It is a damned outrage to put me into the “venerable statesman” class, and I don’t like it.
—Uncle Joe1
The midday sun peeked through the clouds as if to catch a glimpse of this new president. He stood on the East Portico of the Capitol looking out over a patchwork of humanity that stretched out in every direction. Mounted soldiers maintained a perimeter around the staircase.
“Let them come up as close as they please,” Wilson ordered. “I am going to talk to them and want them to hear me.” With a whoop, thousands of people rushed forward into the empty space, shouting “Good boy, Woodrow!” “Oh, you Woodrow!” “What’s the matter with Woodrow!” “He’s all right!”2
Even with the audience standing close, his voice had little hope of reaching more than a fraction of the crowd. It was a vague, uncertain speech that gave little hint of the dramatic changes to come. In tones of wonder and humility, he described the progressive awakening of the nation. He spoke not as one who woke the people but as one had woken with them. “Some old things with which we had grown familiar,” he reflected, “have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes; have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister . . . ” He argued that the nation had a duty “to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil” that it had recently discovered, a moral obligation that transcended partisan divisions and personal rivalries. “Men’s hearts wait upon us,” he exhorted, “men’s lives hang in the balance; men’s hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!”3
Congress answered his call. Over the next four years, a bipartisan coalition of progressive legislators enacted the most comprehensive political and institutional reforms since the nation’s founding. It began as the First Congress had begun—with revenue. By the time Wilson took office, three-quarters of the states had ratified Aldrich’s income tax amendment, enshrining it in the Constitution as the Sixteenth Amendment. Congress immediately began work on a new revenue bill. In contrast to Taft, Wilson worked aggressively to prevent legislators from hiking up tariff rates for favored industries. The resulting bill slashed tariffs by a third and created a new federal income tax with a top marginal rate of 7 percent.4
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 superseded the feeble Aldrich-Vreeland emergency currency act. It created a central banking system with the power to issue currency and set interest rates. In many ways, the new Federal Reserve resembled the blueprints from Jekyll Island, but to Aldrich’s dismay, Wilson insisted that the government, rather than private bankers, dominate the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. The Federal Reserve eased the cyclical currency shortages and financial panics, though it did not always act aggressively enough to stop them—most notoriously in 1929. Its covert origins as the brainchild of New York bankers at a millionaires’ island resort have provided fodder for conspiracy theorists ever since.5
In accordance with Wilson’s New Freedom campaign, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act of 1914 outlawed price discrimination and gave the President more power to block corporate mergers. Though weaker than the antitrust legislation drafted by Brandeis and La Follette, the Clayton Act remains the cornerstone of American antitrust law to this day.6
Not all of the progressives’ aspirations were realized during Wilson’s presidency. The courts, still dominated by Gilded Age judges, impeded labor reform. Like Albert Beveridge’s child labor bill, the Keating-Owen Act of 1916 prohibited interstate transportation of goods produced by children, but the Supreme Court overthrew it. Child labor would remain legal in many states until FDR’s New Deal. The Adamson Act of 1916 that established eight-hour workdays and overtime rates for railroad employees avoided the same fate because it was limited to workers engaged in interstate commerce, while the Workingmen’s Compensation Act of 1916 applied only to federal employees.7
In other cases, Congress passed Constitutional amendments to override the courts. In 1913, the states ratified the Seventeenth Amendment mandating direct election of US senators. In 1920, the final year of Wilson’s presidency, the Eighteenth Amendment prohibited the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol—over the president’s objections. The Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote a few months later.
By that point, American involvement in World War I had broken the progressive alliance and stalled Wilson’s unprecedented string of domestic achievements. The most prominent opponent of the war effort was a certain short Wisconsin senator with a large pompadour. When La Follette led a small band of progressive senators in a sensational filibuster to try to keep America out of the war, Wilson denounced him and his allies as “a little group of willful men representing no opinion but their own.”8
Theodore Roosevelt naturally agreed. Vilifying La Follette as “the most sinister foe of democracy” and a “skunk” who “ought to be hung,” he proposed sending him to the Reichstag. “There he would be in entirely appropriate surroundings,” he sneered, “whereas in the senate of the United States he is a cause for shame and humiliation for every worthy American.”9
The outbreak of war made Roosevelt sick with envy. He repeatedly petitioned Wilson for permission to lead a volunteer cavalry division into Belgium’s trench-slashed fields—where machine guns would have mown down his Rough Riders in a flash. The War Department laughed him off.10
Roosevelt had reconciled with the Republican leaders by then. A progressive crusader no longer, he struck a deal to bring the limping Progressive Party back into the Republican fold during the 1916 presidential campaign.
His icy relations with Taft took somewhat longer to thaw. Six years after the divisive Republican convention, their paths crossed at a Chicago hotel a few blocks from the Coliseum. Roosevelt, eating alone in the dining room, noticed that the room had gone still. He looked up. There was William H. Taft standing over him. Roosevelt threw down his napkin and took his old friend’s hand. As they grasped each other by the shoulder, the other guests cheered. Roosevelt invited Taft to sit, and they spoke for half an hour, bonding over their mutual contempt for Woodrow Wilson. They soon resumed their old correspondence but never saw each other again. On January 5, 1920, Roosevelt died in his sleep from a blood clot.11
Taft’s dream of becoming chief justice came true the following year. Despite a conservative voting record, his deft leadership earned the respect of his colleague Justice Louis Brandeis, who marveled, “It’s very difficult for me to understand why a man who is so good as Chief Justice . . . could have been so bad as President.”12
Uncle Joe returned to Congress in 1914. He served another eight years and supported the President’s war effort—even though Wilson was a Democrat. When Cannon retired at age 86, a new magazine called Time featured his wizened face on the cover of its first issue. The Cannon House Office Building is named in his honor.
Nelson Aldrich died of a stroke in 1915. He lived just long enough to see the fulfillment of his greatest legislative accomplishments: the federal income tax (which he regarded as socialistic and unconstitutional) and the Federal Reserve (which he also regarded as socialistic and unconstitutional). In addition to his unintended legislative legacy, Aldrich is the forefather of a progressive political dynasty that includes West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, and former vice president Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, who led the left wing of the Republican Party in the mid-twentieth century. The Rockefeller Republicans, as the liberal faction was known, remained a potent force in the GOP until the late 1970s. At that point, a conservative insurgency employing La Follette-style grassroots tactics purged the remaining progressives from the party.13
The golden era of muckraking was over by the time Wilson became president. The new doctrine of journalistic objectivity gradually supplanted it, though modern investigative journalism still honors its pioneers—Steffens, Baker, and Tarbell. Baker supported Wilson in 1912 and later wrote an eight-volume Pulitzer-winning biography of his life. Steffens’s quest to defeat the System took him farther afield. In 1919, he visited Russia, fresh from its revolution, and interviewed Chairman Vladimir Lenin. “I have seen the future,” Steffens reported optimistically, “and it works.”14
After Wilson, a backlash against the progressive movement caused both parties to retreat into conservatism. In 1924, La Follette grew so frustrated with the two major parties that he finally broke from the Republicans and ran for president as an independent. Once again, he played the valiant, hopeless underdog, sprinting across the country with little money or national organization. He captured 17 percent of the popular vote but won only Wisconsin’s 13 electoral votes. Undeterred, he insisted that the loss was just a “skirmish” and began laying plans for the next election. “The Progressives will close ranks for the next battle,” he promised.
Lincoln Steffens sighed, “His plans and his party make me tired, but he, the incurable, unreformable Bob, is wonderful.”15
But it was to be Fighting Bob’s last battle. He died of heart failure on June 18, 1925. Belle held his hand as he slipped away, “pouring out the love and devotion of a lifetime in the last long farewell . . . telling him her vision of the nobility and beauty of his life and work.” His daughter Fola remarked, “His passing was mysteriously peaceful for one who had stood so long on the battle line.”16