Progressive Failure
...o purify day-to-day life in addition to the working life. Pioneering these changes was Jane Addams. Addams realized the life for the lower class was dirty, hard, and unfair. In an attempt to make a better life for this class, Addams created Hull House, a house dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of a more healthy and prosperous life. Hull House gave lessons in good house keeping and cooking, teaching both cleanliness and survival skills for the inner-city. Hull House took in a large amount of immigrants, and most of them women. Not only did it teach the physical necessities of life, it also gave lessons in Christian morals. Hull House often took in women caught soliciting prostitution, and counseled these women in Christian values in order to have them join and improve society. And the living improvements weren’t limited to the people, Addams also pioneered to create what we now know today as “garbage day.” Until the progressives, the streets of cities were strewn with filth; if a horse died in the middle of the street, it was left there to rot whilst children played around it day by day. Recognizing how unsanitary this was, Addams pushed to create a patrol to remove the garbage off of the streets so that cities were more sanitary. The progressives also realized that in order for localized societies to change, the laws created must be enforced. The creation of policemen and firemen helped keep society less chaotic and much more controlled. All of these localized improvements have lasted us to present day, and most have become what we know as normal. Society did not take as well to the federal wide goals of the Progressive movement. As progressivism became more popular in local areas, the movement soon moved to the entire nation. It is much more difficult dealing with changing a nation, than changing a town, however. The progressives realized that the best way to put forth their changes was by passing federal laws forcing the public to follow their rules. To paraphrase William Graham Sumner, the progressives thought that life should be lived a certain way, so they forced everybody else to live that way. People do not always reacts well to being forced to live other people’s ideals, however. The first change that progressives brought was the creation of the income tax. The progressives saw sin and filth in the nations cities, and believed that the source of this lifestyle was from the lower class. Their solution to the problem was to eliminate the lower class, and to achieve this the progressives pushed for the creation of the income tax. The idealistic thought was that this tax could be used to take money from the rich and move it down to the poor, so that there can be a sort of common middle class. And though this was a clever way to level out the classes, this idealistic solution was to create a socialistic society, rather than maintain the democratic government that the nation was founded on. The income tax also continued to climb over the years, and is still with us today. It is a very divided issue among people as well; many people support the income tax, while many hate it and feel that it has become much to dominate in today’s government. The progressive’s largest failure, however, was prohibition. Again trying to remove the sin from culture, the progressive’s believed that the source of sin (most of it, at least) was alcohol. And the only way they could figure to get the nation to stop drinking alcohol was to make it illegal. And for this law, the progressives went to the top. The Eighteenth Amendment banned alcohol from 1918 to 1935. Legally, the American public could not drink alcohol. Their reaction to this law, however, was not gracious at all. If Americans could not get alcohol legally, they would make it illegally, which was disastrous not only because there was no real way to keep track of the alcohol ...