Applying the lessons of history, this book argues that progressives have given us the America we know and love--ending slavery and Jim Crow racism, granting equal rights to women, and building a much-admired society of fairness, justice, and equality. From Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, it is progressives who have maximized our legal equality while using government to protect us against tainted meat, polluted water, monopoly capitalists, and other abuses in the marketplace. Progressives since the New Deal have also given us Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, while teaching us how to manage our economy without the depressions that happened every decade before Franklin Roosevelt invented active government. The left has always been right, Ericksen argues, and is right again today.