The genteel and incapable Mugwump reformers received yet another battering in 1968 with the publication of John Sproat's ‘The Best Men’: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age. They are presented as being consumed by their moral imperatives and their hysterical fear of the lower classes, and sinking amid the social turmoil of the 1890s; their label, ‘liberal’, is but a convention for the benefit of their misguided contemporaries, and as we now know what it really means, they should be rejected as unworthy. Like many people, Sproat apparently sees the 1890s as a self-contained decade overwhelmed by the Pullman Strike and Free Silver, with the Klondike and Cuba as a fortunate tailpiece to avert the pending revolution. But amid the turmoil, one era of reform – the era of the ‘Bolt from Blaine’ and of the Civil Service Act – in fact blended into another – the era of Progressivism. The continuing public career of Seth Low, the type of organizations and men who supported him for office, and the principles of municipal reform announced early in his career are some aspects of this blending process. When one considers the diversity of liberal concerns and the regular infusion of new men and aims, then it is high time we modified those explanations of Progressivism based only on an explosion of material self-interest or cravings for lost status after 1900.