all right this is openstax u.s history chapter 21 leading the way the progressive movement 1890 to 1920 we'll be looking at section one the origins of the progressive spirit in america so the progressive movement as we see right here is a domestic which means at home in the united states movement to improve society and this is coming in 1890 this is coming right off the back of the gilded age right here so the gilded age led to many changes in society right so society changed and recall that gilded means gold plated so in fact on the surface a lot of things that were improving in the united states including the united states becoming the world's strongest or one of the world's strongest economic powers one of the world's strongest military powers you had the rise of some of the richest people who lived of all time like john rockefeller and andrew carnegie and you had generally speaking an increase in the standard of living across all you know demographics however though the gilded age had also a lot of problems including but not limited to and again this is just kind of a laundry list of all the problems presented by the gilded age urbanization immigration corruption working conditions corporate power and uh women's rights or the lack of women's rights and so the progressive era really what it wants to do is to address all of these issues right now some of them are new not all of them are new but a lot of them might be older issues but were made a lot worse during the gilded age and so we'll talk about some of the ways that people did that first of all you had some progressives who were known as muckrakers muckrakers were typically middle class we might call them journalist the term muckraker comes from teddy roosevelt who described gilded age society like muck and that these were individuals that went into american society raked through the mock right sort of dug through all the corruption and urbanization and overcrowding and everything and exposed and that's what we might say middle class journalists who exposed problems in gilded age age society and so at a basic fundamental level before you can begin solving the problems in gilded age society you need to know what those problems are and that's what the muckrakers did they sometimes used a tactic called yellow journalism or the muckrakers were often called yellow journalists this means to exaggerate the truth yellow journalists would tell very kind of emotional stories and would sort of bend the truth or stretch the truth in order to get more attention some of the most famous or most notable muckrakers of this period include jacob reese who was a photographer he used photographs to expose the horrible conditions in a lot of cities here's a photo from jacob reese he published how the other half lives of course the other half refers to the urban poor ida tarbell was one of the female muckrakers she exposed the standard oil companies so exposed john rockefeller and maybe what we might call the cutthroat tactics the corruption you know the way that john rockefeller had built his fortune was through a lot of exploitation bribery corruption and really sort of these cutthroat tactics so people like rhys and tarbell helped really raise awareness about a lot of the problems in gilded age society so what are some of the features of progressivism so progressivism again it's kind of a broad we might call it an umbrella term you know there's no kind of strict definition of it but they're generally just a group of people that want to improve society a lot of different people belong to the progressive movement but they were predominantly white predominantly middle class and predominantly native born we might also want to add to this protestant christians right so it's this constituency that really made up what we might call the foundation of the progressive movement although there were a lot of different um uh constituencies and groups that could belong under this larger umbrella description that we're using uh what were the goals well you know the goals again were to improve society by getting more specific to increase democratic participation so that so we want to increase democracy that is more power we might say more power to people less power to you know politics we might say something along those lines efficiency that is to make society run better uh you know the progressives really had a belief that you could change society so that it could function for the better so efficiency and also government regulation that is to use the government so use the state to address problems right that that's how the solution is going to come through laws through government regulations etc etc progressivism first started off as a movement by the people we might also call this grass roots that it was bottom up or we might say local to state to national right so the progressive movement started off much more on a local level much more smaller scale then they achieve victories on a state level again any sort of law regarding you know some of these things and then very at the very end that was at the national level and when it reached the national level this was illustrated by teddy roosevelt who was the first progressive president first progressive president