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"The Age Demands It": Progressivism In Zion City, Illinois, A Conservative Protestant Theocracy, Gayle A. Kiszely

Dissertations (1934 -)

Historians have periodized the last decade of the nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries as the Progressive Era.The Era is characterized by booming industrialization, unregulated corporate capitalism, rapid urbanization, and immigration from countries other than northern Europe. These developments unleashed an explosion of reforms intended to solve the social problems that emanated from these unsettling developments. Reformers beseeched the courts and state and national legislatures to regulate banks and big businesses. Urban reformers and liberal religious leaders established settlement houses to uplift immigrants morally and socially. Other reformers espoused religious or secular communitarian philosophies to dignify labor, …