Progressive Movement

PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT. The Progressive movement of the early twentieth century was an effort to form a majority coalition from interest groups alienated by the economic policy of the governing Republican Party. These groups—including farmers, a significantly immigrant working class, and middle-class consumers—hoped to sustain the successes of American industry while spreading its benefits more widely. Both of the major parties, and several of the minor ones, were home to politicians who hoped to capture this coalition. This diverse movement gave rise to a strain of political thought called Progressivism, whose creators sought to adapt the decentralized ideals of democracy to an age whose material pressures favored the concentration of money and power.

From the Civil War to 1900 the Republican Party, which dominated federal politics, adopted a strategy of national economic development favoring urban industry. A protective tariff nurtured manufacturers. The subsidized development of railroads and telegraph networks gave commerce access to the natural riches of the American continent. A commitment to a strong dollar through maintaining the gold standard kept financiers happy. The country had achieved the Republicans' goal by the turn of the century: the United States was the premier manufacturing nation in the world and was becoming the richest nation in total and per capita wealth.

But mere prosperity, unevenly spread, could not satisfy all segments of the population. Farmers objected to the tariff, which made them pay higher prices for manufactured equipment; to the gold standard, which made life harder for them as debtors; and to the policies that favored railroads, which charged far-flung rural shippers rates higher than urban producers paid. Laborers, against whom the federal government sided in every major union dispute, opposed the tariff, preferring an income tax that would raise public money from the pockets of the rich. In addition, unions sought decent working conditions and stability in employment. Also, university-educated professionals looked with alarm on the war of all against all that resulted from the encouragement of unfettered industry. Oilmen owned U.S. senators, railroad men plundered the public coffers, and public service appeared generally and increasingly beholden to private interests rather than being attentive to the national interest.

Despite this growing discontent, two major obstacles stood in the way of the Progressive movement. One was party loyalty. Even with formidable personalities seeking to woo voters away from traditional tickets, Americans tended to stick with familiar politicians. The other was the near impossibility of bringing together rural, Protestant farmers and urban immigrants who might be Catholic, Orthodox, or Jewish. Ultimately, these two factors spelled ruin for Progressivism; in 1917, anti-immigration sentiment found a home in the Democratic Party and fractured the coalition upon which reform depended. But between 1901 and 1917, the possibility of making this coalition permanent and giving it a partisan home energized politics and political thought, and generated legislation equipping the American state to manage a modern society.

The Republican Roosevelt

After William McKinley's two defeats of the Democratic and Populist candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and 1900, conservative Republicans seemed set to perpetuate the political economy that had worked so well so far. In a speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in September 1901, McKinley assured his constituents that the tariff would remain the principal economic tool of his administration. But while greeting visitors there, McKinley was fatally shot by the anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became president, and the character of politics dramatically changed.

Had McKinley not been assassinated, historians would not now have the concept of a Progressive movement to kick around, as without Roosevelt the dissenting constituencies could more easily have found homes in the Democratic or Socialist parties. But for personal and political reasons, Roosevelt used his presidency to give dissenters a place, however uneasy or temporary, in the Republican coalition. Identifying himself variously as a Progressive, liberal, radical, or insurgent Republican, Roosevelt claimed that as the only elected official with a national constituency, the president was the steward of the public welfare. He used his public addresses to call for a long list of reforms, including anti-corruption, anti-monopoly, democratizing, regulatory, and other novel measures that would use the government to rein in industry. Above all, he tried to define a national interest that would rise above the regional or commercial particularities that had hitherto characterized Republican efforts. Trying to find a middle ground between traditional Republicanism and reformist zeal, he nearly always equivocated; in Americans (1922), Stuart Sherman gave him the title of "greatest concocter of 'weasel' paragraphs on record." But he also, Sherman allowed, was responsible for the consequential rhetorical feat of "creating for the nation the atmosphere in which valor and high seriousness live." While president, Roosevelt used his executive authority to prosecute some trusts; to arbitrate between capital and labor, as in the anthracite coal strike of 1902; and to set aside national parks, preserving them from altogether free exploitation by industry. Aided by the 1904 election—which swept western, reformist Republicans into Congress, and also made Roosevelt president in his own right—he campaigned for and sometimes got reformist legislation. Chief among these laws were three measures passed in 1906: the Hepburn Act, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the authority to set maximum railroad rates and to standardize railroad accounting; the Pure Food and Drug Act, which led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration; and the Meat Inspection Act, which empowered the Department of Agriculture to grade meat products.

But as observers like Sherman noted, Roosevelt effected fewer changes in the law than he did in the atmosphere. He was the first president to identify himself with the changes that had long been brewing in city and state governments. When Robert La Follette was still in the Wisconsin statehouse and Woodrow Wilson was still a conservative Democrat who hated Bryan, Roosevelt was calling for reforms that he freely borrowed from Bryan's platform and using the government as an arbiter between capital and labor rather than a mere tool of capital. And as a Manhattanite who had lived in and identified with the West, Roosevelt straddled two streams of political thought that Progressives desperately wanted to see combined: the self-conscious consumerism of educated urban middle classes and the political rebellion of the West against eastern dominance.

The Basis for Dissent

To a considerable extent, the Progressive effort to trammel industry picked up where the strongly western Populist Party of the 1890s left off. Depression-wracked farmers identified the cozy relationship between industry and politics as the enemy of their security, and even as prosperity returned in the early twentieth century, they continued to support reforms intended to limit the influence of urban industry on government. Thus, railroad regulation and increased antitrust action enjoyed the support of congressmen representing farm districts. When Roosevelt promoted a federal income tax (which became constitutional with the Sixteenth Amendment, proposed in 1909 and ratified in 1913), he echoed farmers seeking to supplant the protective tariff as a method of funding government. Western farmers also supported the creation of a decentralized national banking system, which became law in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Western states led in adopting democratizing reforms like the enfranchisement of women and the primary election for senators and presidential candidates. And the Populists, like the Jacksonians before them, had supported the popular election of senators, which finally became law when the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, ending the power of state legislatures to choose them. All of these measures would tend to limit the ability of extractive industry to exploit the political and financial capital of the West.

These reforms enjoyed as well the backing of urban reformers, who also sought to regulate industry. As consumers mindful of the health of their children and the children of their neighborhood, they favored health and safety codes to prevent overcrowding, the spread of disease, and the danger of fire. They pressed for public ownership of municipal utilities to prevent electric and gas companies from gouging ratepayers. And they sought to improve public education on the subject of modern political issues so as to encourage the poor to assert their rights. They favored antitrust and regulatory legislation to curb the exploitive power of industry. They supported the income tax, which recognizes actual inequalities of wealth among a people dedicated to an ideal of equality. To give greater democratic sanction to their reforms, they lobbied for the enfranchisement of women and direct democratic measures like the primary election, initiative, referendum, and recall. They also promoted a federal banking system that would limit the swings of boom and bust in business cycles, which would lead to steadier employment for nonprofessional workers. All of these measures would tend to reduce the ability of industry to exploit the cityscape without, reformers hoped, reducing American businesses' ability to make money and employ workers on a regular basis.

To the extent that the western agrarian agenda corresponded with the urban consumer agenda, Progressive reform provided a plausible basis on which to construct a political coalition, and because this constellation of interests crossed traditional party lines, it required a new definition of common interests to unify them. Journalists, politicians, and intellectuals inspired by Roosevelt's energy and by the political philosophy of the day stepped into the breach, giving rise to a variety of political thought called Progressivism. Whether categorized as journalist Herbert Croly's New Nationalism or as the contrapuntal New Freedom of lawyer Louis Brandeis, Progressive political thought deployed the same basic idea, namely that when more Americans lived in cities, when concentrations of capital and labor fought over the spoils of industry, the government had to stand above all as an agent of the public interest. Influenced by pragmatic philosophers like William James and John Dewey, Progressives believed the public interest could only emerge from the colloquy of individual citizens seeking to transcend their particular interests and open to the lessons of experience. Because social conditions were constantly changing, democratic opinion had to change, too, and a progressive democracy must be willing endlessly to experiment with social policy. As Croly argued, societies became democratic by acting as if they were democratic, and learning from the results. Even Christian theorists of the social gospel like Walter Rauschenbush argued that all earthly victories were conditional. In this era inflected by Darwinian thinking, adaptive ability was paramount. Fixed ideologies prevented creatures from adapting to new circumstances, so all arrangements were open to improvement.

The formulation that described most actual Progressive reforms was "Hamiltonian means for Jeffersonian ends," the paradoxical principle that those with authority and power must use more of it to produce more nearly democratic conditions: they must use their power so as ultimately to diminish it. Consequently, Progressives were especially optimistic about education and improved childrearing as models for reform: the relationship between teachers and pupils or between parents and children matched their idea of the ideal relationship between the powerful and the powerless, between the government and its citizens. If government could modify the market principle that all buyers, although not equally equipped, must equally beware, and instead interpose its own judgment, then a truer equality might result. This idea underwrote the educational functions of government agencies like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which publicized and judged the fairness of business practices, and also of private efforts like the philanthropically funded settlement houses, in which educated middle-class women set themselves up as parents and teachers to the immigrant poor. All such enterprises, from bureaus of municipal information to experimental schools, operated on the principle that if people knew better, they could truly see their own interests and govern themselves.

Elections sorely tried this faith, as voters continued to exhibit party loyalty, irrespective of what reformers regarded as the public interest. But the Roosevelt presidency created a national nexus for Progressives of the urban and rural varieties, who formed countless organizations based on these principles. With an interlocking web of personnel and ideas developed in the United States and borrowed from similarly reformist European or Antipodean societies, these groups included the General Federation of Women's Clubs (1890), the Sierra Club (1892), the National Consumers League (1899), the National Conference on City Planning (1909), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909), among others, dedicated to enlightening the public on its interest in a particular set of issues.

During the presidency of William Howard Taft, Progressives found themselves excluded from the White House, although they constituted a growing presence in Congress, especially after the elections of 1910 sent control of the Senate to an informal coalition of Progressive Republicans and Democrats. Congress passed the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which strengthened railroad regulation more than Taft wanted, and entirely without his help put before the country the Sixteenth Amendment for a federal income tax and the Seventeenth Amendment for the direct election of senators.

Both amendments, ratified by the states in 1913, yoked together key elements of the Progressive coalition and also showed how fragile and fleeting it was to be. Urban and rural consumers alike supported both measures because they diminished business influence on politics. But key support for the Seventeenth Amendment came from the heavily immigrant industrial cities and a coalition depending upon the common interests of immigrants and farmers could not hold. The campaign for Prohibition, which became law after the Eighteenth Amendment was ratified in 1919, served as a stalking horse for anti-immigrant sentiment and foretold the end of Progressivism.

The 1912 Election and the Wilson Presidency

In the two decades around the turn of the twentieth century, the United States took in some fifteen million immigrants. Progressive attitudes toward immigrants varied from the urbanely condescending approaches of intellectuals who valued diversity to the racist attitudes of labor unions and intellectuals who sought to exclude peoples who, they believed, were bred to live cheaply. Both attitudes tended to generalize unduly about immigrants. Some, like Russian Jews, hoped to make accommodations with American culture and rear their descendants in the United States; many others, like Italian peasants, hoped to make as much money as possible and go home as little tainted by American culture as possible. Return rates among some immigrant populations ran as high as 50 percent.

Between 1898, when Congress failed to pass a McKinley-backed immigration-restriction bill, and 1917, when Congress passed such a bill over President Woodrow Wilson's veto, it was possible for politicians to bid plausibly for the support of both farmers and immigrants. The 1898 bill was defeated by southern congressmen hopeful that immigration might contribute to the industrialization of their region. With time it became clear that immigrants avoided the South—partly because the racial terrorism that accompanied Jim Crow was often extended to foreigners—and instead swelled the cities and the congressional districts of the North. But during the two decades it took for southern leaders to change their minds, the immigrant-farmer coalition was workable and the need to woo southern voters meant national Progressives turned a blind eye toward Jim Crow.

As the 1912 election approached, Progressive Republicans who remembered Roosevelt gathered uneasily around La Follette, now a U.S. senator from Wisconsin who had carried the insurgent torch while Roosevelt was out of politics. Although an experienced Progressive governor, the self-righteous La Follette alienated the press and his supporters early in 1912, leaving room for Roosevelt to seize the leadership of the movement that the senator had husbanded in his absence. When the Republican convention at Chicago renominated Taft, Roosevelt led the insurgents out of the GOP to form a new Progressive Party, leaving fistfights and shouting delegates in his wake.

Roosevelt's split of the Republican Party created a golden opportunity for the Democrats to win a presidential election for the first time since 1892. They nominated Wilson, the governor of New Jersey and former president of Princeton University. On the Progressive ticket, Roosevelt came nearer the presidency than any other third-party candidate. But party loyalty combined with a Progressive-looking candidate prevailed, and enough of the dissenting coalition voted for Wilson to put him in the White House.

Originally a Virginian, Wilson had always leaned toward the states rights interpretations of the Constitution, so much that he opposed basic Progressive measures like laws preventing child labor. But his years of dealing with privileged Princetonians and New Jersey corporate interests moved him nearer the Progressive position on economic regulation and the early years of his presidency saw a flurry of Progressive legislation. The Underwood-Simmons Act of 1913 lowered import tariffs and raised, for the first time, a constitutional federal income tax. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created a dollar regulated by a regional system of publicly supervised banks. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 included detailed provisions for prosecuting anti-competitive business, and the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 created a strong regulatory agency to enforce Clayton Act provisions. In the midst of the 1916 election season, almost wholly on the president's initiative, Congress passed the Adamson Act mandating an eight-hour day for interstate railroad workers.

But the 1916 election spelled the end for the Progressive coalition. Democrats carried Congress and the White House, with rural congressmen promising their constituents anti-immigration legislation and the president promising urban immigrants he would oppose such legislation. The xenophobic influence of the European war drove anti-immigrant sentiment to new heights and in February 1917 Congress passed immigration restriction legislation over Wilson's veto. Two months later Wilson sought, and got, a declaration of war from Congress, and so the war displaced Progressivism altogether in the nation's politics.

The constellation of interests that comprised the Progressive movement would not align again until immigrants, farmers, and self-conscious urban consumers backed Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. In the meantime, Republican administrations, returned to office by traditional conservative constituencies, declined to enforce many Progressive laws. Aided by a Supreme Court that gutted regulatory decisions by subjecting them to judicial review, the conservative administrations and conservative judiciary of the 1920s laid Progressivism to rest. Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919 and Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke in the same year. The Progressive season had passed, leaving in place a partial legislative program and an experimental political philosophy that waited fulfillment.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hatton, Timothy J., and Jeffrey G. Williamson. The Age of Mass Migration: Causes and Economic Impact. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kennedy, David M. "Overview: The Progressive Era." Historian 37 (1975): 453–468.

Kloppenberg, James T. Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974.

McCormick, Richard L. "The Discovery that Business Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism." American Historical Review 86 (1981): 247–274.

Milkis, Sidney M., and Jerome M. Mileur, eds. Progressivism and the New Democracy. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Rauchway, Eric. The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900–1920. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.

———. "In Search of Progressivism." Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December 1982): 113–132.

Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Sarasohn, David. The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989.

Sherman, Stuart P. Americans. New York: Scribners, 1922.

Skocpol, Theda. Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992.

Eric Rauchway

See also Adamson Act ; Bull Moose Party ; Elections, Presidential ; General Federation of Women's Clubs ; Hepburn Act ; National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ; New Freedom ; New Nationalism ; Populism ; Pragmatism ; Sierra Club ; Social Gospel .