The Progressive Movement

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Section I.2. Social Movements Expansion

Over the history of United States, multiples movements saw rise in order to protect and demand common goods, security and other issues that seems to be controlled by the society and federal government. Here we take a look at four of these movements and we analyze how they have changed our everyday lives and transformed society over the past decades:
1. Reconstruction (1865-1877)
Reconstruction was a rough time in the story of American freedom, discrimination against black men and women was very intense, these people were often working for low wages and without proper life’ conditions. Those politicians who worked forward equality and freedom in the market, life, and laws conditions caused divisions between
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The Progressive Movement (1900-1918)
The Progressive Movement was a reaction to intense concentration of wealth and political power in very limited number of hands and created support for new laws aimed at regulation and democratization. Two methods used to derogate this imbalance were:
1. Theodore Roosevelt gave to the Interstate Commerce Commission the power to examine railroads’ records and set fair rates, establishing a federal agency to determine the quality and labeling of food and drugs and the Meat Inspection. (Textbook, p.
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Anti-trust legislation: introduced the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) used to weaken corporate power in 1908, first it was the railroad’s corporation, and later in 1911 John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. (Textbook, p. 710).
3. Congress – Federal Agencies: created by Wilson, president in 1912, created two public federal agencies: the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) used to prohibit unfair business activities and monopolistic practices. (Textbook, p. 713).

3. The Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968)
The Civil Rights movement challenged the United States to rethink what it really means by freedom, they made American society confront the fact that certain groups, felt themselves excluded from full enjoyment of American freedom. The most important achievements of the movement have been the post-Civil War constitutional amendments that eradicate slavery and found the citizenship status of blacks and the judicial decisions and legislation based on these amendments, resulting in three notable cases:
• The Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954. (Textbook, p. 956);
• The Civil Rights Act of 1964. (Textbook, p. 976);
• And the Voting Rights Act of 1965. (Textbook, p.

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