The Progressive Movement

1.  The most influenced area's of the progressive movement were working conditions.  Before the movement, children were pulled out of school to work long hours with little pay in unsafe factories.  Due to this, events such as the Triangle Shirt Waste factory fire happened.  145 people were killed because the owners had locked the doors from the outside.  This needed to be changed so President Roosevelt initiated the Keating-Owen Act of 1914.  This started child labor laws and is currently still working to this day.    Women and men were also working long hours with low pay in horrible working conditions.  The book "The Jungle" gave insight to the disgusting world of meat packing in Chicago and unveiled the horrible food conditions and the even worse working conditions.  Thankfully, the Illinois Factory Act helped by shortening work to an 8 hour work day which also laid down as an example for other states. Labor union strikes began to spike up all over the country hoping for even more rights.  Economically, the government issued a minimum wage to help with the large gap between workers and owners.  Other rights regarding conditions began to emerge as strikes went up. Eventually, workers had fair rights and were treated with respect.

2. At the turn of the century one of the biggest developments that brought about the progressive movement was the vast amount of immigration.  Immigration brought millions of new workers into the country filling up factories and manufacturing jobs.  The large amount of people searching for work allowed the wealthy owners to pay workers unfairly small wages.  These small wages then caused immigrant families to have their children and wives work to be able to afford expenses.  Due to immigration, problems such as child labor and horribly working conditions erupted.  Luckily these problems also lead to solutions in what was called the progressive movement.  Child labor laws were then initiated along with the solutions to other social issues such as a shorter work day.  Populism was seen during this movement everywhere because most Acts that were passed by the government started by the people raising awareness for them to help the majority of the nation.  Workers and immigrants were helped which shows how populism played a role during the progressive movement.  Even though populism was in the progressive movement the two eras were still different.  The focuses of the progressive movement were the problems in mainly social issues and economics in the country and how they were changed for the better while populism had a much broader focus.