Chapter 20 - The Progressives
Progressives did not always agree on the form their intervention should take, and the result was a variety of reform impulses that sometimes seemed to have little in common.
One powerful impulse was the spirit of “anti-monopoly,” the fear of concentrated power and the urge to limit and disperse authority and wealth
Many reformers believed that knowledge was more important than anything else as a vehicle for making society more equitable and humane.
Most progressives believed, too, that a modernized government could—and must—play an important role in the process of improving and stabilizing society.
Modern life was too complex to be left in the hands of party bosses, untrained amateurs, and antiquated institutions.
Among the first people to articulate the new spirit of reform were crusading journalists who began to direct public attention toward social, economic, and political injustices.
They became known as the “muckrakers,” after Theodore Roosevelt accused one of them of racking up muck through his writings.
The muckrakers reached the peak of their influence in the first decade of the twentieth century.
By presenting social problems to the public with indignation and moral fervor, they helped inspire other Americans to take action.
The growing outrage at social and economic injustice helped produce many reformers committed to the pursuit of what came to be known as “social justice.”
The Salvation Army, which began in England but soon spread to the United States, was one example of the fusion of religion with reform
An element of much progressive thought was the belief in the influence of the environment on individual development.
Social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner had argued that people’s fortunes reflected their inherent “fitness” for survival.
Young college women (mostly unmarried) were important participants in the settlement house movement.
Working in a settlement house, which was a protected site that served mostly women, was consistent with the widespread assumption that women needed to be sheltered from difficult environments.
The clean and well-tended buildings that settlement houses created were not only a model for immigrant women but an appropriate site for elite women as well.
The settlement houses helped create another important element of progressive reform: the profession of social work.
A growing number of programs for the professional training of social workers began to appear in the nation’s leading universities, partly in response to the activities of the settlements.
As the emergence of the social work profession suggests, progressives involved in humanitarian efforts placed a high value on knowledge and expertise
Some reformers even spoke of the creation of a new civilization, in which the expertise of scientists and engineers could be brought to bear on the problems of the economy and society
The late nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion in the number of Americans engaged in administrative and professional tasks.
Industries needed managers, technicians, and accountants as well as workers. Cities required commercial, medical, legal, and educational services.
New technology required scientists and engineers, who, in turn, required institutions and instructors to train them.
By the turn of the century, those performing these services had come to constitute a distinct social group—what some historians have called a new middle class.
The new middle class placed a high value on education and individual accomplishment.
By the early twentieth century, its millions of members were building organizations and establishing standards to secure their position in society.
When every patent-medicine salesman could claim to be a doctor, when every frustrated politician could set up shop as a lawyer, when anyone who could read and write could pose as a teacher, a professional label by itself carried little weight
Among the first to respond was the medical profession.
In 1901, doctors who considered themselves trained professionals reorganized the American Medical Association into a national professional society.
By 1920, nearly two-thirds of all American doctors were members.
The AMA quickly called for strict, scientific standards for admission to the practice of medicine, with doctors themselves serving as protectors of the standards.
There was a similar movement in other professions.
By 1916, lawyers in all forty-eight states had established professional bar associations.
The nation’s law schools accordingly expanded greatly.
Businessmen supported the creation of schools of business administration and created their own national organizations: the National Association of Manufacturers in 1895 and the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1912
Federation, is a network of agricultural organizations designed to spread scientific farming methods.
While removing the untrained and incompetent, the admission requirements also protected those already in the professions from the excessive competition and lent prestige and status to their trades.
Some professionals used their entrance requirements to exclude blacks, women, immigrants, and other “undesirables” from their ranks.
Others used them simply to keep the numbers down, to ensure that demand would remain high
Both by custom and by active barriers of law and prejudice, American women found themselves excluded from most of the emerging professions.
But a substantial number of middle-class women—particularly those emerging from the new women’s colleges and coeducational state universities—entered professional careers nevertheless.
A few women managed to establish themselves as physicians, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and corporate managers in the early 1900s.
Several leading medical schools admitted women, and in 1900 about 5 percent of all American physicians were female
For educated black women, in particular, the existence of segregated schools in the South created a substantial market for African American teachers.
Women also dominated other professional activities.
Nursing had become primarily a women’s field during and after the Civil War
The phenomenon of the “new woman,” widely remarked upon at the time, was a product of social and economic changes that affected the private world as much as the public one, even if such changes affected mostly middle-class people.
By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all income-producing activity had moved out of the home and into the factory or the office.
For many wives and mothers who did not work for wages, the home was no longer an all-consuming place.
Technological innovations such as running water, electricity, and eventually household appliances made housework less onerous
Declining family size also changed the lives of many women.
Middle-class white women in the late nineteenth century had fewer children than their mothers and grandmothers had borne.
They also lived longer.
Many women thus now spent fewer years with young children in the home and lived more years after their children were grown.
Some educated women shunned marriage, believing that only by remaining single could they play the roles they envisioned in the public world.
Single women were among the most prominent female reformers of the time
Others lived with other women, often in long-term relationships— some of them quietly romantic—that were known at the time as “Boston marriages.”
The divorce rate also rose rapidly in the late nineteenth century, from one divorce for every twenty-one marriages in 1880 to one in nine by 1916; women initiated the majority of them.
The women’s clubs began largely as cultural organizations to provide middle- and upper-class women with an outlet for their intellectual energies.
In 1892, when women formed the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to coordinate the activities of local organizations, there were more than 100,000 members in nearly 500 clubs.
By 1917, there were over 1 million. By the early twentieth century, the clubs were becoming less concerned with cultural activities and more concerned with contributing to social betterment.
Because many club members were from wealthy families, some organizations had substantial funds at their disposal to make their influence felt.
And ironically, because women could not vote, the clubs had a nonpartisan image that made them difficult for politicians to dismiss.
Black women occasionally joined clubs dominated by whites.
But most such clubs excluded blacks, and so African Americans formed clubs of their own.
Much of what the clubs did was uncontroversial: planting trees; supporting schools, libraries, and settlement houses; building hospitals and parks
The women’s clubs began largely as cultural organizations to provide middle- and upper-class women with an outlet for their intellectual energies
In many of these efforts, the clubwomen formed alliances with other women’s groups, such as the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), founded in 1903 by female union members and upper-class reformers
Perhaps the largest single reform movement of the progressive era, indeed one of the largest in American history, was the fight for women's suffrage.
They linked suffrage with promiscuity, immorality, and neglect of children.
Suffrage also attracted support for other, less optimistic reasons.
Many middle-class people found persuasive the argument that if blacks, immigrants, and other “base” groups had access to the franchise, then it was a matter not only of justice but of common sense to allow educated, “well-born” women to vote.
Women needed more: a constitutional amendment that would provide clear, legal protection for their rights and would prohibit all discrimination on the basis of sex.
These early assaults enjoyed some success. In the 1880s and 1890s, for example, most states adopted the secret ballot
The muckrakers struck a responsive chord among a powerful group of urban, middle-class progressives.
For several decades after the Civil War, “respectable” citizens of the nation’s large cities had avoided participation in municipal government
These activists faced a formidable array of opponents. In addition to challenging the powerful city bosses and their entrenched political organizations, they were attacking a large group of special interests: saloon owners, brothel keepers, and, perhaps most significantly, those businessmen who had established lucrative relationships with the urban political machines and who viewed reform as a threat to their profits
Another approach to municipal reform was the city-manager plan, by which elected officials hired an outside expert—often a professionally trained business manager or an engineer—to take charge of the city government.
The city manager would presumably remain untainted by the corrupting influence of politics.
By the end of the progressive era in the early 1920s, almost 400 cities were operating under commissions and another 45 employed city managers
Two of the most important changes were innovations first proposed by Populists in the 1890s: the initiative and the referendum.
The initiative allowed reformers to circumvent state legislatures by submitting new legislation directly to the voters in general elections.
The primary election was an attempt to make the selection of candidates away from the bosses and give it to the people.
Many states also struggled successfully to create systems of workmen’s compensation for workers injured on the job.
And starting in 1911, reformers successfully created pensions for widows with dependent children.
The most celebrated state-level reformer was Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin.
Elected governor in 1900, he helped turn his state into what reformers across the nation described as a “laboratory of progressivism.”
Under his leadership, the Wisconsin progressives won the approval of direct primaries, initiatives, and referendums.
They regulated railroads and utilities.
They passed laws to regulate the workplace and provide compensation for laborers injured on the job.
They instituted graduated taxes on inherited fortunes, and they nearly doubled state levies on railroads and other corporate interests
In the early twentieth century, while turnout remained high by today’s standards, the figure declined markedly as parties grew weaker.
Party bosses had less ability to get voters to the polls.
Illiterate voters had trouble reading the new ballots.
Party bosses lost much of their authority and were unable to mobilize voters as successfully as they had in the past.
But perhaps the most important reason for the decline of party rule (and voter turnout) was that other power centers were beginning to replace them.
They have become known as “interest groups.”
Beginning late in the nineteenth century and accelerating rapidly in the twentieth, new organizations emerged outside the party system: professional organizations, trade associations representing businesses and industries, labor organizations, farm lobbies, and many others.
One result of the assault on the parties was a change in the party organizations themselves, which attempted to adapt to the new realities so as to preserve their influence.
They sometimes allowed their machines to become vehicles of social reform
In 1911, a terrible fire swept through the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City; 146 workers, most of them women, died.
Many of them had been trapped inside the burning building because management had locked the emergency exits to prevent malingering.
For the next three years, a state commission studied not only the background of the fire but also the general condition of the industrial workplace
For western states, the most important target of reform energies was not state or local governments, which had relatively little power, but the federal government, which exercised a kind of authority in the West that it had never possessed in the East
More significant, perhaps, the federal government exercised enormous power over the lands and resources of the western states and provided substantial subsidies to the region in the form of land grants and support for railroad and water projects.
Huge areas of the West remained (and still remain) public lands, controlled by Washington—a far greater proportion than in any states east of the Mississippi. Much of the growth of the West was (and continues to be) a result of federally funded dams and water projects.
One social question that received little attention from white progressives was race.
But among African Americans themselves, the progressive era produced some significant challenges to existing racial norms.
African Americans faced greater obstacles than any other group in challenging their own oppressed status and seeking reform.
Du Bois advocated talented blacks should accept nothing less than a full university education.
They should aspire to the professions.
They should, above all, fight for their civil rights, not simply wait for them to be granted as a reward for patient striving.
Many progressives considered the elimination of alcohol from American life a necessary step in restoring order to society.
Scarce wages vanished as workers spent hours in the saloons.
Drunkenness spawned violence, and occasionally murder, within urban families.
Working-class wives and mothers hoped through temperance to reform male behavior and thus improve women’s lives.
Employers, too, regarded alcohol as an impediment to industrial efficiency; workers often missed time on the job because of drunkenness or came to the factory intoxicated.
Temperance had been a major reform movement before the Civil War, mobilizing large numbers of people in a crusade with strong evangelical overtones.
In 1873, the movement developed new strength.
Temperance advocates formed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
Despite substantial opposition from immigrant and working-class voters, pressure for prohibition grew steadily through the first decades of the new century.
By 1916, nineteen states had passed prohibition laws.
Virtually all reformers agreed that the growing immigrant population had created social problems, but there was wide disagreement on how best to respond.
Some progressives believed that the proper approach was to help the new residents adapt to American society.
Others argued that efforts at assimilation had failed and that the only solution was to limit the flow of new arrivals.
In the first decades of the century, pressure grew to close the nation’s gates
Progressives did not always agree on the form their intervention should take, and the result was a variety of reform impulses that sometimes seemed to have little in common.
One powerful impulse was the spirit of “anti-monopoly,” the fear of concentrated power and the urge to limit and disperse authority and wealth
Many reformers believed that knowledge was more important than anything else as a vehicle for making society more equitable and humane.
Most progressives believed, too, that a modernized government could—and must—play an important role in the process of improving and stabilizing society.
Modern life was too complex to be left in the hands of party bosses, untrained amateurs, and antiquated institutions.
Among the first people to articulate the new spirit of reform were crusading journalists who began to direct public attention toward social, economic, and political injustices.
They became known as the “muckrakers,” after Theodore Roosevelt accused one of them of racking up muck through his writings.
The muckrakers reached the peak of their influence in the first decade of the twentieth century.
By presenting social problems to the public with indignation and moral fervor, they helped inspire other Americans to take action.
The growing outrage at social and economic injustice helped produce many reformers committed to the pursuit of what came to be known as “social justice.”
The Salvation Army, which began in England but soon spread to the United States, was one example of the fusion of religion with reform
An element of much progressive thought was the belief in the influence of the environment on individual development.
Social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner had argued that people’s fortunes reflected their inherent “fitness” for survival.
Young college women (mostly unmarried) were important participants in the settlement house movement.
Working in a settlement house, which was a protected site that served mostly women, was consistent with the widespread assumption that women needed to be sheltered from difficult environments.
The clean and well-tended buildings that settlement houses created were not only a model for immigrant women but an appropriate site for elite women as well.
The settlement houses helped create another important element of progressive reform: the profession of social work.
A growing number of programs for the professional training of social workers began to appear in the nation’s leading universities, partly in response to the activities of the settlements.
As the emergence of the social work profession suggests, progressives involved in humanitarian efforts placed a high value on knowledge and expertise
Some reformers even spoke of the creation of a new civilization, in which the expertise of scientists and engineers could be brought to bear on the problems of the economy and society
The late nineteenth century saw a dramatic expansion in the number of Americans engaged in administrative and professional tasks.
Industries needed managers, technicians, and accountants as well as workers. Cities required commercial, medical, legal, and educational services.
New technology required scientists and engineers, who, in turn, required institutions and instructors to train them.
By the turn of the century, those performing these services had come to constitute a distinct social group—what some historians have called a new middle class.
The new middle class placed a high value on education and individual accomplishment.
By the early twentieth century, its millions of members were building organizations and establishing standards to secure their position in society.
When every patent-medicine salesman could claim to be a doctor, when every frustrated politician could set up shop as a lawyer, when anyone who could read and write could pose as a teacher, a professional label by itself carried little weight
Among the first to respond was the medical profession.
In 1901, doctors who considered themselves trained professionals reorganized the American Medical Association into a national professional society.
By 1920, nearly two-thirds of all American doctors were members.
The AMA quickly called for strict, scientific standards for admission to the practice of medicine, with doctors themselves serving as protectors of the standards.
There was a similar movement in other professions.
By 1916, lawyers in all forty-eight states had established professional bar associations.
The nation’s law schools accordingly expanded greatly.
Businessmen supported the creation of schools of business administration and created their own national organizations: the National Association of Manufacturers in 1895 and the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1912
Federation, is a network of agricultural organizations designed to spread scientific farming methods.
While removing the untrained and incompetent, the admission requirements also protected those already in the professions from the excessive competition and lent prestige and status to their trades.
Some professionals used their entrance requirements to exclude blacks, women, immigrants, and other “undesirables” from their ranks.
Others used them simply to keep the numbers down, to ensure that demand would remain high
Both by custom and by active barriers of law and prejudice, American women found themselves excluded from most of the emerging professions.
But a substantial number of middle-class women—particularly those emerging from the new women’s colleges and coeducational state universities—entered professional careers nevertheless.
A few women managed to establish themselves as physicians, lawyers, engineers, scientists, and corporate managers in the early 1900s.
Several leading medical schools admitted women, and in 1900 about 5 percent of all American physicians were female
For educated black women, in particular, the existence of segregated schools in the South created a substantial market for African American teachers.
Women also dominated other professional activities.
Nursing had become primarily a women’s field during and after the Civil War
The phenomenon of the “new woman,” widely remarked upon at the time, was a product of social and economic changes that affected the private world as much as the public one, even if such changes affected mostly middle-class people.
By the end of the nineteenth century, almost all income-producing activity had moved out of the home and into the factory or the office.
For many wives and mothers who did not work for wages, the home was no longer an all-consuming place.
Technological innovations such as running water, electricity, and eventually household appliances made housework less onerous
Declining family size also changed the lives of many women.
Middle-class white women in the late nineteenth century had fewer children than their mothers and grandmothers had borne.
They also lived longer.
Many women thus now spent fewer years with young children in the home and lived more years after their children were grown.
Some educated women shunned marriage, believing that only by remaining single could they play the roles they envisioned in the public world.
Single women were among the most prominent female reformers of the time
Others lived with other women, often in long-term relationships— some of them quietly romantic—that were known at the time as “Boston marriages.”
The divorce rate also rose rapidly in the late nineteenth century, from one divorce for every twenty-one marriages in 1880 to one in nine by 1916; women initiated the majority of them.
The women’s clubs began largely as cultural organizations to provide middle- and upper-class women with an outlet for their intellectual energies.
In 1892, when women formed the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to coordinate the activities of local organizations, there were more than 100,000 members in nearly 500 clubs.
By 1917, there were over 1 million. By the early twentieth century, the clubs were becoming less concerned with cultural activities and more concerned with contributing to social betterment.
Because many club members were from wealthy families, some organizations had substantial funds at their disposal to make their influence felt.
And ironically, because women could not vote, the clubs had a nonpartisan image that made them difficult for politicians to dismiss.
Black women occasionally joined clubs dominated by whites.
But most such clubs excluded blacks, and so African Americans formed clubs of their own.
Much of what the clubs did was uncontroversial: planting trees; supporting schools, libraries, and settlement houses; building hospitals and parks
The women’s clubs began largely as cultural organizations to provide middle- and upper-class women with an outlet for their intellectual energies
In many of these efforts, the clubwomen formed alliances with other women’s groups, such as the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL), founded in 1903 by female union members and upper-class reformers
Perhaps the largest single reform movement of the progressive era, indeed one of the largest in American history, was the fight for women's suffrage.
They linked suffrage with promiscuity, immorality, and neglect of children.
Suffrage also attracted support for other, less optimistic reasons.
Many middle-class people found persuasive the argument that if blacks, immigrants, and other “base” groups had access to the franchise, then it was a matter not only of justice but of common sense to allow educated, “well-born” women to vote.
Women needed more: a constitutional amendment that would provide clear, legal protection for their rights and would prohibit all discrimination on the basis of sex.
These early assaults enjoyed some success. In the 1880s and 1890s, for example, most states adopted the secret ballot
The muckrakers struck a responsive chord among a powerful group of urban, middle-class progressives.
For several decades after the Civil War, “respectable” citizens of the nation’s large cities had avoided participation in municipal government
These activists faced a formidable array of opponents. In addition to challenging the powerful city bosses and their entrenched political organizations, they were attacking a large group of special interests: saloon owners, brothel keepers, and, perhaps most significantly, those businessmen who had established lucrative relationships with the urban political machines and who viewed reform as a threat to their profits
Another approach to municipal reform was the city-manager plan, by which elected officials hired an outside expert—often a professionally trained business manager or an engineer—to take charge of the city government.
The city manager would presumably remain untainted by the corrupting influence of politics.
By the end of the progressive era in the early 1920s, almost 400 cities were operating under commissions and another 45 employed city managers
Two of the most important changes were innovations first proposed by Populists in the 1890s: the initiative and the referendum.
The initiative allowed reformers to circumvent state legislatures by submitting new legislation directly to the voters in general elections.
The primary election was an attempt to make the selection of candidates away from the bosses and give it to the people.
Many states also struggled successfully to create systems of workmen’s compensation for workers injured on the job.
And starting in 1911, reformers successfully created pensions for widows with dependent children.
The most celebrated state-level reformer was Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin.
Elected governor in 1900, he helped turn his state into what reformers across the nation described as a “laboratory of progressivism.”
Under his leadership, the Wisconsin progressives won the approval of direct primaries, initiatives, and referendums.
They regulated railroads and utilities.
They passed laws to regulate the workplace and provide compensation for laborers injured on the job.
They instituted graduated taxes on inherited fortunes, and they nearly doubled state levies on railroads and other corporate interests
In the early twentieth century, while turnout remained high by today’s standards, the figure declined markedly as parties grew weaker.
Party bosses had less ability to get voters to the polls.
Illiterate voters had trouble reading the new ballots.
Party bosses lost much of their authority and were unable to mobilize voters as successfully as they had in the past.
But perhaps the most important reason for the decline of party rule (and voter turnout) was that other power centers were beginning to replace them.
They have become known as “interest groups.”
Beginning late in the nineteenth century and accelerating rapidly in the twentieth, new organizations emerged outside the party system: professional organizations, trade associations representing businesses and industries, labor organizations, farm lobbies, and many others.
One result of the assault on the parties was a change in the party organizations themselves, which attempted to adapt to the new realities so as to preserve their influence.
They sometimes allowed their machines to become vehicles of social reform
In 1911, a terrible fire swept through the factory of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City; 146 workers, most of them women, died.
Many of them had been trapped inside the burning building because management had locked the emergency exits to prevent malingering.
For the next three years, a state commission studied not only the background of the fire but also the general condition of the industrial workplace
For western states, the most important target of reform energies was not state or local governments, which had relatively little power, but the federal government, which exercised a kind of authority in the West that it had never possessed in the East
More significant, perhaps, the federal government exercised enormous power over the lands and resources of the western states and provided substantial subsidies to the region in the form of land grants and support for railroad and water projects.
Huge areas of the West remained (and still remain) public lands, controlled by Washington—a far greater proportion than in any states east of the Mississippi. Much of the growth of the West was (and continues to be) a result of federally funded dams and water projects.
One social question that received little attention from white progressives was race.
But among African Americans themselves, the progressive era produced some significant challenges to existing racial norms.
African Americans faced greater obstacles than any other group in challenging their own oppressed status and seeking reform.
Du Bois advocated talented blacks should accept nothing less than a full university education.
They should aspire to the professions.
They should, above all, fight for their civil rights, not simply wait for them to be granted as a reward for patient striving.
Many progressives considered the elimination of alcohol from American life a necessary step in restoring order to society.
Scarce wages vanished as workers spent hours in the saloons.
Drunkenness spawned violence, and occasionally murder, within urban families.
Working-class wives and mothers hoped through temperance to reform male behavior and thus improve women’s lives.
Employers, too, regarded alcohol as an impediment to industrial efficiency; workers often missed time on the job because of drunkenness or came to the factory intoxicated.
Temperance had been a major reform movement before the Civil War, mobilizing large numbers of people in a crusade with strong evangelical overtones.
In 1873, the movement developed new strength.
Temperance advocates formed the Women’s Christian Temperance Union
Despite substantial opposition from immigrant and working-class voters, pressure for prohibition grew steadily through the first decades of the new century.
By 1916, nineteen states had passed prohibition laws.
Virtually all reformers agreed that the growing immigrant population had created social problems, but there was wide disagreement on how best to respond.
Some progressives believed that the proper approach was to help the new residents adapt to American society.
Others argued that efforts at assimilation had failed and that the only solution was to limit the flow of new arrivals.
In the first decades of the century, pressure grew to close the nation’s gates
