As technicians, clerks, managers, and engineers became part of the middle class, they became Progressives."" (1). Progressives were made up of mostly the middle class of U.S. cities. Most of them wanted to apply the principles of their professions to societal problems. Two of the major concerns that the middle class had were the monopolies, and the large gap between the rich and the poor. As the years progressed, the middle class was rather successful in achieving the majority of their goals with the assistance of successful leaders and other sources of aid.
A very significant contribution to the Progressive movement came from those of whom Theodore Roosevelt called the muckrakers. The muckrakers were writers who specialized in stories about underhanded schemes in politics. The stories appealed to the middle class. Among the muckrakers was Henry Lloyd. He attacked Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company and the railroads in 1881. In 1894, he wrote Wealth Against Commonwealth, which exposed corruption and greed of the oil company, yet it gave no suggestions in how to control it. Samuel Hopkins Adams exposed the patent medicine industry in Great American Fraud. John Spargo wrote The Bitter Cry of the Children, an account of young kids at work in sweatshops. In 1893, McClure's Magazine, founded by Samuel Sidney McClure, ran a series of muckraking articles by Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. These articles often became books. Jacob Riis' articles on tenement life were published in How the Other Half Lives in 1890. Lincoln Steffens' The Shame of the Cities written in 1904 described corrupt deals that characterized big-city politics. Theodore Dreiser's .
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The Financer and The Titan exhibited the ruthlessness of industrialist. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair described conditions in Chicago meatpacking industry. His accounts led Congress to enact in 1906, two Acts: the Pure Food and Drug Act, which forbade the sale, production, shipping, and etc of mislabeled food products.