<P> Disturbed by the waste, inefficiency, stubbornness, corruption, and injustices of the Gilded Age, the Progressives were committed to changing and reforming every aspect of the state, society and economy . Significant changes enacted at the national levels included the imposition of an income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment, direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment, Prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment, and women's suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution . </P> <P> Magazines were not a new medium but they became much more popular around 1900, some with circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers . It was an age of Mass media . Thanks to the rapid expansion of national advertising, the cover price fell sharply to about 10 cents . One cause was the heavy coverage of corruption in politics, local government and big business, especially by journalists and other writers who were labeled muckrakers . They wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings . They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption . Muckraking magazines--notably McClure's--took on corporate monopolies and crooked political machines while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor . </P> <P> The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock . Other like Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company . Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate . Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck . </P> <P> The Progressives were avid modernizers, with a belief in science and technology as the grand solution to society's weaknesses . They looked to education as the key . Characteristics of Progressivism included a favorable attitude toward urban - industrial society, belief in mankind's ability to improve the environment and conditions of life, belief in an obligation to intervene in economic and social affairs, and a belief in the ability of experts and in the efficiency of government intervention . Scientific management, as promulgated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, became a watchword for industrial efficiency and elimination of waste, with the stopwatch as its symbol . </P>

Who worked for reform in the progressive era