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Example research essay topic: Economic And Social State And Local - 870 words

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Even more energetic a sphere of historical controversy than that over the Populists is the historians' argument over the Progressive movement. The Progressives were a heterogeneous collection of reformers. Active chiefly in the nation's cities and the urban mass media (and in the legislatures of such states as Wisconsin and New York), the Progressives carried out efforts to reform American society and governance on all fronts. They numbered among their ranks social Progressives (such as Jane Addams, the founder of the Hull House settlement movement), economic Progressives (such as Richard Ely, the noted Wisconsin economist who emphasized the need to prevent great concentrations of economic power), legal Progressives (such as Louis D. Brandeis, the noted Massachusetts attorney and U.

S. Supreme Court Justice, and his protege, Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter), cultural Progressives (including novelists such as Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair and such muckraking journalists as Ida M. Target l), and of course the great Progressive politicians, themselves making up a remarkable spectrum of Progressive variations. Occupying the poles of the Progressive political spectrum were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, each of whom developed his own brand of political Progressive theory and policy. Roosevelt's New Nationalism emphasized giving a vigorous national government the power to regulate and mediate among large, clashing economic and social actors. 'Mere bigness' was no sin if these powerful institutions and organizations could be brought into a stable, cooperative relationship with one another through the medium of government. Wilson's New Freedom emphasized using government power to knock the large economic and social forces down to size and keeping government, business, labor, and society at a human scale.

Rather than concentrating on using the federal government to solve national problems, Wilsonian Progressives believed in using state and local governments as laboratories of reform. Recognizing the diversity of the American nation, they argued for the need to tailor government responses to problems to the specific political, social, and economic contexts in which they would have to operate. What held these heterogeneous and quarrelsome Progressives together as a movement was their shared perceptions, first, that the nation was in serious trouble and, second, that new thinking was desperately needed in order to craft responses to the nation's problems. This new thinking took various forms -- including the use of local, state, and national government to protect workers from unsafe working conditions, to guard consumers against unsafe products, and to bring order and system to the growing, ever more complex economic system. As noted above, however, a division emerged between nationalist Progressives led by Theodore Roosevelt, who conceived the nation as a fully integrated economic, social, and political unit requiring national solutions to national problems, and loyalist Progressives led by Woodrow Wilson and Louis D. Brandeis, who believed that mere bigness was itself a dangerous threat to American liberty, and that solutions to the problems of American life were best given effect by state and local government.

Progressives built on some of the ideas of the Populists, advocating greater democracy and accountability at all levels of government. Progressive initiatives and inventions in government included such devices as the referendum (by which the electorate would decide directly on major public questions), the initiative (by which the electorate could instruct their elected representatives to consider legislative measures), and the recall (by which the electorate could topple officials, for malfeasance or faith ithlessness to the interests of those they represented, before their terms of office were up). The Progressives also united to amend the Constitution to authorize Congress to levy an income tax (Amendment XVI, 1913), transferring the responsibility for funding the American government directly to the individual taxpaying citizen); to require that Senators be elected by the people of each state rather than by the legislature of each state (Amendment XVII, 1913); to empower the federal government to prohibit intoxicating liquors from interstate commerce (Amendment XVIII, 1919); and to require an end to discrimination against women's right to vote (Amendment XIX, 1920). Yet another strand of Progressive thought focused on improving the mental, physical, cultural, and moral lot of the great body of Americans. Progressives favored expanding and reforming the nation's educational system, developing a 'science' of eugenics to produce a genetically improved people, and teaching the citizenry to become moral, sober, and industrious by adopting and enforcing the Prohibition Amendment and legislation (the notorious Volstead Act) putting it into effect.

The historians' debate on Progressivism divides between 'backward-looking' and 'forward-looking' interpreters. Richard Hofstadter, the founder and still the leading exponent of the 'backward-looking's chool, saw Progressives as middle-class Americans, small businessmen and tradesman and professionals, who yearned to restore the idealized America of their youth. Of course, Hofstadter noted in passing, this idealized America never existed, confronting the Progressives with a paradox rich in irony and poignancy. In trying to revive something that was, at best, an inspiring myth, they actually helped to transform the nature of American society, economy, and politics. By contrast, the 'forward-looking's chool, whose first great advocate was Robert H.

Wiebe, maintained that the Progressives confronted head-on the challenges of the emerging 'modern' American economy and society. Wiebe's Progressives emphasized efficiency, predictability, and rationality in propounding their public policy and their critiques of society's ills.


Free research essays on topics related to: state and local, economic and social, federal government, woodrow wilson, theodore roosevelt

Research essay sample on Economic And Social State And Local

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