50 Fun Facts About Progressive Era

Which witness to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire later became the first woman in a presidential cabinet?

Frances Perkins went on to serve 12 years as Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor. Watching garment workers die in the New York blaze was a turning point in her life.

Which novel did Upton Sinclair say aimed at the public's heart and by accident hit its stomach?

The Jungle was written as a plea for immigrant packinghouse workers. Readers fixed on the filthy meat instead, and Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act that same year.

In which city was Theodore Roosevelt shot in 1912 before insisting on delivering his campaign speech?

Milwaukee doctors found the bullet had been slowed by a steel eyeglass case and a folded 50-page speech in his pocket. Roosevelt carried it in his chest for the rest of his life.

Which state sealed women's right to vote in 1920 after its youngest legislator obeyed a letter from his mother?

Tennessee became the last state needed when Harry Burn, wearing the red rose of the opposition, switched sides. His mother's letter told him to "vote for Suffrage" and not keep them in doubt.

Which Hull House founder became the first American woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931?

Jane Addams opened her settlement house in Chicago in 1889 to serve poor, largely immigrant families. She is remembered as the founder of the social work profession in America.

Which rock formation seen in Close Encounters of the Third Kind became the first US national monument in 1906?

Devils Tower was the first use of the new Antiquities Act, which let a president protect a landmark by proclamation. Theodore Roosevelt went on to use the law on seventeen more sites.

Which institution was created after J. P. Morgan personally propped up Wall Street banks in the Panic of 1907?

The Federal Reserve meant the next bank run would not hinge on one financier pledging his own money. Woodrow Wilson signed the law creating it two days before Christmas.

Which automaker astonished rivals in 1914 by more than doubling most workers' pay to five dollars a day?

Henry Ford wanted to end the turnover that had departments hiring 300 men a year to fill 100 jobs. Detroit's best mechanics flocked to him, and competitors had to raise wages too.

Which McClure's journalist exposed John D. Rockefeller's oil trust decades after it squeezed her father's business?

Ida Tarbell grew up in Pennsylvania's oil region, where her father was a small producer hit by a secret scheme on railroad rates. Her exposé ran as nineteen magazine articles.

Which Tuskegee Institute leader caused a Southern uproar by dining with Theodore Roosevelt at the White House?

Booker T. Washington was an adviser to the president, invited weeks after Roosevelt took office. The backlash was so fierce that no other African American dined there for almost thirty years.

What label did Theodore Roosevelt pin on crusading journalists in a 1906 speech, borrowing from The Pilgrim's Progress?

Muckrakers was meant as a scolding: John Bunyan's Man with the Muck-rake rejects salvation to stare at filth. Roosevelt still conceded that such men were often indispensable.

Which country gave its name to the secret ballot that American states began adopting in the 1880s?

Australia's colonies brought in voting in private in 1856, with Tasmania and Victoria acting within weeks of each other. Massachusetts adopted the first statewide version in 1888.

Which Progressive Era reform let Californians remove Governor Gray Davis from office in 2003, mid-term?

The recall had removed only one governor before Davis, North Dakota's Lynn Frazier in 1921. Californians replaced Davis with the actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Which state approved the initiative and referendum in 1902 and lent its name to that 'System' of direct lawmaking?

Oregon's campaign was run by William U'Ren's Direct Legislation League, which had been pressing for citizen lawmaking since 1898. The group went on to win a direct primary in 1904.

Which Wisconsin governor won the direct primary and a tax law that made railroads pay nearly double?

Robert La Follette, known as "Fighting Bob", later spent two decades in the Senate. Running for president as a third-party candidate in 1924, he took 16.6 percent of the vote.

Which amendment, ratified in 1919, is the only one in American history ever to be repealed?

The Eighteenth Amendment banned the making, transport and sale of liquor nationwide. It lasted until December 1933, when the Twenty-first cancelled it.

Which federal levy, struck down by the Supreme Court in 1895, was made constitutional by an amendment in 1913?

Income tax was struck down in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust, the ruling the amendment overturned. Until then federal revenue came mostly from tariffs, which reformers said fell hardest on the poor.

Who chose United States senators before a 1913 amendment handed that power directly to voters?

State legislatures sometimes deadlocked so badly that seats sat empty: an Indiana stalemate left one vacant for two years. Critics also charged that Senate seats were being bought and sold.

Which Montana Republican became the first woman elected to Congress, four years before women's suffrage went nationwide?

Jeannette Rankin, a lifelong pacifist, voted against war with Germany in 1917. Back in the House in 1941, she cast the only vote in Congress against war with Japan after Pearl Harbor.

Which state joined the Union in 1890 as the first to let women vote, a right its territory granted in 1869?

Wyoming's head start gave it the official nickname the Equality State and the state motto Equal Rights.

Which trust, broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, left behind the companies that became Exxon and Mobil?

Standard Oil had come to control 91 percent of oil refining in the United States. The Court called it an "unreasonable" monopoly, and its New Jersey and New York arms were the two biggest pieces.

Which J. P. Morgan-backed trust did the Supreme Court order dissolved in 1904 by a five-to-four vote?

Northern Securities had put the Great Northern, Northern Pacific and Burlington railroads under one roof. Roosevelt's suit was among the first to aim antitrust law at a corporation instead of a union.

Which 1914 law did Samuel Gompers hail as labor's 'Magna Carta' for declaring that human labor is not a commodity?

The Clayton Act allowed injunctions in labor disputes only when property damage was threatened. Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, also called it labor's Bill of Rights.

Which 1890 law against monopolies is named for the younger brother of the Union general who marched through Georgia?

The Sherman Act honors John Sherman of Ohio, its principal author, who sat in the Senate for nearly 32 years. His brother William Tecumseh was the more famous of the pair.

Which president brought more antitrust cases in four years than Theodore Roosevelt managed in seven?

William Howard Taft even took on U.S. Steel. His lawsuits helped drive a wedge between him and Roosevelt, who had handpicked him and then challenged him for the 1912 Republican nomination.

Which animal nickname stuck to the Progressive Party of 1912 after Theodore Roosevelt boasted he felt as strong as one?

Bull Moose became the party's emblem after Roosevelt lost the Republican nomination in June 1912. That November he took 27.4 percent of the vote, finishing ahead of the sitting Republican president.

Which Socialist won six percent of the 1912 presidential vote and ran again in 1920 from a prison cell?

Eugene V. Debs was serving ten years for a 1918 speech in Canton, Ohio, urging resistance to the military draft. He still drew 3.4 percent of the vote from behind bars.

Which name did Theodore Roosevelt give his program of conservation, corporate regulation and consumer protection?

The Square Deal got an early test when Roosevelt negotiated a compromise to end the 1902 coal strike, which was threatening the nation's energy supply. He decided workers needed a fair shake too.

Which slogan did Woodrow Wilson campaign on in 1912 and then use as the title of a 1913 book?

The New Freedom set Wilson against Theodore Roosevelt's rival program, chiefly over how to handle monopolies. In office the phrase came to cover his reforms, such as the farm loan banks of 1916.

In which city was William McKinley shot at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901, making Theodore Roosevelt president?

Buffalo was hosting the fair when an anarchist shot McKinley twice as he shook hands with the public. The president died eight days later of gangrene.

Which Danish-born police reporter used early flash photography to expose New York slums in How the Other Half Lives?

Jacob Riis had known poverty himself after landing in New York, and aimed his pictures at the middle and upper classes. The 1890 book grew out of an eighteen-page magazine article.

Which photographer posed as a Bible salesman and a fire inspector to get his camera into mills employing children?

Lewis Hine quit teaching in 1908 to work for the National Child Labor Committee. He spent the next decade photographing young workers to back its campaign against the practice.

Which McClure's editor collected his exposés of corrupt city governments in The Shame of the Cities?

Lincoln Steffens opened the series with "Tweed Days in St. Louis". In 1906 he walked out of McClure's with two fellow reporters to form The American Magazine.

Which scholar, the first African American to earn a Harvard doctorate, helped found the NAACP and edited The Crisis?

W. E. B. Du Bois had already published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 and gathered Black activists in the Niagara Movement of 1905.

Which Memphis journalist kept up her anti-lynching crusade after a white mob destroyed her newspaper office?

Ida B. Wells moved to Chicago and documented lynchings in pamphlets such as Southern Horrors, published in 1892. Her findings debunked the claim that every victim was guilty of a crime.

Which suffragist was jailed in 1917 for picketing the White House and went on a hunger strike behind bars?

Alice Paul was moved to the jail's psychiatric ward and force-fed raw eggs through a tube. She had already been locked up several times while campaigning for the vote in Britain.

Which Protestant movement led by Baptist pastor Walter Rauschenbusch pressed churches to fight poverty and injustice?

The Social Gospel found its sharpest voice in Rauschenbusch, who preached in New York's Hell's Kitchen. He attacked what he saw as the selfishness of capitalism and backed labor unions and cooperatives.

Which nurse opened America's first birth control clinic in Brooklyn in 1916 and was arrested nine days later?

Margaret Sanger was arrested for giving a pamphlet to an undercover policewoman, one of eight arrests in her career. She later founded the group that became Planned Parenthood.

Which temperance crusader marched into Kansas saloons singing hymns and smashed the bars with a hatchet?

Carrie Nation got the idea from her husband, who joked after one raid that she should use a hatchet next time for maximum damage. Her attacks became known as "hatchetations".

Which labor organizer led child mill workers on a 125-mile march to Theodore Roosevelt's Long Island home in 1903?

Mother Jones had been called "the most dangerous woman in America" a year earlier by a West Virginia prosecutor, at her trial for ignoring a ban on meetings of striking miners.

Which Sierra Club co-founder camped with Theodore Roosevelt at Glacier Point in 1903 and woke under fresh snow?

John Muir used the trip to argue that Yosemite Valley needed federal protection from state mismanagement. Three years later Congress moved the valley into the national park.

Which first chief of the US Forest Service got himself fired in 1910 by publicly attacking the interior secretary?

Gifford Pinchot spent months criticizing Richard Ballinger in public before the president fired him. He later became governor of Pennsylvania.

Which Arizona landmark did Theodore Roosevelt tell Americans to leave unmarred because "You cannot improve on it"?

The Grand Canyon became a national monument by his proclamation in 1908. It had to wait until 1919, after his death, to become a national park.

Which "people's lawyer" became the first Jewish Supreme Court justice in 1916 after the Senate confirmed him 47 to 22?

Louis Brandeis had been Woodrow Wilson's chief economic adviser in the 1912 campaign and a declared enemy of big business. Only three Republican senators voted to confirm him.

Which Texas city invented the commission form of city government to speed its recovery from a deadly 1900 hurricane?

Galveston's new system became known as the Galveston Plan. The storm that prompted it killed at least 6,000 people, the deadliest natural disaster the United States had ever seen.

What nickname is given to members of the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical union founded in Chicago in 1905?

Wobblies preached the idea of "One Big Union". They held that all workers should unite as a single class and replace capitalism and wage labor with industrial democracy.

Which 1919 law spelling out how Prohibition would work was passed over Woodrow Wilson's veto?

The Volstead Act took its name from Andrew Volstead, the House Judiciary chairman who managed the bill. Wayne Wheeler of the Anti-Saloon League helped draft it.

Which federal agency gained the power to set maximum railroad rates under the Hepburn Act of 1906?

The Interstate Commerce Commission could now also open the railroads' financial records. The law ended the free passes that lines had been handing to loyal shippers.

Which government chemist fed borax-laced meals to his "Poison Squad" volunteers to win support for a pure food law?

Harvey Wiley was nicknamed the father of the Pure Food and Drugs Act when it became law in 1906. He started with borax because packers used it to firm up meat that had begun to decompose.

Which workers' ten-hour day did the Supreme Court strike down in Lochner v. New York in 1905?

Bakers were capped at 60 hours a week by the state's Bakeshop Act, which bakery owner Joseph Lochner was convicted of breaking. The ruling gave its name to an era of courts voiding labor laws.