Progressivism was both an idea and a movement. It arose because many Americans believed that their existing institutions, which had been organized around individual liberty and limited government, could no longer function in an increasingly urban, industrial, and ethnically diverse society. Advocates of progressivism sought to reorder the nation’s institutions to produce more order, efficiency, stability, and a sense of social responsibility. They believed that Americans would guarantee progress toward a democratic future by moving away from individualism toward social responsibility. As a movement, progressivism was the struggle of individuals and groups to promote and institutionalize reform. Order, efficiency, stability, and social responsibility meant different things to different Americans, so there was no single progressive movement or single set of proposed reforms. But progressivism succeeded in implementing government regulation of the economy and changing the relationship of Americans to their government and to one another.
In the years following the Civil War, discontented groups of Americans founded new political parties and workers’ organizations, joined local voluntary organizations and the woman suffrage movement, and enlisted in socialist and anarchist movements. All of these groups challenged fundamental premises of American politics. By the middle of the 1890s, such widespread discontent made many Americans fear the collapse of democracy unless society and its institutions were reformed.
The origins of progressivism coincided with a new intellectual movement and technological innovations. Across the Western world, thinkers and academics were arguing that lived experience should decide the worth of existing institutions and structures. New academic disciplines of social science appeared in European and American universities, attracting students across the transatlantic divide to study new fields, such as economics, that emphasized how rational and scientific investigation of social structures would yield the information needed to justify and direct reform. Some of these universities were now admitting female students. Though their numbers were limited, these women would greatly advance progressivism.
Such technological innovations as electricity, railway transportation, the Bessemer converter that transformed iron into steel, steel-frame construction, and massive industrial plants with machinery that sped up the pace of work, among others, were changing everyday life and forms of work. The Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 celebrated the genius of American inventors and manufacturers. The displays of new technology and economic advances celebrated capitalist industrial production and tied progress to the human ingenuity that would tame and conquer nature. These innovations, however, were implemented with little thought to the conditions of life and work they produced, and with minimal government regulation or oversight. The exposition, moreover, coincided with an economic depression that left many Americans homeless, unemployed, and on the verge of starvation. The contrast between the glittering exposition and the conditions on the streets of cities across the country spurred new organization among Americans already concerned with the direction of the country.
By the end of the century, journalists and writers called “muckrakers” were investigating and publicizing the problems of American society. One of the most vexing problems they attacked was the “corrupt bargain” between business and government. For decades, businessmen had curried favors from government officials in order to advance their economic endeavors. In return, politicians and officeholders solicited and accepted bribes. In a climate where economic progress was considered sacrosanct, business received a relatively free hand to conduct its own affairs. Moreover, many businessmen were big contributors to the Republican Party, which reciprocated by passing legislation favorable to them. The money pouring into the party made it the country’s most powerful party on the federal level. Republicans controlled the presidency between 1860 and 1912, interrupted only by Democrat Grover Cleveland’s two terms.
Progressives argued that government should serve the public good. This “corrupt bargain” allowed private interests, including the leading party politicians, to benefit at the public’s expense. Progressives’ insistence that the state must protect and promote this public good challenged lingering sentiments about negative liberty (freedom from government) and self-guiding markets. Progressives demanded legislation to give government new powers, reform of the party and electoral systems, and new constitutional amendments.
Their successes crafted a moderate regulatory state. Congress regulated the power of business to engage in monopolies and trusts, created the Federal Reserve System to oversee the country’s monetary system, and enacted laws regulating the production of food and drugs. New agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission were organized to oversee adherence to these laws. To help finance the regulatory state, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution gave Congress power to levy an income tax. Progressives charged that giving state legislatures the power to appoint U.S. senators had led to collusion among businessmen, state legislators, and their appointees. The Seventeenth Amendment thus mandated the popular election of senators to Congress.
Individual states passed new political measures, and municipal governments were overhauled. Wisconsin became the first state to require the direct primary for nominating candidates, and Oregon adopted the initiative and referendum to give voters more voice in determining state legislation. Other states quickly followed. Some cities reduced the size of their city councils, gave mayors more power, eliminated district-based ward systems in favor of at-large council membership, municipalized some public services, and enacted public safety measures. Such reforms aimed to minimize the role of political parties, eliminate the franchise system by which public services were awarded to the highest private bidder, and replace party politicians with professionals whom progressives believed would be better equipped to bring order, efficiency, honest government, and protections to the chaotic industrial city.
Progressives also expanded the power of the presidency. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt (1901–8) and Woodrow Wilson (1912–20) each made the presidency more active and powerful in promoting a national progressive agenda. Roosevelt had coined the derisive term “muckraker,” but his tours of poverty-stricken urban areas as police commissioner of New York City (1895–97) with the crusading newspaper reporter Jacob Riis convinced him that the uncurbed power of the wealthy few, especially industrialists, threatened democracy. Money influenced politics and allowed business to use the police power of the state to thwart all labor initiatives. As president, Roosevelt used the existing Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) to break up monopolies and trusts. He oversaw new legislation to regulate railroad rates and food and drug production and expanded the role of the executive branch by creating new cabinet positions and broadening the powers of others. He was the first president to use his office to compel industry to resolve a major labor strike, that of coal miners in 1902. His administration took the first steps toward developing a national conservation policy. Roosevelt justified this innovative use of presidential power with the progressive idea that the president was “the steward of the public welfare.”
His successor, Republican William Howard Taft, attacked monopolies and trusts even more vigorously but did not share Roosevelt’s ideals. Taft fought trusts because he believed they restrained free trade, not to promote the public welfare. Unhappy progressive Republicans such as Senator Robert LaFollette (Wisconsin) founded the National Progressive Republican League to contest the Taft regulars. When the party renominated Taft in 1912, they organized the Progressive Party and nominated Roosevelt for president. Progressive women were drawn to this party, even though most still could not vote, because it promised that it would govern in the public interest and would back woman suffrage. The Democrats nominated Woodrow Wilson, and the 1912 race became a contest over the future of progressivism.
Wilson won as the Republican vote split between Taft and Roosevelt. In his first two years in office, Wilson demonstrated his progressive credentials by helping secure new banking, currency, and trade regulations and new antitrust legislation. Wilson managed to keep his southern base intact by promising not to expand the powers of the federal government at the expense of states’ rights and by ignoring other progressive demands to promote racial equality and woman suffrage.
Roosevelt and Wilson confronted a U.S. Senate and Supreme Court hostile to government regulation. The Seventeenth Amendment helped to change the makeup of the Senate, and both presidents took a hands-on approach to dealing with Congress. Since progressivism professed a faith in democracy, both men also appealed directly to the people during their presidencies. Each man used Congress’s constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce to secure regulatory measures. Wilson was able to appoint leading progressive lawyer Louis Brandeis to the court. Brandeis promoted the progressive idea of social realism: legal rulings should be made on the basis of factual information presented to the courts in the social context of the problem. Although few other jurists of the time so readily accepted social realism, the idea gradually gained a place in legal decisions.
Many progressives were motivated by an ideal of collective responsibility for resolving social problems. Settlement house founder Jane Addams argued that democratic governments could not ignore social problems or leave them to the mercy of private charity. She and other progressives proposed that certain social goods, including housing, transportation, parks, recreation areas, health, sanitation, and public education, should not be left to the vagaries of the marketplace. Ideas of social politics owed as much to a transatlantic exchange of ideas as they did to American innovation. Academics, settlement house workers, and professionals in law, economics, finance, and even religion journeyed to Europe to study, investigate, and exchange ideas with leading progressive thinkers there.
The specifics of social politics—for instance, how far and by what means to remove social goods from the marketplace—were contested. As head of the federal Children’s Bureau, Julia Lathrop declared that a democratic state must abolish poverty altogether. Catholic priest Father John A. Ryan wanted government to guarantee a living wage to male workers who could then support their families. African Americans Ida B. Wells-Barnett and W.E.B. DuBois used the ideas and language of progressivism to fight for racial equality, arguing that there could be no true democracy without racial democracy.
Social politics inspired tens of thousands of women across the country to join settlement houses and organize local and national voluntary associations that investigated social conditions and demanded that government solve them. These women were in the forefront of demanding that government provide adequate housing, decent public schools, and health and sanitation programs; promote public safety; and end the use of child labor. Fundamental to their progressivism was the idea that the middle class must learn to experience the lives of the poor, the working class, and immigrants in order to foster social responsibility. Working-class and African American women formed similar organizations.
A distinguishing feature of women’s progressivism was class-bridging organizations such as the National Women’s Trade Union League and the National Consumers’ League, which promoted protective labor legislation and abolition of child labor. In 1908 the Supreme Court had accepted, in Muller v. Oregon, Brandeis’s argument—based on statistics gathered by the women of the National Consumers’ League—that excessive strenuous work harmed women’s health and that the state thus had a reason to regulate their hours of labor. But the Court refused to extend such protection to male workers, citing the “right to contract” implied by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Senate passed the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act in 1916 to outlaw the “awful blot” of child labor, but the Court overturned the law as a violation of state powers to regulate labor.
Progressivism generated other new organizations through which like-minded individuals worked to enact reform. Men formed city clubs and municipal leagues. Activist women banded into the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Black and white Americans founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Through such organizations, progressivism formulated a new interest-group politics that voters believed gave them more access to government.
From the 1890s through World War I, progressives often justified territorial expansion and conquest. Most viewed Native Americans as being at odds with white European economic, religious, and social practices. While some progressives advocated compulsory “civilizing,” by removing Indian children from their parents, others sought less repressive means by which to integrate them into the broader society. Whichever method used, Native Americans’ lands were appropriated to foster white settlement and their customs undermined as part of progressive reordering of society.
Most progressives also justified overseas imperialism. The economic justification was that this would create a more orderly and efficient world in which to do business. It was usually accompanied by a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority. While some progressives were motivated by a more benign ideal that imperialism could bring education and progress, others simply believed that American superiority gave the United States the right to control the world.
Ideas about gender also underlay progressive imperialism. As women moved into public life and demanded suffrage as both a democratic right and as necessary to promote both domestic and international progressivism, political figures such as Theodore Roosevelt worried that American manhood was being undermined. Nothing could prove manhood, he believed, as much as war, conquest, and making the United States the economic and political powerhouse of the world.
International progressivism did have another side, however. Figures such as Addams and LaFollette promoted an ideal of universal social responsibility to bring order and peace to the world. The international membership of the Women’s Peace Party (founded 1915) and its successor, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, encouraged such thinking. If domestic progressivism could make Americans take responsibility for each other, then its international dimension could draw the peoples of the world into a broad alliance to defeat poverty and end armed conflict. But, in 1919, the Versailles Peace Conference and the U.S. Senate’s refusal to ratify the treaty and join the new League of Nations dashed such hopes.
World War I severely limited the continuation of progressivism. One strain of progressivism had argued that only the right populace could guarantee a good democracy. This idea justified immigration exclusion, antisocialist hysteria, and narrowly defining what it meant to be American. Wartime hysteria heightened such thinking and institutionalized the concept of “100 percent Americanism.” Anyone who opposed the war or who supported radical ideologies or groups was labeled un-American and subjected to persecution. The so-called science of eugenics proposed that humans had inbred racial traits that could be measured to determine who would make good democratic citizens. By the 1920s, new laws restricted immigration and enforced new naturalization requirements. Caught in this racialist thinking were African Americans whose progressive activities and participation in the war effort were not rewarded with racial democracy.
Progressivism as a massive movement died out after the war, but its ideals and effects did not. It had never pretended to overturn capitalism but to reform it to cause less harm to Americans. Progressivism’s ideals of social responsibility and the need for government regulation were institutionalized into American politics to provide a balance against the forces of the unrestrained marketplace.
See also foreign policy and domestic politics, 1865–1933; interest groups; press and politics.
FURTHER READING. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics, 1902; Idem, Peace and Bread in Time of War, 1922; Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s, 2007; Morton Keller, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933, 1994; Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935, 1991; Eric Rauchway, Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America, 2003; Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, 1998; Patricia Schechter, Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930, 2001; Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City, 2001; Nancy Unger, Fighting Bob LaFollette: The Righteous Reformer, 2002.
MAUREEN A. FLANAGAN
From its beginnings in the 1820s through its demise in the 1930s, the temperance movement and its descendant, the Prohibition movement, had a tremendous impact on American politics. Temperance and Prohibition helped to both create and disrupt the Second Party System that existed roughly from 1828 to 1854, and proved a staple (and difficult) issue of party politics during the Gilded Age.
The temperance movement brought women into politics before they had the vote. During the Progressive Era, the Prohibition movement created the first single-issue pressure group, a model of influencing politics that was widely imitated. Prohibition also created the only constitutional amendment directly aimed at the personal habits of the people. National Prohibition presented challenges to the political order. After repeal of the amendment, temperance and Prohibition faded as issues. The birth of neoprohibitionism at the end of the twentieth century sidestepped federal politics as it pressured states into raising the legal drinking age and enforcing harsher laws against drunk driving.
The temperance movement began as a reaction to the alcoholic republic of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Americans consumed alcohol at a tremendous rate in this period. For instance, it is estimated that between 1800 and 1830, adult Americans consumed 6.6 to 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol annually, compared to a current annual consumption rate of 2.8 gallons. Alcohol was part of daily life and public culture. Temperance advocates blamed all manner of social disorder on the consumption of drink. Alcohol, they argued, directly caused poverty, disease, crime, political corruption, and family disruption. Many Americans, especially those of Anglo-Saxon and old immigrant stock, saw liquor as an unmitigated evil that needed to be outlawed. Many Christians, inspired by the Second Great Awakening, joined the movement, whose members abstained from liquor and tried to persuade others to do the same.
From the 1830s through the 1840s, many antiliquor agitators moved beyond moral suasion to embrace political means. The first steps toward politicizing temperance came in New England communities where temperance advocates promoted the policy of no license—that is, they pressured local authorities to stop granting licenses to liquor retailers, removing what they saw as a public sanction of the trade. In some states, such struggles were decided through the ballot in what became known as local option elections (a method, while much altered, that still exists). States, by law, authorized the people of any township, county, city, or precinct to decide in a special election to allow or deny liquor sales in their locality. Liquor merchants, as well as advocates of laissez-faire policies and opponents of reform, mobilized against these efforts.
Such divisions fed into the emerging Second Party System. At first, the Whigs tended to support the temperance advocates’ legal solutions while the Democrats opposed them. As immigration increased, bringing both Germans and Irish with established drinking cultures to the United States, the political divisions took on ethnic and religious dimensions, and these immigrants (especially the Catholics among them) tended to favor the Democratic Party. But over time, the rigid divisions between parties over temperance started to erode.
The parties in the 1840s viewed antiliquor measures as both appealing and dangerous. For instance, after Whig-dominated state governments passed laws that restricted the sale of liquor to large bulk orders (in effect imposing a ban on retail alcohol sales), they were turned out of office. Afterward, Whig politicians tried to avoid adopting extreme temperance policies, but only at the risk of alienating some of their supporters. Similarly, Democrats, seeing how popular temperance policies were with some voters, would advocate them, to the disgust of a significant number of their supporters. In short, temperance started out as a defining issue between the parties but became a contested issue within both parties.
By the 1850s, such conflicts led to new political organizations and alliances. Temperance movements throughout the country came together around the Maine Law (named after the first state to adopt it in 1851), which essentially prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol within a state. In all, 13 northern states attempted to adopt such laws, and in almost every case, the laws passed. Most of the Maine Laws were quickly repealed, however, as the political alliances that had created them proved to be unstable. The emergence of a new political party system centered on the slavery issue took Prohibition out of politics for almost a generation.
At the opening of the Gilded Age (around 1870), drinking had a new venue, the saloon—a primarily male institution, a fact that made its respectability automatically suspect. Even so, saloons existed almost everywhere, spread by the practice of many brewers of establishing their own street-level retailing venues. Throughout the period, the Prohibition Party and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) agitated for national constitutional Prohibition. By the end of the period, six states prohibited the sale of alcohol, and almost every state allowed local option elections on liquor sales. At this time, the Democrats and the Republicans preferred to avoid the issue of Prohibition. Republicans pushed alternative policies of high license (which imposed all sorts of restrictions on liquor merchants), while Democrats preferred to leave the matter up to voters in local option elections. In turn, the leading temperance organizations denounced the major political parties and saw the corruption of politics (symbolized by the saloon) as one of the main evils spawned by the legal manufacture and sale of liquor.
The Prohibition Party was the leading male temperance organization of the Gilded Age. Because it asked men to abandon other party affiliations, in an age where party affiliations were extremely strong, the party remained at the margins of power. Its members came primarily from the temperance wing of the Republican Party, and it had effective organizations only in the Northeast and the Midwest. Throughout its history, the Prohibition Party splintered over whether it should embrace other issues, such as woman suffrage or railroad regulation; in some election cycles it did (thus dividing its members) and in others it did not, but then lost voters to organizations that focused on issues other than liquor. Indeed, the emergence of populism, and a host of new political issues, including regulating the money supply and controlling corporations, ended the Prohibition Party’s electoral appeal. By the middle of the last decade of the nineteenth century, the party was widely perceived to be a failure.
Conversely, the female temperance organization of the same period was seen as a great success. The WCTU was the largest female reform organization of the Gilded Age. It was the first national women’s reform movement directed and controlled solely by women. Under the leadership of Frances Willard from 1879 to 1898, this largely white, middle-class Protestant women’s organization kept the Prohibition issue alive when the political structure was hostile to the antiliquor reform—and convinced a generation of women that they should seek the right to vote. The WCTU pioneered highly effective lobbying techniques (keeping in Washington the first woman lobbyist, Margret Dye Ellis), and in the areas seen as within women’s sphere, such as education or the sexual protection of minors, the WCTU was quite successful, especially at the state level. Less successful were the WCTU’s attempts to build political coalitions, first with the Prohibition Party and later with the Populist Party and the Knights of Labor. It is only when the WCTU began working with a new Prohibition organization, the Anti-Saloon League, that the temperance advocates could compel the major parties to pass more restrictions on alcohol, culminating in national Prohibition.
In the 1890s, antiliquor Protestants built the first national interest group mobilized to shape public policy: the Anti-Saloon League. The league’s strength came from its mobilization of millions of church members who opposed the sale of liquor. It grew from the grass roots and built a professional hierarchy of organizers, lobbyists, and power brokers. Through its organization and extensive media empire, the league commanded its supporters to vote the way it told them to, and most did. The league adopted an “omnipartisan” strategy—that is, it supported any politician regardless of party if that politician would support the league’s proposals. The Anti-Saloon League cared only about how a politician voted, not how he acted or what he believed. Thus, Warren G. Harding, a known drinker and gambler, always had league support. The league limited its proposals strictly to liquor issues and to policies that would garner support from voters. As its name implied, it first took aim at the unpopular saloon, supporting such restrictions as the high license, although by the turn of the new century, its favored tool was local option elections. When a state adopted that policy, the league then focused on statewide Prohibition.
At first, the Anti-Saloon League concentrated its operations in the states. Working with both major parties, it dried out large parts of the nation through local option and state Prohibition during the first decade of the twentieth century. At the same time, its lobbyists established an effective presence in Washington, where they sought federal legislation (in alliance with other groups, most notably the WCTU) based on the commerce power and taxing power designed to help dry states effectively carry out their Prohibition policies. Its leaders—William Anderson, Purley Baker, Joseph Cannon, Edwin C. Dinwiddie, and Wayne Wheeler—became familiar and feared faces in Washington.
By 1913, after a major victory in congressional passage of the Webb-Kenyon Act, which prohibited the interstate transportation of liquor intended to be used contrary to the receiving state’s law, the league launched its campaign for national Prohibition. By 1917 the league and the WCTU persuaded Congress to send the Prohibition Amendment to the states for ratification. They were aided by the anti-German hysteria of World War I (which weakened the brewers, the movement’s most effective opponents), as well as the emergency rationale to preserve grain for food (not alcoholic beverages) and to uplift the morals of the people. League organization and political power resulted in speedy ratification and the passage in 1919 of the Volstead Act, which set up the Prohibition enforcement system. On January 16, 1920, national Prohibition went into effect.
National Prohibition proved troubling to both political parties, especially by the middle of the 1920s, when repeal sentiment began to grow. The Prohibitionists, led by the Anti-Saloon League, tied their fortunes to the Republican Party, which welcomed their support at first. But as Prohibition became increasingly unpopular, Republicans tried unsuccessfully to distance themselves from the policy. For example, President Herbert Hoover’s Presidential Commission (known widely as the Wickersham Commission after its chairman, George Wickersham) floated several revision proposals in the course of its life, only to be pulled back to the Prohibitionist line by the time it issued its report.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party was bitterly divided over the issue, with its southern wing strongly supporting Prohibition and its urban, ethnic, northern wing supporting repeal. Thus, the “wet” presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith was saddled with a bone-dry platform plank in the 1928 election. The lobbying of repeal groups, the diminution in size and strength of temperance groups, and the increasing unpopularity of the Prohibition regime (in tandem with a widely accepted view that Prohibition, not alcohol, bred lawlessness and political corruption) culminated in support from both parties for modification or repeal in the 1932 election. Thus, within 14 years of its adoption, the Eighteenth Amendment was repealed through the Twenty-First Amendment.
Repeal took Prohibition out of partisan politics. Even as he proclaimed the passing of national Prohibition, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the nation should return to true temperance, not to the old-time saloon. Thus, the Federal Alcohol Act of 1933 prohibited distillers or brewers from owning retail outlets. The Twenty-First Amendment’s second clause also returned almost complete control over liquor to the states, where the sale of liquor proved easier to regulate than prohibit. Within four years of the amendment’s adoption, 43 of the 48 states had legalized the sale of all liquor. By 1959 there were no Prohibition states left, although several states preserved the policy in local option systems. To prevent the return of the old, much-vilified saloon, virtually all the states adopted either a government monopoly system or a state-controlled license system of distribution. These systems controlled the number of liquor licenses granted in communities, regulated the environment in which liquor could be consumed in a public venue, and made liquor issues questions of bureaucratic politics, not partisan ones.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, an odd alliance of those who saw drink as evil and sinful, bootleggers who profited by bringing liquor into dry areas, and those who did not want liquor stores or bars in their neighborhoods made the United States a patchwork of regions where liquor was sold without restriction, sold only by the drink, or not sold at all.
An unintended consequence of this patchwork was the emergence of driving while intoxicated. Drinking and driving was perceived as a societal problem as early as the 1950s but did not gain strong advocates against it until the 1980s, when it became associated with related issues of underage drinking.
The key advocacy group, at the state and federal levels, was Mothers against Drunk Driving (MADD). As a group, MADD had inherent advantages. First, it was a victims’ group, with personalized stories—My child was killed by a drunk driver, what are you doing to do about it? Second, it quickly gained powerful allies, most notably the insurance industry, the liquor industry (prompted in part by fear of stricter liquor regulations), and car manufacturers (fearful of requirements for more safety devices on cars). MADD, like earlier advocates, started with local and state action. Its first actions were to track judges and others in their sentencing of drunk drivers (and to obtain harsher sentences, either through mandatory sentencing laws or a change of judges) and to push for state laws that lowered the blood alcohol level that legally defined intoxication. In these and later efforts, the group avoided partisan politics in favor of lobbying and leveraging the administrative state. Through its actions, the 1984 Highway Act included provisions that withheld highway funds to any state that had a legal drinking age lower than 21. At the time, legal drinking ages varied among the states, but by 1988, with virtually no political struggle, the legal drinking age in all states was 21.
The control of drink bedevilled party politics from the 1820s to the 1930s. The Prohibition movement mobilized women’s mass political power before suffrage and gave birth to the single-issue pressure group. After repeal, temperance and Prohibition faded as issues, only to be reborn in a far different form in the late twentieth century as neoprohibitionism.
See also Gilded Age, 1870s–90s; populism; progressivism and the Progressive Era, 1890s–1920.
FURTHER READING. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920, 2002; K. Austin Kerr, Organized for Prohibition: A New History of the Anti-Saloon League, 1985; David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition, 2nd ed., 2000; Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933, 1998.
RICHARD F. HAMM
The current American political process is nearly unimaginable without public opinion polls. These surveys measure not only the relative standing of candidates for office but also citizens’ views on myriad social and political issues. Attempts to record political opinion are as old as the nation. But such polls, at least in their contemporary guise, date only from the mid-1930s, when George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley championed the ability of scientific sampling methods to reveal the “pulse of democracy.” The modern public opinion poll—along with its ramifications for U.S. politics and civic life—was born of their success.
Interest in elucidating citizens’ political sentiments stretches far back into the American past, as well as that of most republican nations. Since at least the eighteenth century, when the term public opinion first surfaced, representative governments have claimed to be able to locate—as well as listen and respond to—the will of the people. As James Madison argued in 1791, the “opinion of the majority” was the “real sovereign in every free government.” Public opinion, whether deemed virtuous, unruly, or in need of enlightened guidance, became part of the rhetorical arsenal of rulers and elites who claimed to speak in its name. Collective opinion about public affairs was also thought to exercise a shaping force on citizens. In the words of political philosopher John Locke, “the law of opinion, the law of reputation, the law of fashion . . . is heeded more than any divine law or any law of the state.”
In the United States, where democratic rule and political legitimacy were firmly tied to majority will, assessing the national mood was a favorite pastime of journalists, politicians, and social commentators long before Gallup appeared on the scene. Political scientist Susan Herbst has observed that “technically sophisticated attempts to quantify popular sentiment trailed far behind theorizing and discussion of it.”
Starting in the nineteenth century, rudimentary political surveys, whether for entertainment or electoral gain, were undertaken by reporters, party loyalists, and ordinary citizens. In the 1820s, partisan newspapers began conducting straw polls as a means of both calculating and swaying political contests. “Straws,” named for the way a straw held up in the wind could determine which way it was blowing, were haphazard instruments for gauging opinion, with passengers on a train or people encountered during a phase of a political campaign polled as the entire sample. Regardless, these quantitative surveys were popular news features into the twentieth century, encouraging a “horse race” approach to reporting elections that continues to the present.
A conjunction of statistical and social scientific innovations, commercial demands, and journalistic trends led to more systematic public opinion surveys in the first decades of the twentieth century and ultimately to the “scientific” polling of the 1930s. The estimation of standard errors based on sample size was crucial to pollsters’ ability to extrapolate from the views of a small group of respondents something like national public opinion on a given issue. Equally significant were developments in the burgeoning field of market research, which sought ever more precise gauges of consumer desires and, in the process, supplied the techniques and personnel for political research. Finally, media interest in public opinion as news guaranteed that the polls would have both audiences and financial backers.
But the rise of modern political polling also required the entrepreneurial skills of Gallup and his colleagues. All of them got their start (and remained) in private commercial research and aspired to extend sample survey techniques to other arenas. In the lead-up to the 1936 presidential election, Gallup, along with Roper and Crossley, publicly challenged the best-known straw poll of the day, conducted by the Literary Digest. The Digest poll had correctly predicted the winner of the past five elections. But in 1936, even though it tallied over 2 million mail-in ballots, the poll incorrectly called the election for Republican Alfred Landon. Gallup et al., on the other hand, surveyed significantly fewer but more representative individuals and correctly forecast the election, if not the actual percentage of votes (Gallup was off by 7 points), for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Their victory gave instant credibility to scientific opinion polls, based on careful cross sections of the national population—what Gallup called the “miniature electorate.”
Gallup and Roper, and soon a corps of other “pollers,” were not content to confine their efforts to electoral contests. Indeed, many believed that election polls, although good for business and for legitimating their techniques in the public eye, were socially useless. The real goal was, in Gallup’s words, “charting virtually unexplored sectors of the public mind”: polling citizens on social and political issues that never made it onto a ballot. With this aim in mind, Gallup’s American Institute for Public Opinion (AIPO) was established in 1935 to conduct a “continuing poll on the issues of the day.” By 1940 its reports of Americans’ opinions, on topics ranging from working women to U.S. entrance into World War II, were syndicated and carried by 106 newspapers. Roper’s Fortune Survey, also created in 1935, had a similar goal, if never as wide a following.
James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth, suggested in 1888 that public opinion ought to be “the real ruler of America,” but lamented the lack of “machinery for weighing or measuring the popular will from week to week or month to month.” In his many tracts promoting polling techniques, Gallup portrayed his new technology as the fulfillment of Bryce’s vision.
By this light, opinion polls were more than a method for gathering information. They were a civic instrument, able to revitalize democracy—the spirit, if not the form, of the New England town meeting—in an increasingly complex, bureaucratic nation. Polls would achieve this goal by opening up a direct channel between “the people” and those in power, bypassing unreceptive legislators, political machines, and pressure groups. “As vital issues emerge from the fast-flowing stream of modern life,” pledged Gallup, public opinion polls would “enable the American people to speak for themselves.” Roper similarly described polls as “democracy’s auxiliary ballot box.” In short, the new polls would make ordinary citizens articulate—and their leaders responsive—in an age of mass organization.
In the years after 1936, other individuals, notably Samuel Lubbell, Lou Harris, and Mervin Field, would enter the polling arena, as would government agencies and major survey research organizations such as the National Opinion Research Center (1941), Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (1944), and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan (1946). Technical improvements in sampling and survey design ensued, although they did not prevent spectacular failures in polling techniques. The polls’ confident prediction that Thomas Dewey would prevail over Harry Truman in the presidential election of 1948 was the best known of these failures, triggering a major investigation by the Social Scientific Research Council and much soul-searching by pollsters, social scientists, journalists, and market research clients.
The relative ease with which polling’s 1948 crisis passed, however, suggested the growing dependence of various sectors of U.S. society on Gallup’s techniques. Opinion polling, along with the allied field of market research, expanded dramatically in the 1960s and beyond, as interest groups, political consultants, and television and news organizations got into the polling business. By the mid-1960s, opinion surveying had spread throughout the world. The Gallup Poll had 32 affiliates and conducted polls in nearly 50 countries. In the early twenty-first-century United States, several hundred polling organizations existed on national, state, or local levels. Quantitative reports based on the aggregation of individual responses had largely displaced older ways of gauging citizens’ views, among them public hearings, petitions, rallies, and letter-writing campaigns.
Gallup’s rosy view of the democratic potential of opinion surveys was never fully embraced by his contemporaries, nor by later observers of the polls. Multiple criticisms were leveled at public opinion polls from their inception and recurred loudly during each new election cycle.
Some critiques were political and came from those who had something to lose or gain from poll numbers. Legislators on both sides of the aisle in the 1930s and 1940s looked skeptically at the new electoral polls, citing bias and distortion. (Early polls often did overestimate Republican support, making Franklin Roosevelt suspect that Gallup was on the opposing party’s payroll.) Beginning in 1932, there were regular proposals in Congress to investigate or regulate the polls, and Gallup himself came under congressional scrutiny in 1944.
Ordinary citizens also denounced what they considered to be slanted or inaccurate polls. But their chief complaint concerned the practice of scientific sampling. To many Americans, the notion that national opinion could be distilled from as few as 1,000 respondents was not simply counterintuitive but undemocratic. Given the regular claims of polling’s founders to represent the citizenry, many individuals were puzzled—or offended—by the fact that their opinions were not included in the surveys. Especially in the early decades of scientific polling, some were even moved to write to Gallup and Roper to ask why they hadn’t been questioned. Despite the ubiquity of polls in American life today, widespread distrust of their central methodology persists. Over half of Americans surveyed in 1985, for example, claimed not to believe in the representativeness of random sampling.
Some of the most important challenges to the polls came from those who worried that data publicizing majority views would have negative effects in the public arena, due to either the overt manipulation or subtle influence of opinion data. Many legislators, commentators, and citizens from the 1930s onward decried the purported sway of polls over politicians or individual opinions—the latter the so-called bandwagon effect. Although Gallup dismissed this possibility, some studies, including those in the 1940s by sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, suggested that published survey data could indeed influence voters, favoring candidates who were ahead in the polls. In a later iteration of this theme, scholars found that public opinion research could create a “spiral of silence,” dampening minority voices through social pressure.
Other critiques were technical in nature. Pollsters’ early method of choosing respondents, particularly their use of a discretionary system of “quota” sampling, was one area that came under fire. After the fiasco of 1948, most moved to the more costly procedure of “probability,” or random, sampling, where every individual had an equal likelihood of being polled. Academic survey researchers then and now have pointed to other vexing problems with obtaining valid poll results. Among the most important of these are interviewer bias (the potential for the social background of the interviewer and/or respondent to affect responses) and question-wording effects (the fact that Americans register dramatically different levels of support for “welfare” versus “assistance to the poor,” for example).
Still, other criticisms issued from commentators who found poll results like Gallup’s a poor stand-in for something as complex and changeable as “public opinion.” They argued that tallying individual, anonymous responses to standardized questions fundamentally obscured how opinion was forged. Political scientist Lindsay Rogers, who in 1949 coined the term pollster (partly for its resonance with the word huckster), was a vehement early critic of this stripe. In an influential 1948 argument, sociologist Herbert Blumer faulted the polls for severing opinions from their social context: the institutions, groups, and power relations that helped to shape them. Other critics, returning to concerns raised earlier in the century by political commentator Walter Lippmann, wondered whether Gallup’s vision of direct democracy via polls was desirable—that is, whether citizens were capable of wise, informed opinions about complicated public issues.
A host of recent detractors, including French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, further argued that polls do not neutrally report public views but rather generate entirely new entities: “nonattitudes” born of queries about topics that individuals have little knowledge of or interest in; political debates that would not otherwise be on the public agenda; and even the illusion of an opinionated public. In this view, “public opinion”—as revealed by polls—is an artifact of a particular measurement technique and often benefits interested elites such as politicians and journalists rather than the citizenry at large. Arguing that polls have had a disproportionate role in agenda-setting, such critics have urged paying attention to “don’t know” responses and refusals to learn more about what public opinion polls obscure and whom they serve.
In the late twentieth century, frustration with the limitations of polls, and especially their seeming failure to enrich political discourse, led to multiple experiments with polling formats as well as a movement for “deliberative polling,” led by political scientist James Fishkin. Proponents claimed that when citizens were provided with briefing materials on issues and had time to discuss their opinions face to face with others, reasoned collective judgments would result.
Certainly, many parties over the years have welcomed poll data for measuring public preferences as well as the potential to inform political discussion. Polls have clarified major differences between majority sentiment and political leaders. Longitudinal survey data have allowed new windows on ordinary citizens’ political beliefs and affiliations, documenting, for instance, Americans’ remarkably stable policy preferences over time. One recent study concludes that U.S. opinion surveys reveal a “rational public” and, furthermore, that public policy aligns with majority views in approximately two out of three instances. But the range and extent of critiques over the last 70 years suggest that Gallup’s and Roper’s ambitious hopes for polls as the “pulse of democracy” have not yet been realized.
Notwithstanding such challenges, modern opinion polls and their creators have exercised tremendous influence in American life. Ultimately, Gallup’s surveys managed not only to transform political reportage but also to change politics itself. Polling techniques quickly penetrated the corridors of Congress and the White House. Franklin D. Roosevelt, an early convert to survey data, began receiving three-page summaries of public opinion in 1941; by 1942 these reports were often 20 pages in length. Roosevelt, significantly, monitored polls less to learn the public’s views and more to shape them and garner support for specific policies. Two of the administration’s unofficial pollsters, Hadley Cantril and Gerard Lambert (famous for a successful Listerine advertising campaign), were careful to include in all their analyses suggestions as to “how the attitude reported might be corrected.”
In this, Roosevelt was hardly alone: from the 1930s onward, every president save Harry Truman relied on confidential surveys of opinion, whether to evaluate campaign strategies or claim an independent base of support for his views. Such uses of private polling accelerated over the decades: pollster Lou Harris played a key role in John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign; Richard Nixon employed (and suppressed) polls to gain advantage over his political opponents; and Bill Clinton made pollster Stanley Greenberg part of his “war room” of advisors (and, by one account, spent nearly 
2 million on polls in a single year).
In addition to presidential administrations, members of Congress, governors, and mayors now regularly consult or commission polls. Politicians may disavow “poll-driven” politics, but their actions speak louder than their words. George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 stating, “we take stands without having to run polls and focus groups to tell us where we stand”—and then spent 1 million on polls the following year. It is clear that opinion polling has become a permanent feature of U.S. governance, coloring campaign strategies and political advertisements, public statements, and policy making. Even despite recent, well-publicized flaws in pre-election and exit polls (which, it should be noted, are typically the best designed and most comprehensive kinds of polls, as compared to social issue polls), quantitative opinion surveys are here to stay.
Historically, public opinion has had many different shades of meaning. In 1965 Harwood Childs, founder of the Public Opinion Quarterly, was able to list some 50 competing definitions for the term. One sign of Gallup’s astonishing success is today’s ready conflation of poll data and public opinion: the near-complete merging of the people’s will and a specific statistical technique for measuring it.
See also political culture.
FURTHER READING. Scott L. Althaus, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics: Opinion Surveys and the Will of the People, 2003; Adam J. Berinsky, Silent Voices: Public Opinion and Political Participation in America, 2004; George F. Bishop, The Illusion of Public Opinion: Fact and Artifact in American Public Opinion Polls, 2005; Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” in Communication and Class Struggle, edited by Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, 1979; Jean Converse, Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence, 1890–1960, 1987; Robert M. Eisinger, The Evolution of Presidential Polling, 2003; James S. Fishkin, The Voice of the People: Public Opinion and Democracy, reprint, 1997; Benjamin Ginsberg, The Captive Public: How Mass Opinion Promotes State Power, 1986; Susan Herbst, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling Has Shaped American Politics, 1993; Sarah E. Igo, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public, 2007; Benjamin I. Page and Robert Y. Shapiro, The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences, 1992; Daniel J. Robinson, The Measure of Democracy: Polling, Market Research, and Public Life, 1930–1945, 1999.
SARAH E. IGO