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students to be confused by the history of the period and warned them that progressivism was a curiously elusive concept.15
Complicating the search for progressivism is the existence of paradoxes among the array of people and groups advocating reform and in Progressive Era social thought.16 For example, although progressives espoused environmentalism and the malleability of character, they also thought in historically bound racial and ethnic categories, believing that some groups of people were more equipped than others as contributors and participants in what historian Axel Schäfer described as the American civilizational master narrative.17 Numerous studies have attempted to resolve the contradictions of progressive social thought by dividing ideas into opposing dichotomies, such as “social” versus “structural” reformers and “social justice” progressives versus “social order” progressives.18 However, more recent work reveals progressive social thought was more ideologically fluid than these binaries suggest, with individuals and organizations pragmatically drawing from different stores of ideas over time or even from opposing ideas simultaneously.19 The failure to identify an intellectually coherent, core progressivism prompted one frustrated historian to derisively claim that what characterized the progressive mentality was its “muddle-minded” jumble of oppositions, while others regretted the scholarly inattention to how and why “strange theoretical combinations” of people and ideas existed side by side, working toward similar ends.20
This book is partly a response to this historiographical problem. The book offers a systematic description and critical analysis of grassroots improvement, demonstrating the interrelatedness of the apparently contradictory elements of progressive thought and behavior. Indeed, the history of improvement and its various advocates reveals the progressive capacity to simultaneously embrace both “positive” and “negative” reforms while remaining relatively unaware of their incongruities. For example, middle-class Chicagoans working through neighborhood improvement associations (NIAs) understood that their local tree planting efforts contributed to a range of citywide reform imperatives and represented a vital expression of their sense of social mutuality and