THE 1910s: GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS: OVERVIEW

The High Tide of Progressivism

The high tide of the Progressive Era occurred during the 1910s, as a profusion of interest groups with competing legislative proposals made the decade one of the most turbulent and exciting in U.S. history. Reforms at the federal level included the lowering of tariffs, the introduction of the income tax, passage of antitrust laws and the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, the direct election of senators, federal child-labor laws, and constitutional amendments prohibiting the consumption of alcoholic beverages and extending the vote to women. During the 1910s reformers at the state level enacted workmen's compensation laws and mothers' pensions (the first government-funded welfare plans for nonveterans). Seeking to break the power of entrenched political interests, reformers also advocated open primaries; the initiative, the referendum, and the recall; and governmental regulation of gas, water, and electrical utilities. Urban reformers sought to weaken political bosses and their machines by implementing commission government and home rule. As the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state continued, various political factions battled for control in a society being transformed by the forces of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization.

Embattled Republicans and Ascendant Democrats

During his single term in the White House, President William Howard Taft, who served from March 1909 until March 1913, continued many of the reformist policies of his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt. The presidency was TafVs first elected governmental office, and the politically inexperienced Republican leader lacked the necessary skills to hold together a diverse national constituency. Within months of his inauguration, Taft faced significant opposition from insurgents within his own party, and in the elections of 1910 Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress. In the presidential election of 1912 Democrat Woodrow Wilson garnered a plurality of the popular vote and won by a landslide in the Electoral College as many Republican voters, disillusioned by Taft, cast their ballots for the Progressive Party and its reform-minded candidate, Theodore Roosevelt. By the time the Republicans had healed the wounds of their internecine party warfare, the Democrats, under Wilson, had recaptured the presidency by a slim margin in 1916. In 1918, however, Republicans regained control of both the House and Senate and were soon setting a political course that would lead them to victories throughout the 1920s.

A World Power

During the decade every facet of American politics was shaped by the extraordinary fact that by 1910 the United States had become the wealthiest nation in the world. In the previous quarter century the United States had overtaken the great European powers that had dominated the world for four centuries and established itself as the most productive country in the world. Indeed, by 1919 the U.S. economic output surpassed that of all European nations combined. Proponents of the American political and economic systems argued that the combination of a constitutional republican government and capitalist economy was the basis for their nation's remarkable successes, asserting that U.S. industrial, agricultural, and financial interests were the foundations on which national prosperity was based. Yet the concentration of wealth at the top unsettled others. Capitalists and managerial executives, critics argued, wielded excessive power. Hence one of the major political debates of the 1910s was over what role government should play in the economy. Some feared that too little regulation of corporate power might fuel a growing oligarchy, but others were concerned that too much regulation might destroy the efficiencies of a capitalist system by which America had achieved prosperity. One consequence of this debate was the rise of the philosophy of corporate liberalism, whose advocates argued that government policy ought to gain control of the business cycle, nurture growth, and assist those in society who were not reaping the rewards of modern capitalism. Yet corporate liberals also urged that governmental activism should be limited: government ought not own or control private enterprise, and the regulations it implemented should seek to increase the overall productivity of the economy rather than slow it.

Political Factions

Among the one hundred million U.S. citizens an assortment of factions vied for political power. Farmers, industrial workers, corporate business leaders, small business entrepreneurs, professionals, party bosses and their machines, social scientists, religious leaders, women, immigrants, and African Americans were among the groups who sought to shape local, state, and national policy agendas. Reform to one group was often retrenchment to another. While the decade was rife with the language of reform, there was no single, coherent reform ideology. Urban voters (who were often industrial workers, new immigrants, and Catholics or Jews) tended to cast their ballots for Democrats. Rural voters often backed Republicans, as did Protestants, professionals, and capitalists. Yet the multitude of exceptions to these tendencies demonstrates the complex nature of American politics during the 1910s. In the South voting patterns were fairly easy to discern. Fifty years after its sufferings in the Civil War and Reconstruction—both under Republican presidents—the region remained solidly Democratic, its Republican-voting African American population largely disfranchised by "Jim Crow" laws.

Governmental Activism

Progress was a keyword in the early twentieth century. There was astonishing progress not only in the nation's economy but also in its science, medicine, and technology. It is not surprising, then, that politicians seeking a new label with positive valuations decided to call themselves "progressives." The term captured the ethos of the age and represented to many what was best about the nation, but what counted as "progressive" politically was contested terrain. Conservatives, insurgents, socialists, and modern liberals all claimed to be progressive. By the 1910s, however, the predominant political usage of the term was most often associated with political reformers who espoused the expansion of the regulatory powers of government as a means to alleviate social ills, Indeed, as Roosevelt declared in 1912, "The Progressive Movement is greater than the Progressive Party; yet the Progressive Party is at present the only instrument through which that movement can be advanced." During the decade progressives succeeded in using government as a shield to protect citizens, consumers, and workers from powerful corporate and financial interests. They believed that local, state, and national governments ought to perform a variety of new services.

Political Conservatives

Conservatives believed that their programs offered the best hope for true political progress. In "What is Real Political Progress?" (1912) John William Burgess, a political scientist at Columbia University, took aim at the Progressive Party platform. Dismissing socialism as untenable, Burgess asked "whether this [progressivism] is progress, standstill or retrogression in the development of political theory and practical politics." His reply, after a twenty-page history of individual liberty in the western world, was: "we dare not call anything progress…which contemplates…the expansion of governmental power." Having identified progressivism with an active regulatory welfare state that was, in his view, reactionary and undesirable, he countered with a classic statement of American conservatism. These so-called progressives, he argued, must "show conclusively that the improvement and development of the system of popular education, the revival of the influence of religion, the restoration of a better family life, producing a more enlightened individual conscience and a more general conscientiousness, would not be the truer way, the American way, the real progressive way of overcoming the claimed failure of our system of civil liberty and of fulfilling the hope of history, instead of recurring to the governmental absolutism of earlier times." Nicholas Murray Butler, Burgess's colleague at Columbia University, concurred, arguing in "What is Progress in Politics?" that "limitations on the power of government" were themselves progressive and that to relax those limitations (as the progressives desired) would lead to overbearing government power at the expense of individual civil liberties. Freedom of choice, Butler maintained, could only be maximized through strictures on governmental activism. Instead of building a welfare state on which the poor might rely for assistance, he argued that America "should push forward along the road already traveled.…and do so in a spirit that will not lead the individual to lean more heavily upon the community, but rather help him to stand up more surely and confidently upon his own feet." While opposing the rise of the welfare state, however, Butler—like some other conservatives of his day—supported limited regulatory strictures on monopolistic practices. He opposed monopoly on the grounds that it would lead to a diminution of competitive capitalism and to plutocracy in economy and politics, asserting, "We should aim not to bring the government into partnership with monopoly and privilege, but in all our legislation affecting these matters, whether in the State or in the nation, to keep open the channels both of competition and of useful combination by preventing monopoly on the one hand and by punishing specifically unfair and dishonorable business practice on the other."

Taft's Presidency

When William Howard Taft was inaugurated in spring 1909, his political future seemed bright. Yet, three and a half years later, in the election of 1912, he suffered the worst electoral defeat of any incumbent president in the twentieth century, a casualty of the divisive politics that had rent asunder the Republican Party. Secretary of war from 1904 to 1908, Taft had been chosen by Theodore Roosevelt as his successor for the Republican presidential nomination in 1908. Supported by both the Republican Old Guard and by party insurgents, Taft won the nomination and the ensuing national election easily. Within months, however, Taft was caught in a political crossfire within his own party. In 1909 insurgent Republicans (also called reformers or progressives) were battling Republican conservatives for control of the party. On the contentious issue of tariff reform, in a congressional dispute over the power of conservative House Speaker Joseph Cannon's domination of the House of Representatives, and in a high-profile case over control of the nation's conservation policies (the Ballinger-Pinchot affair of 1909-1910), Taft alienated party insurgents. In the congressional elections of 1910 he made his allegiance to the party's Old Guard clear when he tried to purge insurgent Republicans in the primaries. Unsuccessful at these efforts, Taft incurred the insurgents' wrath, and thereafter he headed a divided party. By January 1911 insurgents, led by Wisconsin senator Robert La Follette, had formed the National Progressive Republican League, and within five months La Follette had announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Taft further muddled his political fortunes when, on 27 October 1911, it was announced that his administration, closely adhering to the provisions of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, would prosecute U.S. Steel under that law. In a 1907 meeting with J. P. Morgan, Roosevelt had approved U.S. Steel's acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, the transaction that was the basis for the prosecution. Viewing Taft's actions as a personal slight, Roosevelt used the incident as pretext for reentering the political arena as the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party. Nominated by his party for a second term, Taft, running on a conservative platform, placed third in the general election behind the Democratic winner, Woodrow Wilson, and Roosevelt. To judge Taft's presidency by the measure of his inept handling of the progressive wing of his party would, however, miss his administration's many achievements. Taft was not unsympathetic to the reformers. In one term his administration prosecuted more trusts than Roosevelt had in seven years. He had expanded the nation's forest reserves, supported mine-safety legislation and the eight-hour day, and signed the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910, which regulated the nation's railroads while strengthening the Interstate Commerce Commission. Had he been a more astute politician, Taft might have held his party together and won a second term.

Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party

Though Roosevelt was to hold no political office during the decade, his status as retired president, as well as the American people's abiding affection for him, made him a formidable political force. After completing his second term in 1909 he had embarked on a safari in Africa for several months and then visited European heads of state. Roosevelt returned to the United States in spring 1910 to find many people clamoring for him to reunite a divided Republican Party. On 31 August 1910 Roosevelt delivered a much-heralded speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, espousing the lineaments of the "New Nationalism." After failing to gain the Republican Party nomination from Taft in a hard-fought struggle over delegates at the Republican National Convention of 1912 in Chicago, Roosevelt, backed by reformers, launched the Progressive Party. With the aid of the progressively minded social-scientific community in New York, the new party's mandarins, Roosevelt stood for office on a platform that condemned "the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics." Promoting a broad spectrum of social, economic, and political reforms, the Progressive platform proved to be a charter that shaped modern liberal reform for half a century. It called for national medical insurance, old-age insurance, and unemployment coverage. It championed labor's right to collective bargaining, the creation of a department of labor, a minimum wage for women, prohibition of child labor, federal health and safety standards in the workplace, an eight-hour day in many industries, and better educational services for immigrants. The platform advocated graduated income and inheritance taxes, public ownership of natural resources, and federal regulation of securities markets. It supported adoption of votes for women; the direct election of U.S. senators; the initiative, the referendum, and the recall; the short ballot; and primary elections.

Woodrow Wilson's Presidency

Woodrow Wilson was twice elected president during the 1910s. The first and only president with a Ph.D., Wilson had been a professor of political science and history at Wesleyan University and president of Princeton University prior to his election as governor of New Jersey in 1910. Wilson proved to be a moderate reformer. He successfully sponsored tariff reduction, increased government regulation of industry, and extended federal aid to farmers. Yet his presidency was increasingly dominated by foreign-policy issues.

Wilsonian Foreign Affairs

In 1916 the United States sent troops into Mexico, coming close to war with that nation, and by mid decade U.S. relations with Japan and China had improved. Yet beginning in 1914, the war in Europe was the president's major foreign-policy concern. As a new world power and as a nation of immigrants—many of whom traced their origins to one or another of the warring factions—the American people were at first deeply divided over the war, though few at the outset advocated American military involvement. Indeed, it was not clear that the United States had anything to gain by getting involved. At the outbreak of this European conflict, which many wrongly believed would be "over by Christmas," President Wilson declared U.S. neutrality and asked the American people to remain "neutral in thought as in deed." Pacifists in the United States, including Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, insisted that peace was in the nation's best interest, but U.S. commercial and financial interests, and pro-Allied sympathies across the country, combined to lead America on the path toward war. When Germany returned to unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic in early 1917, President Wilson decided that neutrality was no longer tenable and asked Congress to declare war on Germany. Fighting alongside British and French troops, American soldiers won a series of bloody campaigns against the Germans. By November 1918 the resources and manpower of the United States had been a decisive factor in an Allied victory. Wilson personally conducted the nation's peace negotiations in Paris, and his Fourteen Points were an important part of the deliberations resulting in the Treaty of Versailles. After his achievements in Paris, however, he suffered a massive stroke and remained largely ineffectual during the last months of his presidency.

Conflict amid Success

The 1910s were also a time of domestic turmoil and protest. African Americans, about 10 percent of the nation's population, were disfranchised, segregated, and economically oppressed. Women were struggling for the vote, which they won at the national level in 1920. "New immigrants"—generally from eastern and southern Europe—were pouring into the nation and often found the adjustment to life in their adopted country difficult. During the second decade of the twentieth century, there were scores of race riots and thousands of industrial strikes. The constitutional protection of freedom of speech ensured that American politics was a forum for sharp disagreement and wide-ranging debate over the role of government at every level. Perhaps no other time in American history was such a diversity of opinion expressed in American political discourse, from contemplative conservatism to radical socialism, communism, and anarchism.