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Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American socialist, political activist, trade unionist, one of the founding members of the Industrial Workers of the World and five times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States. -
Ida Tarbell
Ida Minerva Tarbell was an American writer, investigative journalist, biographer and lecturer. She was one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and pioneered investigative journalism. -
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist, democratic socialist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology. -
Woman's Christian Temperance Union
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union is an active international temperance organization that was among the first organizations of women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity." -
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Higgins Sanger was an American birth control activist, sex educator, writer, and nurse. Sanger popularized the term "birth control", opened the first birth control clinic in the United States, and established organizations that evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. -
Interstate Commerce Act
The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 is a United States federal law that was designed to regulate the railroad industry, particularly its monopolistic practices. The Act required that railroad rates be "reasonable and just," but did not empower the government to fix specific rates. -
Sherman Antitrust Act
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was a United States antitrust law that was passed by Congress under the presidency of Benjamin Harrison, which regulates competition among enterprises. -
Square Deal Policy
The Square Deal was Theodore Roosevelt's domestic policy based on three basic ideas: protection of the consumer, control of large corporations, and conservation of natural resources. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida Bell Wells-Barnett, more commonly known as Ida B. Wells, was an African-American investigative journalist, educator, and an early leader in the Civil Rights Movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. -
National American Woman Suffrage Association
Founded in 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage Association united two suffragist organizations that had pursued opposite policies in the years following the Civil War — the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), founded in 1869 by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and the American Woman Suffrage Association. -
How the Other Half Lives
How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York (1890) is an early publication of photojournalism by Jacob Riis, documenting squalid living conditions in New York City slums in the 1880s. -
Anti-Saloon League
Anti-Saloon League, the leading organization lobbying for prohibition in the United States in the early 20th century. It was founded as a state society in Ohio in 1893, but its influence spread rapidly, and in 1895 it became a national organization. -
Robert La Follette
Robert M. La Follette, U.S. leader of the Progressive Movement, who as governor of Wisconsin (1901–06) and U.S. senator (1906–25) was noted for his support of reform legislation.He was the unsuccessful presidential candidate of the League for Progressive Political Action (i.e., the Progressive party) in 1924, winning almost five million votes, or about one-sixth of the total cast. -
Anthracite Coal Strike
The Coal strike of 1902 was a strike by the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners struck for higher wages, shorter workdays and the recognition of their union. The strike threatened to shut down the winter fuel supply to major American cities. -
Elkins Act
The Elkins Act is a 1903 United States federal law that amended the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. The Act authorized the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to impose heavy fines on railroads that offered rebates, and upon the shippers that accepted these rebates. -
Department of Commerce and Labor
The United States Department of Commerce and Labor was a short-lived Cabinet department of the United States government, which was concerned with controlling the excesses of big business. It was created on February 14, 1903, during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt. -
Northern Securities Antitrust
Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, was a case heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1903. The Court ruled 5 to 4 against the stockholders of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroad companies, who had essentially formed a monopoly, and to dissolve the Northern Securities Company. -
The Jungle
The Jungle is a novel written in 1904 by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair. Sinclair wrote the novel to portray the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. -
Lincoln Steffens
Lincoln Joseph Steffens was an American investigative journalist and one of the leading muckrakers of the Progressive Era in the early 20th century. He launched a series of articles in McClure's, called Tweed Days in St. Louis, that would later be published together in a book titled The Shame of the Cities (1904). -
Pure Food and Drug Act
The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was the first of a series of significant consumer protection laws which was enacted by Congress in the 20th century and led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration. -
Meat Inspection Act
The Federal Meat Inspection Act of 1906 (FMIA) is an American law that makes it a crime to adulterate or misbrand meat and meat products being sold as food, and ensures that meat and meat products are slaughtered and processed under sanitary conditions. -
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City on March 25, 1911 was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. -
Progressive (Bull Moose) Party
The Progressive Party is a third party in the United States formed in 1912 by former President Theodore Roosevelt after he lost the presidential nomination of the Republican Party to his former protégé, incumbent President William Howard Taft. -
17th Amendment
Seventeenth Amendment, amendment (1913) to the Constitution of the United States that provided for the direct election of U.S. senators by the voters of the states. Adopted in the Progressive era of democratic political reform, the amendment reflected popular dissatisfaction with the corruption and inefficiency that had come to characterize the legislative election of U.S. senators in many states. -
Underwood Tariff
The Revenue Act of 1913, also known as the Tariff Act, the Underwood Tariff, the Underwood Act, the Underwood Tariff Act, or the Underwood-Simmons Act re-imposed the federal income tax after the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment and lowered basic tariff rates from 40% to 25%, well below the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909. It was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on October 3, 1913 and was sponsored by Alabama Representative Oscar Underwood. -
Federal Reserve Act
The Federal Reserve Act is an Act of Congress that created the Federal Reserve System, and which created the authority to issue Federal Reserve Notes as legal tender. The Act was signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson -
Clayton Antitrust Act
The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, was a part of United States antitrust law with the goal of adding further substance to the U.S. antitrust law regime; the Clayton Act sought to prevent anticompetitive practices in their incipiency. -
Federal Trade Commission
The Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, established in 1914 by the Federal Trade Commission Act. Its principal mission is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly -
Keating-Owen Child Labor Act
The Keating–Owen Child Labor Act of 1916 also known as Wick's Bill, was a short-lived statute enacted by the U.S. Congress which sought to address child labor by prohibiting the sale in interstate commerce of goods produced by factories that employed children under fourteen, mines that employed children younger than sixteen, and any facility where children under fourteen worked after 7:00 p.m. or before 6:00 a.m. or more than eight hours daily. -
18th Amendment
The 18th amendment is the only amendment to be repealed from the constitution. This unpopular amendment banned the sale and drinking of alcohol in the United States. This amendment took effect in 1919 and was a huge failure. -
19th Amendment
The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and the federal government from denying the right to vote to citizens of the United States on the basis of sex.
