AMH 2020 Lecture : Week #6.docx

• School: University of Florida
• Department: American Studies
• Course: AMH 2020
• Professor: All

Document Summary

During the progressive era the meaning of social control was an allegory for people who shared common concerns as consumers, urban residents, and political citizens. Progressives not only wanted social control but they also advocated for political, economic, and cultural order. Progressives supported a variety of reforms to help push toward this social control. These reforms included direct primary election, conservative means, the abolition of child labor, and the regulation of trust, banks, and railroads. Progressives favored politics that was a representation of their own brand of middle class morality and beleaguered the behavior of immigrants, the working class, and nonwhites. Many of the reforms progressives imposed such as prohibition, antivice campaigns, and immigration restrictions seemed to be a threat to the poor and working class families instead of being a moral good. The eugenics movement, which sought to maintain white racial purity through selective breeding was an example of the most menacing of the progressive reforms.