I. The Course of Reform
A. The Progressive Mind
1. The term progressivism embraces a
widespread, many-sided effort after 1900 to build a better society; there was
no single progressive constituency, agenda, or unifying organization.
2. Progressives placed great faith in scientific management
and academic expertise; they also felt that it was important to resist ways of thinking
that discouraged purposeful action. 3. “Institutional
economists” used statistics and history to reveal how the economy functioned and
why the strong would devour the weak in the absence of trade unions and
regulation. 4. Progressives opposed the
reigning legal concept that treated laws as if they arose
from eternal principles neither rooted in nor to be tested by social
reality.
5. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s reasoning, known as
legal realism, rested on his conviction that “the life of the law has not been
its logic; it has been its experience.”
6. The philosophical underpinnings for legal realism came
from William James’s philosophy of pragmatism, which judged ideas by their consequences.
7. The most important source of
progressive idealism was religion. The major doctrine known as the Social
Gospel came about as the churches’ concerns for the plight of the poor expanded
the concept of piety to include work for social improvement.
8. The progressive mode of thought, which valued acquisition
of facts, nurtured a new kind of reform journalism; at the turn of the century,
editors discovered that readers were most interested in the exposure of
mischief in
9. The term muckraker was given to
journalists who exposed the underside of American life; however, in making the
public aware of social ills,muckrakers
called the people to action.
1. Middle-class women, who had long carried the burden of
humanitarian work in American cities, were among the first to respond to the idea
of progressivism.
2. Josephine Shaw Lowell founded the New York Consumers’
League in 1890 to improve the wages and working conditions for female clerks in
the city stores by “white listing” progressive businesses.
3. The league spread to other cities and became the
National Consumers’ League, a powerful lobby for protective legislation for
women and children.
4. Muller v.
6. Women from the National Women’s Trade Union League
identified their cause with the broader struggle for women’s rights, such as the
right to vote.
7. Alice Paul’s National Women’s Party and the National
American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) organized a broad-based campaign to
push for a constitutional amendment for woman suffrage.
8. Feminists were militantly prosuffrage
because they considered themselves fully equal to men, not a weaker sex
entitled to men’s protection. 9.
Feminism and broader progressivism came together in the work of Margaret
Sanger, who opened the first birth control clinic in the
10. Disputes led to the fracturing of the women’s
movement, dividing the older
generation of
progressives from their feminist
successors who prized gender equality higher than any social benefit.
1. Progressive politicians, especially Robert LaFollette, felt that the key to reforming party machines
was to reclaim the power to choose candidates. The progressives took that power
away from the bosses and gave it to voters in a direct primary.
2. The ballot initiative enabled citizens to seek direct redress
for issues important to them, and the recall empowered them to remove
officeholders in whom they had lost confidence.
3. Like the direct primary, the initiative and the recall had
as much to do with power relations as with democratic idealism, since many
progressives excelled at garnering popular support. 4. Many cities demanded more efficient
government. By making aldermanic
elections citywide, municipal reformers attacked the ward politics that
underlay the corrupting patronage system.
5. Combining an elected commission with an appointed city
manager became the model for municipal reformers; the commission-manager system
aimed at running the city in the same way as a private business corporation. 6. After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire, it was clear that urban social problems had become too big to be handled
informally by party machines; some machine politicians led the way in making
laws and regulations in order to improve labor conditions.
7. Urban liberals advocated intervention by the state to
better the lives of the laboring masses of American cities.
8. Combining campaign magic and popular programs, progressive
mayors won over the urban masses; city machines adopted urban liberalism without
much ideological struggle.
9. When social experts warned that the numbers of southern
and Eastern Europeans immigrating into the
10. Urban liberals denounced prohibition and anti-immigrant
proposals as attacks on the personal liberty and decency of urban immigrants. 11. During the progressive years, the unions’
selfreliant “voluntarism”weakened
substantially as the labor movement came under attack by the courts.
12. Judges granted injunctions to prohibit unions from
striking, and, in the
15. Between 1910 and 1917, all industrial states enacted
insurance laws covering on-the-job injuries, yet health insurance and
unemployment compensation scarcely made it into the American political agenda.
16. Old-age pensions met resistance because the
1. The southern direct primary was ostensibly an attack on
back-room party rule, but it also served to deprive blacks of their political rights.
2. In the North, racism was on the rise as thousands of
blacks migrated from the South to the North.
3. The
6. Like the NAACP, the National Urban League was
interracial, and it became the leading organization in social welfare.
7. In the South, social welfare was the province of black
women; they utilized the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs, which
was established in 1896.
II. Progressivism and National Politics A. The Making of a Progressive President 1. Like many budding
progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was motivated by a high-minded Christian
upbringing, but he did not scorn power and its uses.
2. During his term as governor of
4. As president,
5. In an unprecedented step,
6.
1.
3. With the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890,
the federal government had enabled itself to enforce firmly established common laws
in cases involving interstate commerce, but the power had not been exercised. 4. In 1903,
5. After winning the presidential election,
6. In the Trans-Missouri decision of 1897,
the Supreme Court held that actions restraining or monopolizing trade
automatically violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.
7.
10.
C. The Fracturing of Republican Progressivism 1. William
Howard Taft had served Roosevelt loyally as governor-general of the
2. Taft won the election against William Jennings Bryan in
1908 with a mandate to pick up where
3. Progressives felt that
4. Although Taft had campaigned for tariff reform, he
ended up approving the protectionist Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909.
5. After the Pinchot-Ballinger affair, in which he fired
Pinchot for whistle-blowing on a conspiracy to hand public land to a private
syndicate, the progressives saw Taft as a friend of the “interests” bent on
plundering the nation’s resources. 6.
Galvanized by Taft’s defection, the reformers in the Republican Party became a
dissident faction, calling themselves the “Progressives” or “Insurgents.”
7. The Progressives formed the National Progressive Republican
League and began a drive to take over the Republican Party; they knew they needed
8.
9. Unlike
10. In the Standard Oil decision of 1911,
the
Supreme Court once again asserted the rule of
reason, which meant that the
courts, not the
president, would distinguish
between good and bad trusts.
11. Taft’s attorney general brought suit against U.S.
Steel, basing the antimonopoly charges in part on an acquisition approved by
Roosevelt, who could not, without dishonor, ignore what amounted to a personal
attack.
12.
13.
14. Roosevelt was too reformist for party regulars who
handed Taft the Republican presidential nomination for the 1912 election, so
Roosevelt led his followers into a new Progressive Party, nicknamed the “Bull
Moose” Party.
1. As Republicans battled among themselves, Democrats made
dramatic gains in 1910, taking over the House of Representatives and capturing a
number of traditionally Republican governorships. 2. While governor of
3.
4. Wilson and Roosevelt differed over how government
should restrain private power.
5.
6. However, the election did prove decisive in the history
of economic reform;
9. To deal with the problem of corporate power, the
Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 amended the Sherman Act; the Clayton Act’s
definition of illegal practices was left flexible to distinguish whether or not
an action stifled competition or created a monopoly.
10. The Federal Trade Commission was established in 1914,
and it received broad powers to investigate companies and issue “cease and
desist” orders against unfair trade practices.
11. The labor vote had grown increasingly important to the Democratic
Party, and before his second campaign,