Progressivism grew out of that dismay and a desire to fix what many saw as a broken system. To many, such a society violated America’s fundamental principles and promises. Lincoln Steffens’s 1902 The Shame of the Cities, for example, demonstrated the graft dominating politics in American urban centers. A new class of muckraking journalists fed this outrage with stunning exposés of business exploitation and corruption of government officials. Even middle-class Americans became outraged as the gap widened between the working and middle ranks of society and wealthy capitalists smugly asserted their superiority. Economic growth occurred without regard to its costs to people, communities, or the environment. Farmers were at the mercy of railroad trusts, which set transport rates that squeezed already indebted rural residents. It was cheaper for manufacturers to let workers be injured or die than to improve safety-so they often did. Business owners didn’t mark high voltage wires, locked fire doors, and allowed toxic fumes to be emitted in factories. A new unskilled industrial laboring class, including a large pool of child labor, faced low wages, chronic unemployment, and on-the-job hazards. Cities, polluted and overcrowded, became breeding grounds for diseases like typhoid and cholera. Many negative consequences accompanied this change. Standard Oil, Nabisco, Kodak, General Electric, and Quaker Oats were among those companies and products to become familiar household words. Several factors made this achievement possible: unprecedented scale in manufacturing, technological innovation, a transportation revolution, ever-greater efficiency in production, the birth of the modern corporation, and the development of a host of new consumer products. By the turn of the century, American factories produced one-third of the world’s goods. These economic and social crises stemmed from the rise of industrial capitalism, which had transformed America between the Civil War and 1900. To increasing numbers of Americans, something seemed dreadfully wrong. Citizens even marched on Washington as workers unemployed in the depression of 1893–1894 formed "industrial armies" to demand relief. In the same period, cyclical economic downturns spawned massive protests, including marches by millions of largely rural farmers drawn into the populist movement. The great railroad strike of 1877 triggered armed confrontation the 1892 strike at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead, Pennsylvania, steel plant included a bloody battle and just two years later, the strike at Pullman Palace Car Company brought Army troops into a violent clash with workers on the streets of Chicago on the Fourth of July. Armed conflict between workers and government and private militias broke out repeatedly. As the nineteenth century came to a close, just decades after the Civil War, many feared the nation faced another explosive and violent conflict, this time between the forces of industrial capitalism and militant workers. Progressivism arrived at a moment of crisis for the United States.
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