<P> The Progressive Movement enlisted support from both major parties (and from minor parties as well). One leader, Democrat William Jennings Bryan, had won both the Democratic Party and the Populist Party nominations in 1896 . At the time, the great majority of other major leaders had been opposed to Populism . When Roosevelt left the Republican Party in 1912, he took with him many of the intellectual leaders of progressivism, but very few political leaders . The Republican Party then became notably more committed to business - oriented and efficiency oriented progressivism, typified by Taft and Herbert Hoover . </P> <P> The foundation of the progressive tendency was indirectly linked to the unique philosophy of pragmatism, which was primarily developed by John Dewey and William James . </P> <P> Equally significant to progressive - era reform were the crusading journalists, known as muckrakers . These journalists publicized, to middle class readers, economic privilege, political corruption, and social injustice . Their articles appeared in McClure's Magazine and other reform periodicals . Some muckrakers focused on corporate abuses . Ida Tarbell, for instance, exposed the activities of the Standard Oil Company . In The Shame of the Cities (1904), Lincoln Steffens dissected corruption in city government . In Following the Color Line (1908), Ray Stannard Baker criticized race relations . Other muckrakers assailed the Senate, railroad companies, insurance companies, and fraud in patent medicine . </P> <P> Novelists, too, criticized corporate injustices . Theodore Dreiser drew harsh portraits of a type of ruthless businessman in The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914). In The Jungle (1906), Socialist Upton Sinclair repelled readers with descriptions of Chicago's meatpacking plants, and his work led to support for remedial food safety legislation . </P>

Populist form of government in the first half of the twentieth century