An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890–1920: Chicago in th ...

Grassroots projects such as tree planting and street paving were partly inspired by this current of optimism about the future of urban America. However, grassroots improvers were also motivated by what Boyer described as “negative environmentalism.” “Negative” reformers adopted a coercive, moralistic approach that aimed to control the aspects of urban culture that they believed were responsible for moral and social breakdown, particularly public drinking and prostitution. According to Boyer, positive and negative environmentalism constituted “two quite distinct branches of reform activity” that “led in two radically different directions.”¹¹ Indeed, the presence of such contradictory impulses among reformers has often hindered historians seeking to explicate the nature of the Progressive Era.

Extending from the 1890s to the late 1910s, the Progressive Era is universally interpreted by historians as a unique period, characterized by unprecedented levels of interest in social reform. One typically elastic definition describes the Progressive Era as a “broad-gauged response by Americans from many backgrounds and walks of life to the emergence of the United States as a modern, urban, industrial, multicultural world power.”¹² Historians agree the singularity of the Progressive Era is attributable to the contrast between it and surrounding periods, though the principal distinguishing feature is the pervasive presence of a reform impulse referred to as “progressivism.”

In contrast to the consensus over the presence of progressivism, the project of defining and explaining the concept has consistently produced debate and disagreement among historians.¹³ The search for the essence of progressivism has revealed a multiplicity of reform-oriented people, organizations, ideas, values, goals, programs, and motives.¹⁴ Reflecting on the welter of conflicting interpretations produced by growing numbers of historians since the 1960s, historian Daniel Rodgers cautioned readers of Reviews in American History to prepare their undergraduate