegheny County Mothers’ Pension League, campaigning for mothers’ pensions in the Greater Pittsburgh area, reported on the first-ever public celebration of Mother’s Day in the United States, noting that the gathering of 1,100 “was unique in the fact that not only was tribute paid to Motherhood in speech and flower, but Mother was honored in a more practical way by trying to assist the mothers less fortunate, in their struggle to help her children under her own roof.”[6] While many did philanthropic work on behalf of poor families, in this new era women also called for state participation in granting financial relief to the needy. To help one group of poor families—single mothers forced to raise children without male incomes—they campaigned on behalf of state aid to widowed mothers. Given the high male mortality due to work accidents and poor job conditions, the growing numbers of young, very poor widowed mothers was a major social problem. By the early twentieth century, many family welfare experts were convinced that if at all possible, poor children of widowed mothers should be kept at home, rather than placed in orphanages, which had been the custom in the nineteenth century. In the second decade of the twentieth century, mothers’ pension leagues campaigning across the country were remarkably successful. By 1920, the vast majority of states had enacted some sort of mothers’ pension program. These state-funded initiatives were the precursors to the Aid to Dependent Children Program, which became federal law during the New Deal as part of the Social Security Act. Whether campaigning for mothers’ pensions, protective labor legislation, public health programs my dream job essays, or the establishment of the juvenile justice system, progressive maternalists stressed that these initiatives would help women become better mothers. They advocated specific programs because of their traditional convictions regarding gender roles and family life, with men as successful breadwinners and women proper domestic caretakers, but their approach was also strategic. Women knew that their participation in the political arena flew in the face of conventional norms; concentrating on issues already associated with women’s traditional roles lessened the impact of their challenge. The decade that followed World War I saw the demobilization of most progressive initiatives. Efforts to enhance government responsibility for social welfare took a back seat to nativist campaigns and moves to decrease the power of trade unions while increasing the ability of American corporations to operate unimpeded by government regulations. By the middle of the 1920s most of the progressive women’s organizations and their members were facing well-publicized accusations that they were part of a vast radical conspiracy that was determined to bring a communist government to the United States, just as the Bolsheviks had recently done in Russia. Within a decade, vast networks of middle-class and wealthy women were energetically addressing how these social programs affected women and children. Encouraged by the national General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC), local women’s clubs turned to learning about and then addressing the crises of the urbanizing society. Excluded by the GFWC, hundreds of African American women’s clubs affiliated with the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) focused on family welfare among black Americans who were dealing with both poverty and racism. The National Council of Jewish Women (NCJW), dominated by prosperous German-Jewish women, sprang into action in the 1890s as well, to work with the newly arrived eastern European Jewish community. The National Congress of Mothers (later the Parent Teacher Association) emerged in 1897 to address the needs of the American family and the mother’s crucial role in fulfilling those needs. Activist women throughout the country, from Boston in the East, to Seattle in the West, and Memphis in the South, focused on improving public schools, especially in poor neighborhoods.[3] And though they believed that women had a special affinity for social welfare work, progressive women did not rely on the notion that women had a natural sympathy for the poor. Tackling the social problems of the day, they believed, required hardheaded research. “A colony of efficient and intelligent women,” Florence Kelley wrote of her colleagues at Hull House in 1892.[9] Three years later, the women of Hull House published the famous detailed survey of social conditions in Chicago, Hull House Maps and Papers. now considered a major work in the early history of American social science. Women conducted detailed social investigations as part of their campaigns on behalf of protective labor legislation. And at the Children’s Bureau, Lathrop campaigned on behalf of public health initiatives for infant and maternal care and against child labor by first launching major investigations of the conditions that she wanted government to address. The settlement house movement soon took hold throughout the country. Located in urban, poor, often immigrant communities, the houses were residences for young middle-class and prosperous women, and some men, who wished not merely to minister to the poor and then go home, but to live among them, to be their neighbors, to participate with them in bettering their communities. Their poorer neighbors did not live in the settlement houses but spent time there, participating in various clubs and classes, including kindergarten and day nurseries for children. Settlement houses also sent volunteers out into the community. Truly pioneers in the area of public health, their visiting nurses taught hygiene and health care to poor immigrant households. Settlement house workers and other woman reformers also campaigned for public milk stations in an effort to reduce infant mortality. 526 words
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This paper will also include individuals who were very influential during the Progressive Movement. Upton Sinclair wrote "The Jungle", which exposed the meat packing industry. Ida Tarbell wrote "A History Of The Standard Oil Company". There was also Samuel H. Adams who exposed the medicine industry. Progressive State governors at this time included Robert M. LaFollette, of Wisconsin help with writing my descriptive essay, Hiram Johnson, of California essay about my childhood dreams, and Charles Evans Hughes, of New York. Social reforms consisted of improvements in living conditions of the poor. Settlement houses were set up. In factories and mines people worked for long hours, low wages, and operated unsafe machinery. Progressives helped pass laws stating that there had to be safety precautions taken in factories, and that money would be given to employees if they were injured on the job. The Progressive Movement made many economic, social, and political reforms between 1890 to 1917. Economic reforms increased government regulations of business and established a series of tax reforms. Before The Progressive Movement, taxes were based on property. Progressives demanded that the taxes be based on income rather than land, because wealthy people tried to hide land as stocks and bonds, so they did not have to pay taxes on them. At the time of the Progressive Movement there were also many social problems that faced America. One goal that was set was to have housing regulations. Another goal was to establish a minimum wage. The reason for that was that in the factories and mines workers were working an eight hour day, and they were not receiving a fair wage. The Progressives also wanted safety requirements in the workplace. In some factories the conditions were very hazardous and haphazard. By the way of the media, the Progressives wanted to increase public awareness of corruption and other problems in the businesses and the government. There were many advantages such as free passes on railroads that were given to government officials to influence their actions. The Progressives also wanted to increase popular participation in the American system. In 1905 American Social reformers began to call themselves Progressives. The philosophy of progressivism welcomed innovations and reforms in government to alleviate ills of society and wanted people to have more control over the government. The Progressives and, this movement, to get away from problems such as business monopolies, dishonest politics, city slums, and poor working conditions in factories and mines. From 1890 to 1900 reformers helped bring about laws aimed at relieving these problems. The Progressive Movement had three reforms which included economic, political, and social. The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project is a university-chartered research center associated with the Department of History of The George Washington University Also working to expunge the ills of society were progressive, “muckraking” journalists. Jacob Riis exposed the poor living conditions of the tenement slums in “How the Other Half Lives” (1890) and inspired significant tenement reforms. In 1904, Robert Hunter published Poverty. In his book, Hunter attempted: (i) “to define and measure poverty”; (ii) “to describe some of its evils”; (iii) “to point out certain remedial actions”; and (iv) “to show that the evils of poverty are procreative”. Hunter argued in his book that there were over 10 million people living in poverty in America. Also in 1904 Lincoln Steffens, who specialized in investigating government and political corruption, published a collection of his articles in The Shame of the Cities . revealing the political corruption he uncovered in the party machines of Chicago and New York. Most shocking to contemporary readers was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906) in which he traced an immigrant family’s exploitation and downward spiral in Chicago’s meat packing industry. The novel resulted in the Pure Food and Drug and the Meat Inspection Acts in 1906, the first legislation of its kind. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York by Jacob Riis Limitations on reading or speaking English was a problem for many immigrants; many workers could not read safety regulations or instructions on operating machines. Only about two percent of those injured or killed ever-recovered on claims. In confrontations of the late 19th century, workers were generally losers. In addition, immigrants and blacks were often targets of resentment because they were used as strikebreakers, or “scabs.” In general the union movement was secondary to the general struggle for jobs—it was a buyers’ market. The age of industrialization was also the age of exploitation—of people, land, and resources—and while many benefited from the results ielts essays pollution, many also suffered. As industrialization and urbanization changed the face of America forever, those who took the time to look backward were astounded at how far the nation had come in just a few decades. Progressivism is a term commonly applied to a variety of responses to the economic and social problems that arose as a result of urbanization and the rapid industrialization introduced to America in the 19th Century. Progressivism began as a social movement to cope with a variety of social needs and eventually evolved into a reform movement and greater political action. The early progressives rejected Social Darwinism. In other words, they were people who believed that the problems society faced (poverty, poor health, violence, greed, racism, class warfare) could best be addressed by providing good education, a safer environment, an efficient workplace and honest government. Progressives lived mainly in the cities, were college educated, and believed that government could be a tool for change. The immigrant “problem” was handled for the most part by white, middle-class young women. Many of these female reformers had been educated in the new women’s colleges that had sprung up in the late nineteenth century. Possessing an education yet barred from most professional careers sample thesis topic tourism, these women took to “association building” as a means to be active in public life. Among these associations were the Women’s Trade Union League, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. the National Consumers’ League, the American Red Cross. Associated Jewish Charities, Legal Aid, Juvenile Protective Association and a vast system of “Americanizing” centers known as settlement houses. These organizations were meant to “purify” the public sphere of men in which vice and corruption were bred. The WTUL and the NCL sought to cleanse the largely male-owned garment factories in which female workers were harshly exploited. The Temperance Union sought to eliminate the dominantly male immigrant worker’s drinking habits and with them, saloons and prostitution. With settlement houses, women such as Jane Addams and Lillian Wald set out to uplift the immigrant masses and to teach them “proper” ways of life and moral values. These houses, of which there were 400 in America by 1910, instructed immigrants on everything from proper dancing forms (intentionally steering them away from more popular and sexually suggestive dances like the “cakewalk”) to proper housekeeping and civic reforms. Settlement house work influenced woman and child labor laws, welfare benefits, and factory inspection legislation. The window of time that the Progressive Era inhabits is a brief one, but not at all insignificant. Its reforms introduced a new role for government. In dealing with the problems of urbanization and industrialization, the country’s democratic institutions had to address problems on a very local level. This precedent would provide the backbone for the New Deal and would inspire the reforming spirit of the nation’s leaders during the Great Depression. To deal with these problems the federal government enacted: Notable social reformers of the era included: Jane Addams. Lillian Wald, Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Susan B. Anthony. Carrie Nation. Margaret Sanger. Harriet Tubman. Alice Paul and Lucy Burns (please see the “people” section of the website to learn more about these individuals!) Influential journalists and writers who helped carry the message of social reform included Jacob Riis, Ida Tarbel, Upton Sinclair and Thomas Nast. Political reformers of the time included: Theodore Roosevelt. Eugene V. Debs, William E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington. Altogether, these reformers were powerful voices for progressivism. They concentrated on exposing the evils of corporate greed, combating fear of immigrants, and urging Americans to think hard about what democracy meant. The Origins of Progressivism Applying this sense of duty to all ills of society, middle-class reformers attempted to restore democracy by limiting big business, “Americanizing” the immigrants, and curbing the political machines. Theodore Roosevelt, wanting to ensure free competition, was particularly instrumental in curtailing monopolistic business practices during his time in the White House. He extended the powers of the executive branch and the powers of the government within the economy, departing from the laissez-faire attitude of previous administrations. By supporting labor in the settlement of the Anthracite Coal Strike in 1902, Roosevelt became the first president to assign the government such a direct role and duty to the people. Thank you for the question. I never really thought about who was the most progressive of the Progressives. However, I did a little review and came up with a number of names you might want to consider instead of Woodrow Wilson. Clearly, Jane Addams qualifies; but there are others who contributed significantly. For example, Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch was influential in most of the great reforms of her day:the opening of public schools as social centers, National Aid for Public Education, widow’s pensions, nursery schools, child care centers, woman’s suffrage, housing, dock conditions and old age poverty. MKS was a popular speaker on such topics as settlement work, housing, recreation, and woman’s suffrage, and she published articles on housing, education, and her work at GH. She also published several books, including The City Worker’s World (1917), Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (1938), Group Life (1940), and Here Is God’s Plenty (1942). To support themselves and their families, thousands of men, women and children worked long hours in unsafe factories to meet the insatiable American appetite for cheap, mass-produced goods. For example, from 1880 to 1900 the number of employed women went from 2.6 to 8.6 million. In 1880 4% of clerical workers were women; by 1920 the figure was 50%, but women could not get management positions. Although middle class married women were able to stay at home, among the poor, women—and children—had to work. A state of quasi-slavery existed where parents bound children to work, but child labor would not be squarely addressed until the Progressive Era. Unions were generally hostile to women; men believed women shouldn’t work for wages because they undercut wage levels. Some separate women’s unions did exist, and they sought special legislation for female workers. For example, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union led a massive strike against New York City sweatshops. Union leaders came from the middle class and were not militant, but insistent. In the 19th century no special concern existed over children or women doing hard work—they had always worked within the family on farms or in family businesses. By 1890 18% of the labor force consisted of children between the ages of ten and fifteen. Industrial safety was a large issue: factory work was very dangerous, and it was difficult if not impossible to hold factory owners responsible for deaths and injuries. Around 1900 25-35,000 deaths and 1 million injuries per year occurred on industrial jobs. Many of the deaths occurred on railroad jobs, which were especially dangerous. Fires, machinery accidents, train wrecks and other misfortunes were common. No federal regulation of safety and no enforcement of state or local safety regulations existed. Insurance and pensions were rare, and courts were not sympathetic to worker claims; no liability was seen if the worker was negligent, or if the employer was not. The burden of proof was on the injured party to prove he or she had not been negligent—and it is difficult to prove a negative. In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns. I would argue that linking the conservative resurgence to a recovery of the Constitution was in fact a critical part of its ability to flourish in a way that conservatism had not otherwise managed earlier in the 20th century. Government's main duty for the Founders is to secure that freedom -- at home through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law paper you can write on online, abroad through a strong national defense. The protection of life and liberty is achieved through vigorous prosecutions of crime against person and property or through civil suits for recovery of damages, these cases being decided by a jury of one's peers. The Progressives also believed that the scientifically educated leaders of the advanced nations (especially America, Britain, and France) should not hesitate to rule the less advanced nations in the interest of ultimately bringing the world into freedom, assuming that supposedly inferior peoples could be brought into the modern world at all. Political scientist Charles Merriam openly called for a policy of colonialism on a racial basis: That was precisely Daniel Patrick Moynihan's insight in Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding. Almost overnight, an obscure, untested academic theory about the cause of juvenile delinquency -- namely, Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin's structure of opportunity theory -- leapt from the pages of the social science journals into the laws waging a war on poverty. Second, government must become involved in the "spiritual" development of its citizens -- not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment ("conservation"), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture. For the Founders, the consent principle extended beyond the founding of society into its ordinary operation. Government was to be conducted under laws, and laws were to be made by locally elected officials, accountable through frequent elections to those who chose them. The people would be directly involved in governing through their participation in juries selected by lot. Third, still other scholars believe that the ideas of the American founding itself are responsible for current developments. Among conservatives, Robert Bork's Slouching Toward Gomorrah adopts the gloomy view that the Founders' devotion to the principles of liberty and equality led inexorably to the excesses of today's welfare state and cultural decay. Allan Bloom's best-selling The Closing of the American Mind presents a more sophisticated version of Bork's argument. Liberals like Gordon Wood agree, but they think that the change in question is good, not bad. Wood writes that although the Founders themselves did not understand the implications of the ideas of the Revolution, those ideas eventually "made possible…all our current egalitarian thinking." This volume's pessimism also neglects the critical moment in American history which provided the indispensable basis for today's effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism. As you may know, in the Republican primaries of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency on a platform of radical constitutional reform enunciated in his "Charter of Democracy" speech, delivered in Columbus in February 1912. There and subsequently, he endorsed the full range of Progressive constitutional reforms: the initiative, referendum, and recall, including the recall of judges and judicial decisions. Authors: William A. Schambra and Thomas West The connection between sexual liberation and Progressivism is indirect, for the Progressives, who tended to follow Hegel in such matters, were rather old-fashioned in this regard. But there was one premise within Progressivism that may be said to have led to the current liberal understanding of sex. That is the disparagement of nature and the celebration of human will, the idea that everything of value in life is created by man's choice, not by nature or necessity. Since the Progressives held that nature gives man little or nothing and that everything of value to human life is made by man, they concluded that there are no permanent standards of right. Dewey spoke of "historical relativity." However, in one sense, the Progressives did believe that human beings are oriented toward freedom, not by nature (which, as the merely primitive, contains nothing human), but by the historical process, which has the character of progressing toward increasing freedom. So the "relativity" in question means that in all times, people have views of right and wrong that are tied to their particular times, but in our time, the views of the most enlightened are true because they are in conformity with where history is going. 3. The Progressives' Rejection of consent and Compact as the Basis of Society Two decades ago, in a widely publicized report of the American Council of Learned Societies, several leading professors in the humanities proclaimed that the "ideal of objectivity and disinterest," which "has been essential to the development of science," has been totally rejected by "the consensus of most of the dominant theories" of today. Instead, today's consensus holds that "all thought does, indeed, develop from particular standpoints, perspectives, interests." So science is just a Western perspective on reality, no more or less valid than the folk magic believed in by an African or Pacific Island tribe that has never been exposed to modern science. While the Progressives differed in their assessment of the problems and how to resolve them, they generally shared in common the view that government at every level must be actively involved in these reforms. The existing constitutional system was outdated and must be made into a dynamic, evolving instrument of social change, aided by scientific knowledge and the development of administrative bureaucracy. This aspect of the election of 1912 -- that is, the contest within the Republican Party between Taft and Roosevelt about preserving the Constitution -- is almost entirely forgotten today. Shelves and shelves of dissertations and books have been done on Progressivism and socialism in that election, but virtually nothing about conservatism. As we try to recover an understanding of the Founders' Constitution, so also conservatives need to recover our own history, which has otherwise been completely ignored by the Progressive academy. Progressivism was the reform movement that ran from the late 19th century through the first decades of the 20th century, during which leading intellectuals and social reformers in the United States sought to address the economic, political, and cultural questions that had arisen in the context of the rapid changes brought with the Industrial Revolution and the growth of modern capitalism in America. The Progressives believed that these changes marked the end of the old order and required the creation of a new order appropriate for the new industrial age. Once sexual conduct comes under the scrutiny of such a concern, it is not hard to see that limiting sexual expression to marriage -- where it is clearly tied to nature's concern for reproduction -- could easily be seen as a kind of limitation of human liberty. Once self-realization (Dewey's term, for whom it was still tied to reason and science) is transmuted into self-expression (today's term), all barriers to one's sexual idiosyncrasies must appear arbitrary and tyrannical. As this illustrates, the New Deal, for all its Progressive roots, is in some sense less purely Progressive than LBJ's Great Society. In the Great Society, we had more explicit and direct an application of the Progressive commitment to rule by social science experts, largely unmitigated initially by political considerations. Toggle open close The Progressives believed that a historical process was leading all mankind to freedom, or at least the advanced nations. Following Hegel, they thought of the march of freedom in history as having a geographical basis. It was in Europe, not Asia or Africa, where modern science and the modern state had made their greatest advances. The nations where modern science had properly informed the political order were thought to be the proper leaders of the world. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state. Mr. West and his co-authors are all children of this conservative resurgence and are themselves obviously hoping to link it to a recovery of constitutionalism. So perhaps it is just modesty that leads them to profess that their efforts and those of their teachers have come to naught and to insist that Progressivism has succeeded in destroying America after all. What follows is a discussion about the effect that Progressivism has had -- and continues to have -- on American politics and political thought. The remarks stem from the publication of The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), to which Dr. West contributed. The Progressives rejected these claims as naive and unhistorical. In their view, human beings are not born free. John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the Progressives, wrote that freedom is not "something that individuals have as a ready-made possession." It is "something to be achieved." In this view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he collectively creates himself. He is a social construct. Since human beings are not naturally free, there can be no natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also writes, "Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology." In other words, to some degree, modern conservatism owes its success to a recovery of and an effort to root itself in the Founders' constitutionalism. Frank Meyer was famous for his doctrine of fusionism -- a fusing of libertarian individualism with religious traditionalism. The real fusionism for contemporary conservatism, I would suggest, is supplied by its effort to recover the Founders' constitutionalism, which was itself an effort to fuse or blend critical American political principles like liberty and equality, competent governance and majority rule. Like the volume to which he has contributed, Tom West's remarks reflect a pessimism about the decisively debilitating effect of Progressivism on American politics. The essayists are insufficiently self-aware -- about their own contributions and those of their distinguished teachers. That is, they are not sufficiently aware that they themselves are part of an increasingly vibrant and aggressive movement to recover the Founders' constitutionalism -- a movement that could only have been dreamt of when I entered graduate school in the early '70s. Finally, a recovery of the Constitution's concept of decentralist federalism informed conservatism's defense of family, neighborhood, local community, and local house of worship; that is, it gave us a way to defend local community against Progressivism's doctrine of national community but within a strong national framework, without falling into anarchic doctrines of "township sovereignty" or concurrent majorities. In the founding, God was conceived in one of two ways. Christians and Jews believed in the God of the Bible as the author of liberty but also as the author of the moral law by which human beings are guided toward their duties and, ultimately, toward their happiness. Nonbelievers (Washington called them "mere politicians" in his Farewell Address) thought of God merely as a creative principle or force behind the natural order of things. The thesis of our book, The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science. is that Progressivism transformed American politics. What was that transformation? It was a total rejection in theory, and a partial rejection in practice, of the principles and policies on which America had been founded and on the basis of which the Civil War had been fought and won only a few years earlier. When I speak of Progressivism, I mean the movement that rose to prominence between about 1880 and 1920. Commentary by William A. Schambra As much as the Progressives succeeded in challenging the intellectual underpinnings of the American constitutional system, they nonetheless faced the difficulty that the system itself -- the large commercial republic and a separation of powers, reflecting and cultivating individual self-interest and ambition -- remained in place. As their early modern designers hoped and predicted, these institutions continued to generate a certain kind of political behavior in accord with presuppositions of the Founders even as Progressive elites continued for the past 100 years to denounce that behavior as self-centered, materialistic, and insufficiently community-minded and public-spirited. Progressives therefore embraced a much more active and indeed imperialistic foreign policy than the Founders did. In "Expansion and Peace" (1899) internet marketing strategy case study, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that the best policy is imperialism on a global scale: "every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for law, order, and righteousness." Thus, the American occupation of the Philippines, T.R. believed, would enable "one more fair spot of the world's surface" to be "snatched from the forces of darkness. Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of peace." Indeed, the entire point of the Great Society was to reshape the behavior of the poor -- to move them off the welfare rolls by transforming their behavior according to what social sciences had taught us about such undertakings. It was explicitly a project of social engineering in the best Progressive tradition. Sober liberal friends of the Great Society would later admit that a central reason for its failure was precisely the fact that it was an expertise-driven engineering project, which had never sought the support or even the acquiescence of popular majorities. Indeed heading for cover letter, modern liberals do often defend Social Security in those terms. But in fact, FDR knew the American political system well enough to rely on other than altruistic impulses to preserve Social Security past the New Deal. The fact that it's based on the myth of individual accounts -- the myth that Social Security is only returning to me what I put in -- is what has made this part of the 20th century's liberal project almost completely unassailable politically. As FDR intended, Social Security endures because it draws as much on self-interested individualism as on self-forgetting community-mindedness. Second is the rational choice explanation. Morris Fiorina and others argue that once government gets involved in providing extensive services for the public, politicians see that growth in government programs enables them to win elections. The more government does, the easier it is for Congressmen to do favors for voters and donors. 1. The Rejection of Nature and the Turn to history In this context, progressive leaders advocated and strived to introduce reforms for solving the grave issues. Progressivism movement was wide in nature with varying goals. It introduced urban reforms and had offensive attitude towards dishonest leaders and corrupt political system. Leaders of progressive movement favored taking ownership of public utilities by government supporting different social welfare programs to resolve mainly the problems of immigrants, working class, and poor. At the state level, Progressive movement introduced specific democratic reforms. The purpose of democratic reforms was to allow American citizens to select leaders as per their choice, independently and freely. The new comers strived to adapt to entirely new conditions at one hand while trying hard to maintain their distinctive culture and language system on the other creating a complex situation. Wealth concentrated in few hands and a large segment of people were caught in the vicious circle of poverty. Low wage-rates, dangerous working conditions, and long working hours were among several grave problems faced by most of the Americans. Swift technological advancements and rapid speed of industrialization altered the life styles of Americans. It is pertinent to mention that Progressive movement was wide in a sense that it included both Democrats and Republicans. The movement heavily impacted the political structure at local, state, and national levels. It had significant influence on cultural and social life of America. It was, in fact, a dynamic movement introducing reforms at varied platforms including democratic, social, and political fronts. The agenda also had variety and diversification. It comprises social as well as political agenda. However, the main aims were elimination of corruption, protecting common people especially lower- class, elimination the continuous gap between different social classes, and promoting scientific as well as technological developments ensuring welfare of people. Progressivism was a movement starting at the end of nineteenth century (1880) and ended in the second decade of twentieth century (1920). In this era tremendous changes at the economic, social, and political level were made. People taking part in the movement had diversified backgrounds, different political views, and varied social interests. It included political leaders from both Democrats and Republicans. The movement was led by people of different groups comprising teachers, political leaders, labor leaders, religious leaders, journalists, from both genders. It included famous people like; Theodore Roosevelt- President of the United States; Woodrow Wilson- President of the United States; Robert M. La Follette, former governor of Wisconsin.
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