Progressive Dbq

The Progressive era

The progressive Era was a time of confusion as well as success. The reformers of this time worked tremendously hard in trying to improve the dreadful conditions of the U.S. The Progressive Era reformers along with government and the media were fairly successful in bringing about reform on a federal level between 1900 and 1920. However, there were inevitable negative effects that occurred due to the Progressive movement, and there were people who opposed it altogether.

Progressive reformers such as Jane Adams, founder of the Hull House, Theodore Roosevelt, Vice president of William McKinley and later president, and W.E.B Dubois, founder of NAACP were great in achieving personal reform goals. Theodore Roosevelt was an advocate of direct nomination. His famous speeches for changes in different areas of political life, like conservation efforts given February 22, 1912, were a major advance in the Progressive Movement (Doc D). In 1898 he organized the Rough Riders, a group of his college classmates it was the first voluntary cavalry in the Spanish-American War. Jane Adams, a prominent suffragist helped many women and children with her Hull House to have housing and education free of charge it was built in 1889. W.E.B. Dubois the college degree having founder of the N.A.A.C.P was a pusher for equality and changing America’s society into a better one and the intertwining of races.

On May 18, 1896, the Supreme Court ruled in the Plessy v. Ferguson law case that separate-but-equal facilities on trains were constitutional. John Marshall, disagreed with the ruling and argued that separating blacks from whites (called segregation) in public facilities created inequality and marked one race as inferior to another. Cases like these showed many efforts towards changes in society. Other cases and media bursts that showed Progressive reform were the exploitation of child labor, corruption