![]() Progressives also desired to expose graft, use a secret ballot to counteract the effects of party bosses, and have direct election of U.S.The Progressives favored the “ initiative” so that voters could directly propose legislation, the “ referendum” so that the people could vote on laws that affected them, and the “ recall” to take bad officials off from their positions.Progressives were mostly middle-class citizens who felt squeezed by both the big trusts above and the restless immigrant hordes working for cheap labor that came from below.The muckrakers sincerely believed that the cure to the ill so of American democracy was more democracy.Wiley exposed the frauds that sold potent patent medicines by experimenting on himself. ![]() John Spargo’s The Bitter Cry of the Children exposed child labor.Ray Stannard Baker’s Following the Color Line was about the illiteracy of Blacks.Senators did not represent the people but actually the railroads and trusts. These writers exposed the mean trust, the “money trust,” the railroad barons, and the corrupt amassing of American fortunes, this last part done by Thomas W.Tarbell launched a devastating exposé against Standard Oil. In 1902, Lincoln Steffens launched a series of articles in McClure’s entitled “The Shame of the Cities,” in which he unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and the government.Despite criticism, reformer-writers ranged far and wide to lay bare the muck on the back of American society.Beginning about 1902, a group of aggressive ten- and fifteen-cent popular magazines, such as Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and Everybody’s, began flinging the dirt about the trusts.Socialists and feminists gained strength, and with people like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald, women entered the Progressive fight.Riis, writer of How the Other Half Lives, a book about the New York slums, and novelist Theodore Dreiser, who wrote The Financier and The Titan. Other exposers of the corruption of trusts, or muckrakers, as Theodore Roosevelt called them, were Jacob A.In 1894, Henry Demarest Lloyd exposed the corruption of the monopoly of the Standard Oil Company with his book Wealth Against Commonwealth, while Thorstein Veblen criticized the new rich (those who made money from the trusts) in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899).The Progressives had their roots in the Greenback Labor Party of the 1870s and 1880s and the Populist Party of the 1890s.The purpose of the Progressive Movement was to use the government as an agency of human welfare.would be struck by a movement by people known as the progressives, who fought against monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social injustice. In the beginning of the 1900s, America had 76 million people, mostly in good condition, but before the first decade of the 20th century, the U.S.
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