The progressives got their name from their belief in the doctrine of progress—that governing institutions could be improved by bringing science to bear on public problems. It was a disparate movement, with each reform group targeting a level of government, a particular policy, and so on. Common beliefs included that good government was possible and that the cure of the evils of democracy is more democracy (per a quote from H. L. Menchen from his book in 1926, Notes on Democracy). At the national level, they achieved civil service reform and introduced the direct pri- mary, the initiative, the referendum, and the recall. At the local level, they spawned the commission and council-manager forms of government. It was the progressive influence that initially forged the fledgling discipline of public administration.
As public administration struggled to establish its identity, it was aided greatly by the progressive reform movement that sought to raise the standards of honesty in government and to increase the level of public services provided to citizens, especially in American cities. This effort was further fueled by reform-oriented journalists—the “muckrakers” who publicized both the corruption found among city political machines and the deplorably inadequate living standards and levels of poverty of the working classes, especially among immigrants.26
While the progressive movement sought to offer solutions to many vexing social problems, these problems were often first identified and dug up by the muckrakers. This was President Theodore Roosevelt’s term, taken from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), for a journalist who wrote expo- sés of business and government corruption. Some of the most famous muckrakers were Lincoln Steffens who, in The Shame of the Cities (1904), found many big cities “corrupt and contented”; Ida M. Tarbell who exposed the monopolistic practices of John D. Rockefeller and forced the breakup of Standard Oil; and Upton Sinclair whose exposure of the poisonous practices of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Today, any- one who writes an exposé of governmental corruption or incompetence might be called a muckraker, although they prefer to be called investigative journalists.
The effort to control corruption would be realized with the passage of civil service reform legislation and the creation of stronger city charters and city management systems. Efforts to assist the poor and needy would take much greater effort and in fact would follow a different track entirely. Indeed, it was the settlement movement, based on an English model where social- minded upper-class groups would establish “settlement houses” for the poor and live with them in a group setting. The first settlement houses were tried in New York City in the mid-1880s, but the best-known model opened its doors in 1889 in Chicago at Hull House. The founder was a remarkable 29-year-old woman, Jane Addams27(1860–1935), who would lead this movement and provide a unique American definition to the idea of providing a social setting for immi- grants to escape the poverty cycle and succeed by their own efforts.