Best President of the Progressive Era, and Why?

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Wilson.

He did pretty much everything T.R. said that he was going to do.

Seriously, Wilson gets a bad rap because of things he did in WWI, but I assure you that FDR did, well, pretty much most of what Wilson did, and interned an entire race of human beings. And we all love FDR on the left. So I think Wilson gets a little too much sh**t, in some regard. Yes, we was a weasley racist bastard, but so was Theodore "Blood for the Blood God" Roosevelt. Wilson passed more good legislation than any president up to that point, and made the New Deal possible by setting up the foundations for it (income tax, federal reserve, co-operation between labor and government, proving that government intervention in the economy could work)

So, my final ranking is:

[1] Woodrow Wilson
[2] Theodore Roosevelt
[3] William Howard Taft
[4] William McKinley
[5] Herbert Hoover
[6] Calvin Coolidge
[7] Warren Harding

Harding is an odious slimeball and probably would be considered the worst President in American history were it not for Richard Nixon.

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I only see three presidents as being part of the progressive era. TR, Taft and Wilson. McKinley was Guilded Age, Harding and Coolidge were Return to Normalicy and Hoover is part of the Depression Era. Thus the best would be Taft by a mile. Wilson was the worst.

The "Progressive Era" is typically measured by historians as being 1896-1932, an era that basically consisted of Republican domination of politics and a new type of political alignment--urban Republicans vs. agrarian Democrats.

Not really. The Progressive Era is typically considered the period between Teddy Roosevelt's ascension to the Presidency and the outbreak of WWI. The longest I've seen it is 1900 to 1920, but nothing I've seen includes the 1920s, which were decidedly not part of the same political era. The Progressive Era itself is just sort of a blip in the otherwise Long Gilded Age that starts in 1877 and ends in 1933.