The Progressive Era, 1890 to roughly 1930, witnessed dramatic social innovations and political changes. The overly broad historical term, progressive, captures different kinds of reformers who marched under different banners. Some humanitarian, others political. Some radical, others conservative. United only by a felt need to respond to the vast economic and demographic changes wrought by burgeoning urbanization, industrialization, and immigration, in the late 19th century. >> Hm. By 1890, the census year that marked the closing of the American Frontier, the country stood on the verge of a severe depression. The large cities teemed with pauperized immigrants, arriving in droves from southern and eastern Europe. Some 18.2 million arrived in the Progressive Era. Corporate industrialism was corrupt, avaricious, monopolistic, and exploitative. An abyss yawn between the hyper-wealthy corporate elite and the working classes. The proletariat fought back. Railroad strikes and violent labor conflicts were rife and emblematic of a troubled decade. Municipal governments were patronage troughs run by corrupt mayors, ethnic ward bosses and their friends. Cities were not only ill-managed, they were also ill-planned, marred by overcrowded, unsanitary tenement ghettos. Orphaned or abandoned children lived on the street. Child labor in factories and tenement sweat shops was rampant. Urban schools were decrepit, overcrowded, under-resourced and anti immigrant. Not surprisingly, many children were truant. Urban America was a fine mess. Progressives working in all of these venues, aimed to set the nation's course aright. >> The Progressive Era is synonymous with an efflorescence of wildly desperate social and political reforms that included, among others, the settlement house movement and the advent of child labor laws, juvenile courts, and enforced compulsory schooling. The creation of public parks. The passage of pure food and drug laws. The prohibition of alcohol. The victory of women's suffrage. The direct election of US Senators. The establishment of centralized urban school systems and the consolidation of rural schools. The federal truncation of corporate monopolies and the introduction of a federal income tax. And there was a lot more. >> Hm. In the Progressive Era, US race relations were locked in a time warp. Jim Crow prevailed in the south, and segregation continued unabated as a matter of law and custom, not that great progress was being made in the north. Blacks were treated as a subordinate caste. Reform-minded governors and social welfare advocates did not include African Americans in their reform agendas. >> Recognizing the great diversity of social and political activity, the central focus of the present module is the education reform component of American progressivism writ large. In our next episode, we look briefly at the larger arena of reform as a backdrop for the progressive education movement. Social welfare and administrative reforms, developed as part of the larger progressive movement outside schools, would be adopted by education reformers and become what the historians, David Tyack and Larry Cuban call, the taken for granted grammar of U.S. public schools in the 20th century. [MUSIC]
