Chapter 20: The Progressives

Chapter 20: The Progressives

• Varieties of progressivism

• 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.

• muckrakers

• 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 social gospel

• 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

• The settlement house movement

• 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.

• The allure of expertise

• 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 professions

• 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 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, 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 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

• Women and the professions

• 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

Chapter 20.1:women and reform

• The new woman

• 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 club women

• 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

• Woman suffrage

• Perhaps the largest single reform movement of the progressive era, indeed one of the largest in American history, was the fight for woman 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.

Chapter 20.2: the assault on the parties

• Early attacks

• These early assaults enjoyed some success. In the 1880s and 1890s, for example, most states adopted the secret ballot

• Municipal reform

• 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

• New forms of governance

• 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 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

• Statehouse progressivism

• 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 take 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 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

• Parties and interest groups

• 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.

Chapter 20.3: sources of progressive reform

• Labor, the machine, and reform

• 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

• Western progressives

•  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. 

• African Americans and Reform

• 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. 

Chapter 20.4: crusade for social order and reform

• The temperance crusade

• 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. 

• Immigration restriction

• 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

• Powerful opponents—employers who saw immigration as a source of cheap labor, immigrants themselves, and their political representatives—managed to block the restriction movement for a time. But by the beginning of World War I (which effectively blocked immigration temporarily), the nativist tide was gaining strength. 

Chapter 20.5: challenging the capitalist order

• The dream of socialism

• At no time in the history of the United States to that point, and seldom after, did radical critiques of the capitalist system attract more support than in the period 1900–1914. 

• Although never a force to rival or even seriously threaten the two major parties, the Socialist Party of America grew during these years into a force of considerable strength. 

• Virtually all socialists agreed on the need for basic structural changes in the economy, but they differed widely on the extent of those changes and the tactics necessary to achieve them. 

• Some believed in working for reform through electoral politics; others favored militant direct action

• The IWW was one of the few labor organizations of the time to champion the cause of unskilled workers and had particular strength in the West—where a large group of migratory laborers (miners, timbermen, and others) found it very difficult to organize or sustain conventional unions. In 1917, a strike by IWW timber workers in Washington and Idaho shut down production in the industry. 

• That brought down upon the union the wrath of the federal government, which had just begun mobilizing for war and needed timber for war production. 

• Federal authorities imprisoned the leaders of the union, and state governments between 1917 and 1919 passed a series of laws that outlawed the IWW. 

• The organization survived for a time but never fully recovered. 

• Moderate socialists who advocated peaceful change through political struggle dominated the Socialist Party

• But World War I dramatically weakened the socialists. 

• They had refused to support the war effort, and a growing wave of antiradicalism subjected them to enormous harassment and persecution. 

• Decentralization and regulation

• Most progressives retained a faith in the possibilities of reform within a capitalist system. 

• Rather than nationalize basic industries, many reformers hoped to restore the economy to a “more human” scale

• Other progressives were less enthusiastic about the virtues of competition. 

• More important to them was efficiency, which they believed economic concentration encouraged

Chapter 20.6: theodore roosevelt and the modern presidency

• The accidental president

• When President William McKinley suddenly died in September 1901, the victim of an assassination, Roosevelt (who had been elected vice president less than a year before) was only forty-two years old, the youngest man ever to assume the presidency

• Roosevelt’s reputation as a wild man was a result less of the substance of his early political career than of its style. 

• As a young member of the New York legislature, he had displayed an energy seldom seen in that lethargic body

• But Roosevelt as president rarely rebelled against the leaders of his party. He became, rather, a champion of cautious, moderate change. 

• Reform, he believed, was a vehicle less for remaking American society than for protecting it against radical challenges. 

• Government, capital, and labor

• Roosevelt allied himself with those progressives who urged regulation (but not destruction) of the trusts. 

• At the heart of Roosevelt’s policy was his desire to win for government the power to investigate the activities of corporations and publicize the results. 

• The new Department of Commerce and Labor, established in 1903 (later to be divided into two separate departments), was to assist in this task through its investigatory arm, the Bureau of Corporations. 

• Although Roosevelt was not a trustbuster at heart, he made a few highly publicized efforts to break up combinations

• A similar commitment to establishing the government as an impartial regulatory mechanism shaped Roosevelt’s policy toward labor.

• In the past, federal intervention in industrial disputes had almost always meant action on behalf of employers. 

• Roosevelt was willing to consider labor’s position as well. 

• When a bitter 1902 strike by the United Mine Workers endangered coal supplies for the coming winter, Roosevelt asked both the operators and the miners to accept impartial federal arbitration. 

• When the mine owners balked, Roosevelt threatened to send federal troops to seize the mines

• The square deal

• During Roosevelt’s first years as president, he was principally concerned with winning reelection, which required that he not antagonize the conservative Republican Old Guard.

• Roosevelt also pressured Congress to enact the Pure Food and Drug Act, which restricted the sale of dangerous or ineffective medicines

• Roosevelt pushed for passage of the Meat Inspection Act, which helped eliminate many diseases once transmitted in impure meat. 

• Starting in 1907, he proposed, but mostly failed to achieve, even more stringent reforms: an eight-hour workday, broader compensation for victims of industrial accidents, inheritance and income taxes, regulation of the stock market, and others. 

• Roosevelt and conservation

• Roosevelt’s aggressive policies on behalf of conservation contributed to that gulf. Using executive powers, he restricted private development on millions of acres of undeveloped government land—most of it in the West—by adding them to the previously modest national forest system. 

• When conservatives in Congress restricted his authority over public lands in 1907, Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, seized all the forests and many of the water power sites still in the public domain before the bill became law.

• Roosevelt was the first president to take an active interest in the new and struggling American conservation movement.

•  In the early twentieth century, the idea of preserving the natural world for ecological reasons was not well established. 

• The Newlands Act provided federal funds for the construction of dams, reservoirs, and canals in the West—projects that would open new lands for cultivation and (years later) provide cheap electric power.

• Roosevelt and preservation

• Despite his sympathy with Pinchot’s vision of conservation, Roosevelt also shared some of the concerns of the naturalists— those within the conservation movement committed to protecting the natural beauty of the land and the health of its wildlife from human intrusion. 

• The hetch hetchy controversy

• In 1906, San Francisco suffered a devastating earthquake and fire. 

• Widespread sympathy for the city strengthened the case for the dam; and Theodore Roosevelt—who had initially expressed some sympathy for Muir’s position—turned the decision over to Gifford Pinchot.

• For over a decade, a battle raged between naturalists and the advocates of the dam, a battle that consumed the energies of John Muir for the rest of his life and that eventually, many people believed, led to his death

• The fight against Hetch Hetchy helped mobilize a new coalition of people committed to preservation, not “rational use,” of wilderness. 

• The panic of 1907

• Despite the flurry of reforms Roosevelt was able to enact, the government still had relatively little control over the industrial economy. 

• That became clear in 1907, when a serious panic and recession began. 

• Conservatives blamed Roosevelt’s “mad” economic policies for the disaster.

• Roosevelt loved being president. 

Chapter 20.7: the troubled succession

• Taft and the progressives

• Taft’s first problem arose in the opening months of the new administration, when he called Congress into special session to lower protective tariff rates, an old progressive demand. 

• But the president made no effort to overcome the opposition of the congressional Old Guard, arguing that to do so would violate the constitutional doctrine of separation of powers

•  a sensational controversy broke out late in 1909 that helped put an end to Taft’s popularity with reformers

• The return of roosevelt

• During most of these controversies, Theodore Roosevelt was far away: on a long hunting safari in Africa and an extended tour of Europe. 

• To the American public, however, Roosevelt remained a formidable presence thanks to intensive newspaper coverage of his every move abroad

• Spreading insurgency

• Roosevelt still denied any presidential ambitions and claimed that his real purpose was to pressure Taft to return to progressive policies

• Roosevelt was still reluctant to become a candidate for president because Senator Robert La Follette, the great Wisconsin progressive, had been working since 1911 to secure the presidential nomination for himself.

• But La Follette’s candidacy stumbled in February 1912 when, exhausted, and distraught over the illness of a daughter, he appeared to suffer a nervous breakdown during a speech in Philadelphia. 

• Roosevelt announced his candidacy on February 22. 

• Roosevelt vs taft

• Roosevelt needed fewer than half the disputed seats to clinch the nomination

• The “Bull Moose” party was notable for its strong commitment to a wide range of progressive causes that had grown in popularity over the previous two decades.

Chapter 20.8: Woodrow Wilson and the new freedom

• Woodrow wilson

• Reform sentiment had been gaining strength within the Democratic as well as the Republican Party in the first years of the century. 

• Wilson had risen to political prominence by an unusual path. 

• He had been a professor of political science at Princeton until 1902, when he was named president of the university

• The 1912 presidential campaign was an anticlimax. William Howard Taft, resigned to defeat, barely campaigned

• The scholar as president

• Wilson was a bold and forceful president. 

• He exerted firm control over his cabinet, and he delegated real authority only to those whose loyalty to him was beyond question.

• His most powerful adviser, Colonel Edward M. House, was an intelligent and ambitious Texan who held no office and whose only claim to authority was his personal intimacy with the president.

• Wilson held Congress in session through the summer to work on a major reform of the American banking system

• In 1914, turning to the central issue of his 1912 campaign, Wilson proposed two measures to deal with the problem of monopoly. 

• In the process he revealed how his own approach to the issue was beginning to change. 

• There was a proposal to create a federal agency through which the government would help business police itself—a regulatory commission of the type Roosevelt had advocated in 1912. 

• Retreat and advance

• By the fall of 1914, Wilson believed that the program of the New Freedom was essentially complete and that agitation for reform would now subside.