History of the USA · The modern United States. The idea in plain words, the rules to remember, the mistake to avoid and a worked example, written and checked by Mega Lecture.
After the Civil War the United States became the world's leading industrial power. Railways, steel (Carnegie) and oil (Rockefeller) created huge firms and fortunes. Mark Twain's name for the period, the Gilded Age, means a thin layer of gold over deep problems: poverty, corruption and monopoly.
Workers formed unions, and millions of immigrants filled the cities. After about 1880 more and more came from southern and eastern Europe, not the north and west.
Two movements answered these changes. The Populists of the 1890s spoke for indebted farmers. The Progressives (about 1900 to 1920) were mainly urban and middle class, and used government to regulate business, clean up politics and protect consumers.
Do not treat Populists and Progressives as the same movement. Populists were farmers of the South and West in the 1890s; Progressives were mostly city reformers after 1900, though they adopted several Populist ideas.
Answer: Initiative, referendum, recall and the direct election of senators.
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