<P> Many activists joined efforts to reform local government, public education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, churches, and many other areas . Progressives transformed, professionalized and made "scientific" the social sciences, especially history, economics, and political science . In academic fields the day of the amateur author gave way to the research professor who published in the new scholarly journals and presses . The national political leaders included Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and Charles Evans Hughes on the Republican side, and William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith on the Democratic side . Yet, leaders of the movement also existed far from presidential politics . Jane Addams, Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge were among the most influential Progressive Era reformers . </P> <P> Initially the movement operated chiefly at local levels; later, it expanded to state and national levels . Progressives drew support from the middle class, and supporters included many lawyers, teachers, physicians, ministers, and business people . Some Progressives strongly supported scientific methods as applied to economics, government, industry, finance, medicine, schooling, theology, education, and even the family . They closely followed advances underway at the time in Western Europe and adopted numerous policies, such as a major transformation of the banking system by creating the Federal Reserve System in 1913 . Reformers felt that old - fashioned ways meant waste and inefficiency, and eagerly sought out the "one best system". </P> <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, election reforms to stop corruption and fraud, 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>

What was a significant impact of the progressive movement