During the 20th century, many groups across the nation were facing problems with the new urban-industrial order. Progressivism was defined as a broad-based response to industrialization and its social byproducts, which were immigration, urban growth, growing corporate power, and widening class divisions. Most progressives were reformers, who strived to make the new urban-industrial order more humane instead of overturning it and believed that most social problems could be solved through study and organized effort.
While the reformers reoriented American social thought, novelists and journalists reported corporate wrongdoing, municipal corruption, slum conditions, and industrial abuses. Magazines like McClure’s and Collier’s stirred reform energies with articles exposing urban political corruption and corporate wrongdoing, some magazines later appeared as books.…