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Robert La Follette
Robert M. La Follette was an American Republican and politician who is best known as a proponent of progressivism and a fierce opponent to corporate power. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Governor of Wisconsin and a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin during his career. -
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. -
Ida B. Wells
Ida B. Wells-Barnett, African American journalist who led an antilynching crusade in the United States in the 1890s. -
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. -
National American Woman Suffrage Association
The National Woman Suffrage Association was formed on May 15, 1869 in New York City The National Association was created in response to a split in the American Equal Rights Association over whether the woman's movement should support the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. -
Women's Christian Temperance Union
The Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was founded in November 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio. After Frances Willard took over leadership in 1879, the WCTU became one of the largest and most influential women's groups of the 19th century by expanding its platform to campaign for labor laws, prison reform and suffrage. -
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 Anti-Trust Act was the first Federal act that outlawed monopolistic business practices. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit trusts. ... Several states had passed similar laws, but they were limited to intrastate businesses. -
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
The Anti-Saloon League was the leading organization lobbying for prohibition in the United States in the early 20th century. -
Northern Securities Antitrust
The Northern Securities Company was a short-lived American railroad trust formed in 1901 by E. H. ... The company was sued in 1902 under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 by the Justice Department under President Theodore Roosevelt, one of the first anti-trust cases filed against corporate interests instead of labor. -
Anthracite Coal Strike
The Coal strike of 1902 (also known as the anthracite coal strike) 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. -
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. The United States Secretary of Commerce and Labor was the head of the department. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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. -
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
Bull Moose Party, formally Progressive Party, U.S. dissident political faction that nominated former president Theodore Roosevelt as its candidate in the presidential election of 1912; the formal name and general objectives of the party were revived 12 years later. -
17th Amendments
17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Direct Election of U.S. Senators. Americans did not directly vote for senators for the first 125 years of the Federal Government. The Constitution, as it was adopted in 1788, stated that senators would be elected by state legislatures. -
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 (ch. 16, 38 Stat. 114, October 13, 1913), re-imposed the federal income tax after the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment -
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 was a bill passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1916. ... It relied on Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce, which they decided included the manufacture of products. The Supreme Court disagreed, and declared the act to be unconstitutional in 1918. -
18th Amendment
The Eighteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution established the prohibition of "intoxicating liquors" in the United States. The amendment was proposed by Congress on December 18, 1917, and was ratified by the requisite number of states on January 16, 1919. -
19th Amendment
Nineteenth Amendment, amendment (1920) to the Constitution of the United States that officially extended the right to vote to women.
