The Progressive Movement in American history is often related as a time of great political reform. New legislation such as Child Labor laws, the Progressive Income Tax laws, Women suffrage, etc., etc. What author Michael McGerr portrays in his book is a much richer portrait of a movement that went far beyond changes to our political system and explains how the very success of the movement caused its demise.

The Progressive Movement encompassed a broad spectrum of social reforms that included control of big business, greatly reducing extreme poverty, the transformation of gender relationships, the improvement of home life, the restraint on leisure and pleasure, and the fostering of racial segregation. This last item bears a brief explanation. Progressives were not racists, but came to view the "negro" as needing protection from society.

The Progressive agenda had its roots in the middle class of society of the Gilded Age that was repulsed by the concentration of wealth of the upper class that composed what McGerr labels the "upper ten" of the population. The post civil war industrialization of America witnessed changes in society including extremes of wealth and poverty, massive immigration and new and tempting pleasures and amusements. It is in this environment that progressivism begins to attempt to restructure society and create a middle class utopia by uplifting the working class and restraining the upper ten.

McGerr's book looks less at the well known political achievements of the Progressive Era and instead details the less obvious agenda of the reform movement: to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; and to segregate society. We see the results of these efforts in social battles such as Prohibition , Women Suffrage, Labor Unions, Anti-Trust laws, Settlement Houses, Jim Crow laws, etc.

The demise of the Progressive Movement ironically occurs at the very time it wield the most power, during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. Yet, World War I and the post war aftermath of strikes, the Red Scare, and lifting of wartime restraints on society would bring a crushing political defeat to reformists. Jane Adams of Hull House fame, who was one of the best known progressives in America and considered a true American hero before the war, is branded after the war as a radical and Bolshevik. So complete is the fall of the progressives that the election of 1920 ushers in twelve years of pro-business presidents and era of unrestrained pleasures known as the "Roaring Twenties."

Later reform efforts such as the New Deal and the Great Society did not attempt to duplicate the progressive's goal of transforming society. The New Conservative Right lead by Goldwater and Reagan would take power on the image of American Individualism and the need to control government. McGerr argues that our political world today in the early 21st Century is a direct outcome of the fall of the Progressive Movement.