It was certainly very easy to be excited about the times. The changes in life-style had been so amazing, so extensive, and in such a short stretch of time.  In only a couple of generations Americans had gone from horseback to automobiles, and even to flight.  Electricity lit up not only cities but also homes, news of the larger world arrived almost instantly to an increasingly attentive population, personal phones put people in direct communication with each other across even the miles, and wealth reached down into even the middle classes, who knew that they were living better than kings and queens had lived only a few centuries earlier.  All this change was very heady stuff.

But there clearly was a downside to all this change.  The American population was climbing rapidly. In the forty-year period between 1870 to 1910 the population went from 38.5 million to 92.3 million, growing by about 25 percent each decade (28 percent by 1880, another 27.6 percent by 1890, and another 21 percent for each of 1900 and 1910).  This time period also marked a huge shift in the nation's demography, 10 to 11 million (figures are not exact) Americans moving from farms to America's fast-rising cities, where they were joined by another 25 million immigrants streaming in from Europe.

Not everyone headed to the cities was going to find the streets paved with gold. On the contrary, urban slums – with all the accompanying problems of filth, disease, violence and just simply human degradation – greeted the vast majority of these urban pilgrims.

Also with over fifty percent of the nation's total wealth owned by one percent of the population and nearly a half of the population owning only one percent of the nation's total wealth, it was a certainty that there was going to be a huge outcry about this outrageously huge social disparity in the land where supposedly "all men are created equal."  This in itself gave sufficient cause to those with a crusading heart to take up the cause of social justice.  Thus developed a rather spontaneous and very diverse social and political movement which historians have termed Progressivism.

Progressivism was not the program of any particular social group or even political party.  The state itself played a rather minimal role in its many initiatives, although the state did tend to follow up on social initiatives in many cases with legislation solidifying the gains of the Progressivists.  The church also played a minimal role, although much of what moved Progressivism was the Christian conscience.

By and large Progressivism was the instinct of crusading individuals – and groups which these individuals were able to gather around their particular social cause. These individuals were often writers and journalists, they were often educated and socially comfortable individuals with a crusading zeal for social reform, and occasionally they were political leaders.

The first and foremost problem that Progressivism felt needed to be tackled was that of relieving the suffering of those whose lives had been thrown into turmoil by all the industrial change.

This group of industrial victims included the small farmers who found themselves unable to compete with the larger industrial farms arising in their midst, industrial farms that were able to secure special rates from the grain elevator companies that stored and prepared the farmers' grain for shipment, and special shipping rates from the single (thus monopoly) railroad company that connected their region to the customers back East.  To the smaller American farmers, who were having a hard time earning a living from their small plots of land, this special treatment extended to the wealthy industrial farms was outrageously unfair. Something needed to be done to curb the power of the high and mighty, and restore power to the small American farmer, the mainstay of American Middle-Class society.

This category included also the industrial workers who worked long hours in the newly-rising enterprises which hired their services or labor.  Skilled workers were accustomed to being respected for their special industrial talents, and were unhappy that their services were so poorly compensated in comparison to enormous earnings of the financial managers or owners of the enterprises that contracted their services.  In another way, they were incensed when they were gradually reduced in status simply to that of laborer, hardly different from the masses of unskilled labor who poured into the industrial cities looking for work of any kind.

This latter group of unskilled laborers was actually itself divided into a number of different groups.  One was that of the Anglo-White laborers, usually former farmers or their sons unable to secure or hold their lands in the increasingly competitive world of American farming, Whites that were driven to the cities to find any work that they could.  Another was that of the Southern Blacks who came North looking for work, no different from the White farmers turned laborers – except for the sadly major distinction of skin color.  And then there were the European immigrants (and on the West Coast the numerous Chinese) who came to the country with virtually nothing except the hope that they would finally find success in the America whose streets (they were told) were paved with gold.

This labor mix was characterized by powerlessness in the face of the wealth (and consequent political power) of the industrial elite, or "robber barons" as both the laborers and their spokesmen among the Progressivists termed them.  It was also characterized by confusion and disunity within the ranks of the workers because of these many social divisions that set one labor group off against the others. United, they could have constituted a major political force.  And indeed many Progressivist reformers attempted to do just that, unite the American labor force into a single labor movement.  But in the highly diverse America, that would prove to be an almost impossible task.

An example of the difficulty organized labor faced was the Knights of Labor, founded in 1869.  Because of its strong advocacy of the eight-hour working day, it had reached a membership total of almost 30,000 members by 1880.  Four years after that its membership figure reached 100,000 and then two years after that (1886) nearly 800,000 members, making it by far the largest labor organization in America at that point.

But the organization itself was weak.  And although the Knights of Labor was politically republican in character, it became identified in the press and by its capitalist adversaries as a dangerously militant organization in the manner of the anarchists, who were very influential among many of the immigrant German and East European workers.  Indeed, this unfair comparison crippled the organization after the disastrous Haymarket Square Riot of 1886², with most of its members soon abandoning the organization.  By the time of the economic Panic of 1893 it had become only a very small operation.

The organizing of American labor was subsequently taken up by the American Federation of Labor (AFL) founded in the pivotal year of 1886 by Samuel Gompers as a result of a dispute with the Knights of Labor over competing labor contracts. It united a number of guilds or unions of skilled workers and craftsmen (as opposed to common day laborers) – beginning with the cigar makers' unions.  Then as the Knights of Labor faded away during the later 1880s, the AFL held steady, even picking up new members.

Overall, it supported the idea of capitalism, simply attempting to put skilled workers in a better position to take advantage of the huge profits being accumulated in the industrial revolution sweeping America.

Its political caution – and especially its patriotism (most notably during World War One) and its willingness to oppose more radical (mostly immigrant) labor organizations such as the "Wobblies" (the Industrial Workers of the World) and the more radical Socialist Party – helped bring the U.S. government alongside the AFL in support of its labor program. By 1920, the AFL had grown to nearly four million members.

²At a gathering of workers at Haymarket Square in Chicago who were demanding the eight-hour working day, an unknown person threw a bomb at police who were in the process of dispersing the crowd, killing seven officers and a number of civilians.  On the basis of scanty or non-existent evidence seven (mostly German) anarchists were sentenced to death by hanging (a number of them had not even been present at the gathering) for their contribution to the tragedy.  Only four were actually hanged, as one committed suicide in jail and the two others had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment, but were pardoned by the Illinois governor in 1893 who (as did many) considered the trial a total travesty of justice.

American Progressivism also included a very strong women's – even feminist – movement.  For a number of American women, the prohibition of the sale of alcohol easily brought them to political action.  Far too many husbands were returning home from work on payday completely empty-handed, having stopped at the local bar along the way to find some liquid joy in their hardscrabble lives.  All too often this visit to the bar was as far as their paycheck got them, leaving their wives to wonder how they were to pay for the food and the other requirements of their meager lives.  Something needed to be done to solve this problem, to halt the scourge of rampant alcoholism.

In this, women particularly put the moral muscle of Christianity behind their efforts – eventually generating the idea that any alcohol-drinking at all was un-Christian (a rather recent Christian virtue – although drunkenness had always come under strong Christian condemnation).  And thus the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was born.

Right along with this anti-alcohol movement went the issue of women's suffrage (voting rights).  In most states, women were not given the right to vote. Voting was considered an expression of the will of the entire family – men, women and children – which men, as head of the family, were supposed to represent in voting. But the women claimed that men were not handling that responsibility well and therefore the vote should be opened up to women, who as mothers and wives would bring a more moral tone to politics.

The more radical among the feminists of those days however pushed for voting rights simply as a matter of social justice, a right that should flow from the basic natural equality of men and women, regardless of whether or not it better-served American family life.