The period from the last years of the Gilded Age in the 1890s and early 1900s to the late 1920s is called the "Progressive Era." 

That was because most Americans were looking at problems like women's rights, workers' rights, unsafe and unsanitary cities, obscenely rich millionaires with poorly paid servants, racial inequality, environmental destruction, and alcoholism, and were like, "This is America, yo, let's do something about it." 

Most people wanted to see progress happen, even though they didn't all agree on what it should look like.

For most of American history, folks had been avoiding some of the biggest problems in American society. You know how most houses have a broken stair or a leaking faucet somewhere? And everyone in the house comes up with ridiculous workarounds like jumping over the stair or keeping water bottles under the sink? And then everyone gets so used to it that people who want to actually fix the stairs or faucets just sound like complainers? 

Well, issues like income inequality, women's rights, alcoholism, and environmental destruction were America's broken stair issues in the early-20th century.

Because of this, early activists came off as complainers and nitpickers. A common term was "muckraking" because they were bringing ugly truths up to the surface. However, instead of shutting up, muckrakers just kept getting louder and louder. Eventually, politicians listened and became reformers who dramatically changed American society.  

However, these changes weren't always wise or generous. An ugly undercurrent of racism and classism—being prejudiced against people of a certain class—had infected the Progressive movement, and even as they advocated on behalf of the white working poor, many Progressives still wanted to attack or remove non-white people and non-white culture. 

Plus, they sometimes "advocated" for the poor in a way that sounded more like insulting the poor.

A New York Times editorial decried the "Biggest Beef Recall Ever." It reported on a "nauseating video" of diseased cows in filthy conditions at a Westland/Hallmark Meat Company plant, "stumbling on their way to a California slaughterhouse." 

The Humane Society of the United States, which randomly selected the plant for videotaping, took the footage and then distributed it nationwide via news stations and the internet.

That controversial footage clearly indicated that Americans were being sold meat processed from sick animals that never, according to government food safety standards, should have become part of the food supply. In response to the resulting public outcry, the Westland/Hallmark Meat Company issued a full recall of more than 143 million pounds of beef produced over two years. This included—as the Times article noted—"37 million pounds that went to school-lunch programs."¹

From all across the country, people quickly responded to the bad-meat exposé. Vegetarians suggested that these sorts of catastrophes could be avoided altogether if people just stopped killing animals for food, and omnivores wrote letters proposing that people should keep eating meat, but that the animals need not be mistreated while being raised for slaughter.

The whole episode unfolded a bit more than one century after the 1906 publication of Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, which sparked the first national scandal over the meatpacking industry. Many of the issues first introduced during that Progressive-Era scandal remain live wires in today's political and social climate. 

• How should the government effectively inspect the nation's food supply?
• What should the punishment be for violating government standards?
• How much power should food inspectors possess?
• What kind of safety standards are acceptable or advisable for the American food industry?

Just as Upton Sinclair himself learned through bitter experience, reforms could produce results that differed considerably from the original intent of the reformer. The Humane Society sought to dramatize the plight of sick cows to win better treatment of animals, but early reaction to the scandal focused almost entirely on tightening standards over which animals should be blocked from entering the human food supply.

And no fundamental restructuring of the American beef industry today appears imminent. The economic pressures of the capitalist marketplace—the cost of land, the push to maximize output, the competition from foreign beef importers, the expense of new facilities, and the costs of removing diseased cattle from production—all work against the reformers' cause.

A century ago, Progressive reformers encountered similar setbacks. They tackled food safety along with a host of other issues: alcohol abuse, women's rights, economic concentration, corporate power, political corruption, and poverty. 

But they didn't solve them. Tellingly, every one of these issues remains problematic in our own time. How do we, as a society, address these social challenges? Can the successes and failures of the Progressive reformers of a century ago provide us with guidance, or should they serve as a cautionary tale?