Progressive Era

Progressive Era. The Progressive Era takes its name from the Progressive party of 1912–1924 and from the general feeling both at the time and in subsequent histories that the early years of the twentieth century were focused on a coherent body of democratic reforms that changed important aspects of the American political system. Interpretations of the Progressive Era have undergone many changes. Autobiographies and early histories stressed the return to popular control over political actions and the gradual shift from local to state to national authority. The next generation stressed points of continuity between Progressive reforms and those of the New Deal Era in a presumptive march toward a moderate welfare state. In the 1950s, historians stressed the “status resentment” of middle‐class reformers who, presumably fearing a loss of social power, had enacted laws to preserve an economic system in which they did well. Radical historians subsequently derided the extent of Progressivism's reform achievement and stressed its conservative nature; their successors focused on such matter as professionalization and bureaucratization. The subject remains contentious, but few in the early twenty‐first century regard the actual legislative achievements of the Progressive Era as more than tentative first steps toward substantive reform.

Viewed chronologically, the “Progressive Era” normally covers three discrete time periods. Toward the end of the 1880s, a significant number of women and their male allies came to the conclusion that Social Darwinism, the reigning ideology that had justified economic expansion since the Civil War, was inhumane in its effects and unchristian in its implications. Seeking more meaningful vocational choices than those the order of the day supplied, they pioneered such new professions as social work, or reinvented such older ones as teaching and journalism to make them more ethically meaningful. Following the precedents of Toynbee Hall in London, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened Hull House in Chicago in 1889, in a quiet way beginning the era with a concrete achievement. The social settlement movement, with its efforts at adult education, public health, political lobbying, and immigrant assimilation, gave women a respectable place in society. When John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and other academics joined various clergy and a few doctors in associating themselves with settlement houses, Progressivism was essentially under way.

The growing body of reformers soon included such local politicians as Hazen Pingree in Detroit; Samuel M. “Golden Rule” Jones in Toledo, Ohio, and Governor John P. Altgeld of Illinois. As these locations attest, the upper Midwest particularly nurtured the movement. The focus was on “gas and water socialism,” that is, requiring de facto monopolies to charge fair prices in the absence of true competition. Municipal transit fares were often popular issues, but water, gas, electricity, and eventually telephone rates all drew attention. Taxation of real estate, an issue that Henry George had made central to California reform activity, was basic. Allied issues included low wage rates, dangerous working conditions, polluted water supplies, and conditions in the schools.

Attention shifted to the national level with the inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt as president in 1901. A former member of the U.S. Civil Service Commission and of the New York City Police Commission, Roosevelt not only knew crime and corruption firsthand, he was friendly with reform journalists such as Lincoln Steffens. A moderate reformer by temperament, Roosevelt was sympathetic to early efforts at “muckraking” journalism. Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, and Samuel Hopkins Adams focused public attention on the underworld of contemporary capitalism, and Roosevelt supported efforts to break up large trusts, regulate railways, purify food and drugs, and protect public lands from private exploitation. He rebelled, however, against writers such as Upton Sinclair and David Graham Phillips, whom he felt went overboard in denouncing corrupt business or political behavior.

An aroused public reelected Roosevelt in 1904, enabled William Howard Taft to win in 1908, and carried Woodrow Wilson to the White House in 1912. Taft proved inept, but Wilson managed to lower tariffs; increase economic regulation of business; assist education, agriculture, and labor; and above all to enact the Federal Reserve Act, a long overdue measure that proved the most enduring of all Progressive reforms. During these years as well, local reformers adopted “initiative, referendum, and recall” measures enabling voters to initiate legislation, ratify legislative acts, and remove public officials who violated their trust. Certain states notably California, Oregon, and Wisconsin proved especially friendly to reform activity.

The outbreak of World War I in 1914 began a slow but inexorable shift from domestic to international preoccupations. At first favoring neutrality, Wilson took America into the war in 1917, an act that, in Wilson's obsessively theological mind, seemed quintessentially Progressive: America could bring its reform mentality to the supreme task of assuring a permanent world peace. Through a series of “covenants” he would conduct a war to end all wars and instill democratic principles everywhere. Wilson's failure to win the kind of peace treaty he sought at Versailles, and the U.S. Senate's repudiation of American membership in the League of Nations, marked the end of the Progressive impulse as a political force.

Early interpretations of the Progressive Era dwelled on political and diplomatic goals, but in reality the movement was a broad‐based cultural and even religious phenomenon. Most Progressive leaders came from Protestant and often clerical families, they had learned Christian moral principles from an early age, and they tended to assume that sin was somehow at the core of social problems. Sin implied sinners; sinners needed to repent; and thus the period comes increasingly to look like a massive revival effort, with journalists, professors, lawyers, social workers, and clergy exhorting their audiences in sermons, secular or otherwise. Roosevelt was not simply using rhetoric opportunistically when he twice urged voters at national conventions to “stand at Armageddon” and “battle for the Lord.” The era was more a third “Great Awakening” than an “early New Deal.”

In fact, the greatest achievements of the Progressive impulse were not legislative at all. “Progressive education,” for example, remains a major legacy of the period. Drawing ideas from psychology and pragmatic philosophy, John Dewey supervised a Laboratory School during his years (1894–1904) at the University of Chicago, publishing a number of influential papers consolidating the results. Insisting that traditional methods that stressed sheer memorization and an outmoded morality merely stifled intelligence, he demanded a schooling experience that would be less oriented toward “reading, writing, and ’rithmetic” and more focused on re‐creating the educational effect of a vanishing rural life. Students needed to work on projects; familiarize themselves with fabrics, carpentry, and crafts; learn about local governments and fire laws, take trips to observe biology and botany in their nature setting; and, in general, use their arms and legs more than their vocabularies. When he shifted to Columbia University in 1904, Dewey founded one of the more forceful institutions in modern life, the Progressive educational establishment, a bureaucracy that in time caused many parents to equate the word “Progressive” with “child‐centered” and “undisciplined.”

In intellectual life, Progressivism reshaped church and university. Led by George D. Herron and Walter Rauschenbusch, most Protestant denominations developed versions of a Social Gospel closely tied to British and continental socialism. The true Christian had a moral duty to do good in this world rather than withdrawing from society to pursue his or her own salvation. In social science, new graduate schools such as Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago were soon turning out Ph.D.s intent on social investigation as a prelude to reform. Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey, both with Ph.D.s from Johns Hopkins, offered models of the socially engaged intellectual. At Chicago, sociology was especially strong, as William I. Thomas pioneered in the study of immigration and Robert Park in study of the city. Charles A. Beard at Columbia and Carl Becker at Cornell were only two of the historians who recast American history in terms of present needs rather than some abstract “scientific knowledge.”

In journalism, the muckrakers generated an astonishing number of reform novels. Upton Sinclair took on the meatpacking industry in The Jungle (1906) and Brand Whitlock the criminal mentality in The Turn of the Balance (1907), David Graham Philipps produced books on one industry in need of moral reform after another. In the arts, Vachel Lindsay was only the most eloquent of several poets who celebrated William Jennings Bryan, three‐time reform candidate for president, or William Booth, the Salvation Army general who devoted himself to helping society's outcasts. The painter John Sloan of the “ashcan school” worked for socialist candidates while picturing scenes of urban poverty.

Like Progressives in other arenas, reformers in the arts yearned nostalgically for the moral, natural, God‐centered world of their grandparents, creating comparable solutions for contemporary problems. Unlike the modernists of Greenwich Village, who valued the new in and of itself, without reference to Protestant moral values, the Progressives always combined their innovations with nostalgia.

In this context of “innovative nostalgia,” the composer Charles Ives looked back to the Revolutionary War, antislavery, and the Civil War to find materials for his radical innovations. He named movements of a Concord Sonata after Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Henry David Thoreau; the String Quartet no. 1 bears the subtitle A Revival Service; and the most innovative piece of all, Putnam's Camp, from Three Places in New England, fuses tales of the Revolutionary War and a stream‐of‐consciousness dream sequence with memories of a Fourth of July celebration when two uncoordinated brass bands marched into Danbury, Connecticut, each competing for sonic dominance.

Most famous of all, Frank Lloyd Wright brought Progressive concerns into architecture. From a background of Unitarianism, he adapted the educational ideals of Friedrich Froebel to the concerns of Hull‐House and the University of Chicago, fitting easily into the world of Addams and Dewey. Developing a “prairie style” of single‐unit construction, usually of houses or churches, he sought in the manner of the transcendentalists, to fit his works into nature. Form and function were one; generations of efforts to impose on the landscape, to ornament without regard to useful purpose, went out the window.

Defeated politically in 1920, Progressivism persisted in identifiable ways at least until World War II. It helped shape both sides of the interior foreign policy debates, as Progressive internationalists fought isolationists. Some Progressive moralists resisted the secular and nationalizing tendencies of the New Deal, while others adapted with little trouble. In time, the Progressive image became increasingly tarnished. National prohibition, adopted by the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919, seemed a fiasco, the effort to remoralize drinking habits eventually leading to more drink and much more crime. Once devoted to moral reform, America turned toward secularism and social democracy in 1933, only to return to at least one strand of the Progressive ethos in the Ronald Reagan years, when issues like the legality of abortion and religion in the public schools focused public debate in ways eerily reminiscent of the years before World War I.
See also Antitrust Legislation; City Planning; Education: The Public School Movement; Great Awakening, First and Second; Lippmann, Walter; Modernist Culture; Painting: To 1945; Pragmatism; Pure Food and Drug Act; Revivalism; Secularization; Temperance and Prohibition; Transcendentalism; Unitarianism and Universalism.

Bibliography

Allen Davis , Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914, 1967.
Paul Boyer , Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920, 1978.
Robert M. Crunden , Ministers of Reform: The Progressives’ Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920, 1982.
Daniel Rodgers , In Search of Progressivism, Reviews in American History, 10.4 (Dec.1982): 113–32.
Arthur S. Link and and Richard L. McCormick , Progressivism, 1983.
James T. Kloppenberg , Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920, 1986.
Alan Dawley , Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State. 1991.
Nora Lee Frankel and Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era, 1991.
William A. Link , The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1992.

Robert M. Crunden