California progressive movement history and impact

¶ … California Progressivism

From past to present, California has long prided itself on being a state open to social changes, great and small. After the turn of the 20th century, the political influene of the Progressive movement finally made itself felt in the state legislature when Hiram Johnson and other California progressives came to power after the election of 1910. The reforms that occurred after the progressives gained control of both bodies of the state's legislature changed California economically, socially, and politically in ways that still have an impact upon state politics today. ("Progressives in Power," the California Historical Society, 2004)

Progressivism was a movement that was largely concentrated in the urban locations of the United States. It was spawned in part by the outrage felt by many Americans at the horrific abuses caused by industrialism. America, particularly the California frontier, was thought to be a bastion of individualism, not the province of wealthy industrialists. As the rich grew richer, and profited more off the back-breaking sweat and labor of a largely economically disenfranchised workers, these impoverished individuals strove to make their discontent felt in the only way they knew how -- through political mobilization and the ballot box.

The first major reform of the progressive California state government was to reform the railroad system, which was then a corrupt institution (famously depicted in the thinly fictionalized novel of muckraker Upton Sinclair called the Octopus). After the progressives came to power, the California state legislature gave the state railroad commission the power to control railroad rates. The people of the state were no longer at the mercy of the behemoth railroad cartels. Also, the California legislature created new commissions that could regulate the rates charged by the other public utility companies, to enable all persons within the state to be charged a fair and affordable rate. ("Progressives in Power," the California Historical Society, 2004)

Next, the elected progressives enacted the first system of workers' compensation, which made employers liable for industrial accidents that harmed their workers. Employers had not been liable for this in the past. Before, injured workers were simply left to their own devices, so employers had no incentive to spend the money to help workers that their unsafe factories had maimed. The state legislature adopted an eight-hour workday for women in 1911, and, two years later, as the result of lobbying efforts by worker's rights progressive activist Katherine Philips Edson, the state legislature passed a law creating a minimum wage for women and child workers. ("Progressives in Power," the California Historical Society, 2004)