Progressive Era Essay Example for Free

Progressive Era Essay The progressive era was a thirty-year period in which the United States was completely reformed. Actions were taken to improve working conditions for laborers and women. President Roosevelt and Wilson were both reformers for the rights and voice of the people. Theodore Roosevelt used his presidency to put regulations of businesses and make sure the government is still higher than corporations. Individual Reformers and the government in the progressive era went through a great deal to bring about change in the united states, with teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting and political reform, improvement of laborers and goods, and the restrictions of child labor and women rights. Teddy Roosevelt became known as the great trustbuster. He didn’t get this name for no reason. Roosevelt could identify which trusts were good and which were bad. He could determine which trusts helped the people and which ones hurt them. Roosevelt would hunt down the bad trusts and take them down. He would destroy the bad trusts and restrain the good trusts from becoming bad trusts. Roosevelt believed that the government should police the corporations of America. (A). He took the Sherman Anti-trust act and enforced it so that companies could price their products and make sure not one company could not take control of the market. He did this by creating the Clayton anti-trust act to keep regulations on anti-competiveness. (E) Roosevelt also believed in changing the ways that politicians were elected. Senators in particular were being corrupted because officials were appointing them. He believed that the US senate was just a club basically for high privileged people. This lead to the passage of the seventeenth amendment which said that direct election of senators was to be the new way of choosing who would be in the US Senate. (D) This amendment got the people involved even more with politics and gave them more of a say in government. Politically the government was reformed with the US senate, and the trust busting and making sure that the government was a police force to big corporations. Laborers in the progressive era had it rough. They were not treated with respect, or the consideration that they deserve. The goods that were produced were not of quality and contained harmful hazardous materials. Upton Sinclair was a muckraker who wrote The Jungle, a book about the horribleness of the meatpacking industry. The meatpacking industry was a brutal and unsanitary way of life. The people who worked in the industry were subjected to disease such as tuberculosis and terrible working conditions. The workers were ignorant of the relationship of disease and cleanliness. They didn’t understand that a working condition should be clean and not filled with disease. A lot of the workers had tuberculosis while they worked, and it would get in the meat that they work with, which provided for unsafe meat for people to eat. (B) In other businesses it was just the same. Labors were never treated fairly. Up until recently laborers were not even allowed to go on strike. The government was not helping people; they were staying out of business affairs. Up until the age of reform, and the progressive era. The government was then trying to help out laborers and give them rights. Child laborers and women’s rights were also two big things that came up during the progressive era. Children were expected to work alongside grown men. They were subjected to the same harsh conditions as the adults. Children were not able to be educated because they had to work in the factories. A lot of children only went to school for a short time. The educators acted as if the industrial work was good for children. So children had to go through terrible disease ridden conditions of work. C) The children were not helped by the case of Hammer vs. Dagenhart which ruled that child labor is not a government problem; it is to be judged by the state legislatures. Even some parents felt like it was their kids duty to work, and that the children should work. (G) Eventually however the children were set free from the bondage of labor. But women were still subjected to discrimination. Women at this time didn’t have very many rights. Women want to be treated equally and to have a say in government. Women suffrage was big at this time. They felt like they could not do anything with the life that they had. So they pushed for reform, which was not happening at this time. It was unusual since the progressive era was a big reforming time. (H) The progressive era was a time of great change for the US. It came in the political with the trust busting and the senate voting, it came in the improvement of laborers, and it came in the way child laborers were treated and the women movement. The progressive era was big and it made people really understand what the US was all about.