Widespread dissatisfaction with new trends in American society spurred the Progressive Era, named for the various progressive movements that attracted various constituencies around various reforms. Farmers and workers had been waging political war against capitalists and political conservatives for decades, but then, slowly, toward the end of the nineteenth century a new generation of middle-class Americans interjected themselves into public life and advocated new reforms to tame the runaway world of the Gilded Age. Terrible forces seemed out of control and the nation seemed imperiled. The many problems associated with the Gilded Age-the rise of unprecedented fortunes and unprecedented poverty, controversies over imperialism, urban squalor, a near-war between capital and labor, loosening social mores, unsanitary food production, the onrush of foreign immigration, environmental destruction, and the outbreak of political radicalism-confronted Americans.
One can only dimly feel these things, but they are in the air, now, today.” 1 An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fiber and structure of society. He wrote, “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. “Never in the history of the world was society in so terrific flux as it is right now,” Jack London wrote in The Iron Heel, his 1908 dystopian novel in which a corporate oligarchy comes to rule the United States.
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