THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
HISTORIANS HAVE LONG REFERRED TO THE NEARLY TWO decades between the Spanish–American War and the American entry into the First World War as the Progressive Era. The term has its uses but can easily mislead. Yes, the years between 1898 and 1917 may have represented a high tide for a certain approach to reform, in which activist intellectuals and politicians, many of them associated with a loose movement that came to be called Progressivism, sponsored programs of far-reaching structural change to political and economic institutions. But it is not as if there were no reform ideas or efforts being promoted before 1898, and none again after 1917, and it was not as if those ideas were less sweeping or far-reaching than those of the people who are called Progressives.
What we call the Progressive Era was a more concentrated and widely influential phase in a longer and more general response to the great disruptions of industrialization, urbanization, national consolidation, and concentrated wealth and power. In that phase, the reformers achieved political power, even the presidency, and enacted significant portions of their reform agenda. Such responses were part of a larger quest for a new order, or at least for a new way of thinking about how American democracy and self-rule could survive and thrive under such dramatically changed conditions. We still struggle with some of those same questions today.
But the Progressive Era had an important prologue, which began with scattered visionaries who attracted large followings, offering radical innovations to solve the nation’s problems. Some of their solutions were quite novel. The San Francisco journalist Henry George, in an 1879 book called Progress and Poverty, called for a single tax on land, termed a land value tax, as a way to equalize the alarming inequalities of wealth that he had observed in the cities. The many disruptions wrought by nineteenth-century industrialization also led to a rash of utopian novels, perhaps best exemplified by Edward Bellamy’s fabulously best-selling 1888 fantasy Looking Backward, an effort to imagine a perfected postindustrial Boston, reconstituted as a socialist cooperative commonwealth in the year 2000. Far from celebrating individualism, Bellamy openly reviled it, proposing in its place a quasi-Christian “religion of solidarity” that would radically deemphasize the self and instead promote social bonds over individual liberty. The huge popularity of Bellamy’s book – it was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the best-selling book of the nineteenth century, and it gave rise to innumerable “Bellamy clubs” across the nation, where the reform-minded gathered and dreamed together – showed how many Americans were hungry for such alternative ideas.
Similar themes were sounded by Christian leaders drawn to the Social Gospel, such as Columbus’s Washington Gladden and Rochester’s Walter Rauschenbusch, both of whom argued that the essence of the Christian gospel was not in its supernatural aspects or its offer of salvation but in its implications for social and economic reform, for what Rauschenbusch called the “Christian transfiguration of the social order.” Exemplifying such concern, urban reformers like Jane Addams and Ellen Starr moved into the most troubled neighborhoods in the new cities, seeking to establish “settlement houses” that could be sources of practical knowledge and material improvement in the lives of slum dwellers.
But the impulse for reform did not come only from the cities. Farmers, traditionally among the most self-reliant of citizens, found themselves experiencing a profound crisis in the latter years of the nineteenth century. Not only were they suffering from deeply depressed crop prices but now they found themselves struggling with bankers, railroads, grain-elevator operators, and a crowd of other middlemen and creditors, just to be able to get their livelihood. The simplicity of rural farm life was becoming a vanishing dream of the past.
But even if farmers’ lives were becoming nearly as constrained as those of factory workers, they did not live and labor like factory workers. Being geographically dispersed and accustomed to living independently, they found it difficult to organize in order to change their condition. Nevertheless, by the 1890s, an agrarian protest movement was coming together, and farmers were being advised to “raise less corn and more hell.” Eventually, a varied collection of movements coalesced into a third political party, called the People’s Party or the Populists. The Populists formulated an ambitious platform, featuring calls for a graduated income tax, nationalization of the railroads, coinage of silver, direct election of senators, and the eight-hour workday, among many other items. It was more radical than anything on offer from the labor movement.
By the 1896 presidential election, the Populists had reluctantly joined forces with the Democrats in supporting the latter party’s candidate, William Jennings Bryan, a two-term former congressman from Nebraska. Bryan was then only thirty-six years old but was a gifted and silver-tongued orator with the power to captivate audiences, using rhetoric with powerful and unabashed Christian and biblical overtones. When he spoke, he preached, and when he preached, it was on behalf of the poor, the disenfranchised, the debt-ridden farmers and small businessmen, and the laboring classes. In resonant tones and rolling cadences reminiscent of a revivalist, he could pull at the emotional strings of his audiences and bring them to their feet, weeping and cheering.
He did not promote the entire populist agenda, but his proposals included the free coinage of silver, an issue that had long been a populist favorite and had taken on great symbolic importance, following as it did directly upon lines of class division, separating the wealthy and the poor. But its importance was not merely symbolic. To monetize silver, and thereby depart from the conservative gold standard, would mean a significant inflation of the currency, which in turn would greatly help poor debtors (since they would be able to repay their debts in dollars that were worth less than the dollars they had borrowed) and disadvantage wealthy creditors (for the same reasons, and because inflation erodes the value of present assets). Bryan taunted the opposition for its hard-hearted ungenerosity in a time of such severe need, using an image that in such a robustly Christian culture would have to be regarded as the ultimate weapon: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he cried in his speech at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1896. “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” As he spoke those words, he raised his arms to his sides, offering himself as a veritable image of the crucified Christ. And the crowd went wild.
Bryan’s tactics did not play equally well elsewhere. There were “gold” Democrats who could not support Bryan’s currency ideas and did not much like his evangelistic manner; they bolted from the party. The campaign of Bryan’s opponent, William McKinley, was able to paint Bryan as a wild-eyed anarchist, animated by a “communistic spirit,” and in the end, despite Bryan’s frenzied and effective cross-country campaigning, McKinley succeeded in beating back the Nebraskan’s challenge. Bryan won the western interior and southern states, while McKinley took the Northeast, the Midwest, and most of the Pacific Coast. The margin of victory, while comfortable, was not of landslide proportions: about 51 percent to 48 percent in the popular vote.
Many historians have regarded the 1896 election as a climactic victory of urban and industrial values over the rural and agrarian values that Bryan was taken to represent, an election affirming the emergence of a new “modern” American status quo. This is entirely plausible. The election can indeed be read as a stamp of approval of the dramatic changes that had occurred since Appomattox, a stamp that would be made even more indelible two years later, with the Spanish war and the annexation of the Philippines. It could even be read as a conclusion to the Second American Revolution imagined by Charles Beard.
But how remarkable it was that a movement driven by radical protest had come so far, capturing the nomination of a major political party and losing the general election only by a modest and respectable margin. Bryan’s 6.5 million votes amounted to the largest vote total achieved by any presidential candidate in American history up to that point – excepting only McKinley’s 7.1 million, which sufficed to defeat him. If Bryan had somehow found a way of connecting with working-class Catholic voters in the Northeast and Midwest, the outcome could have been dramatically different. In short, there was no reason to think that the rising reform impulse in America could be undone by a single election.
Nor was it undone, but it would have to change its colors and shift its emphases to move ahead. The mantle of reform would be passed to a different cast of characters: the cast making up the Progressive movement. This movement had already begun in the 1890s but had so many different constituencies and was so diverse in character that it is probably a misnomer even to call it a “movement” or to attribute to “Progressivism” too strict a definition. But with those caveats in mind, we can make certain useful generalizations.
First, it can be said that while Progressives supported many of the very same measures that the Populists supported, they did so from a more urban and town-dwelling base. Progressivism was a middle-class movement, with its heartbeat in the small towns and growing cities of the upper Midwest, particularly in states such as Wisconsin, where Progressivism enjoyed a pinnacle of success. Its constituencies included a great many professional people and traditional pillars of the community – doctors, lawyers, ministers, bankers, shopkeepers – but also there were officeworkers and middle managers employed in government agencies and business corporations. Progressives tended to be educated, civic minded, religiously inclined, and morally earnest. They wanted not merely to help the poor and oppressed but to change the system that brought about those conditions: to correct the perceived abuses, inequities, and inefficiencies that the new industrial economy had created and, in doing so, to restore – and perhaps more fully realize – the preconditions of democracy. In that sense, they were both reformist and conservative: willing to endorse dramatic changes in the service of rescuing and recovering older values.
The impetus for Progressivism was, as in other reform efforts of the era, a perception that the economic and financial revolutions of the previous decades had distorted or displaced the institutions that ordered social and political life and that new ones needed to be devised to correct these abuses. Notable in feeding this perception were the great investigative journalists of the era, such as Henry Demarest Lloyd, Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, whose slashing articles and books shed light on such ills as the monopolistic behavior of Standard Oil and other gargantuan corporations, the dire conditions of the urban slums, and the corruption of urban government. These writers became known, in a word that Theodore Roosevelt had borrowed from John Bunyan’s religious classic Pilgrim’s Progress, as “muckrakers.” He did not mean it as a term of praise, since he felt that these writers were so fixated upon wallowing in the mud and “raking the muck” that they missed the better and more admirable aspects of life. But even he grudgingly acknowledged that they performed an important function, as indeed they did. They stirred things up, identifying problems and making them harder to ignore. As we will see, Roosevelt himself paid attention to them.
These writers enjoyed a national audience, but the movement itself began on the local level, in municipalities and states, before spreading to the national level, and it was focused on concrete structural reforms. The goals included not only the reining in of corruption but the creation of what they considered to be a more wholesome public life in its place. In Toledo, Ohio, the self-made millionaire Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones, a Christian Socialist who had been influenced by Henry George, brought Progressive ideas into his administration as city mayor, creating free kindergartens, parks and playgrounds, public baths, an eight-hour day for city workers, and other popular reforms. His successor, Brand Whitlock, also a Georgist, would continue in a similar vein. Cleveland’s mayor Tom Johnson was an even more dramatic reformer, reforming almost every aspect of city government, from cleaning up the police department to establishing strict building codes, municipalizing functions such as trash collection, expanding public recreation offerings, promoting municipal ownership of streetcar lines and power utilities, and creating a spacious park called the Mall, meant as a grand public space open to all and expressive of the democratic ideal.
The control of utilities like electricity and water by the public rather than by private companies was an important and popular target in other Progressive cities as a way to break the often corrupt relationship between those corporations and the city bosses and return that power to the broader public. By 1915, two-thirds of American cities had publicly owned and operated water systems, and many cities had municipalized transportation systems, electrical power generation, and similar utilities affecting the entire public.
These reforms reflected one of the beliefs shared by nearly all Progressives: the view that there was something called “the public interest,” above and distinct from the self-interests of any particular parties – particularly the Interests, so often capitalized, of the large business combinations whose rise troubled them so much – and that the pursuit of that larger public interest ought to be the chief concern of government, as it was the chief object of the most conscientious of Progressive reformers. The word disinterested, which we use today to mean “uninterested,” was in those days a word that signified a very high ideal: the ideal of making decisions or allocating resources or rendering judgments without reference to one’s particular interests but only with the public interest in mind.
Most of the more significant Progressive reforms proceeded from that motive of “disinterestedness.” There was therefore a certain high-mindedness about the Progressives, which was a reflection of their religious formation. While they could be tough-minded in their efforts to promote reform, they ostensibly did not seek to aggrandize themselves, or to punish others, or otherwise to give quarter to the politics of self-interest. This was admirable; it also could be annoyingly self-righteous and self-deceiving, particularly when the term public interest was used to justify policies that did not appeal to those who did not share the Progressives’ socioeconomic profile. More on that in a moment.
The ethic of disinterestedness carried over into the Progressive view of how governments should be structured. Progressives tended to distrust politics, which they found to be a dishearteningly grubby business of deal making and vote trading, or worse, and thought it better to entrust as much of governance as possible to those with the expert knowledge, and the disinterested position, to enable them to govern with purported objectivity and unquestioned authority. One expression of this view was the creation of the city-manager system of governance, pioneered by Dayton, Ohio, in which a nonelected professional city manager with certified expert knowledge was hired by the elected city council to run the various city departments, all of which would report to the manager rather than the council. By 1923, more than three hundred cities had adopted one form or another of that plan of government, and some of them still retain that form today.
On the state level, governors struggled with large corporate interests, such as railroads and insurance companies, and sought to institute changes in the legislative process, such as the introduction of initiative, referendum, and the party primary system, all ways that allowed ordinary citizens to circumvent the professional politicians and the deliberations of their smoke-filled rooms and take a direct hand in their own governance. The Progressives’ interest in such reforms illuminates one of the paradoxes of their way of seeing things. On one hand, they took a very skeptical view of democratic political institutions and preferred the rule of professionals and accredited experts wherever it was possible to introduce it. On the other hand, they had an expansive faith in the people and their ability to initiate positive change in the public interest, operating outside the legislative frameworks that had been provided by their existing political institutions. Their heavy commitment to ballot reform, direct primaries, initiative, referendum, recall, and the like reflected their desire to increase citizen participation in government. They had great faith in democracy but far less faith in democratic institutions.
Yet there were places in which this combination of things seemed to work admirably well. Inspired and effective leadership made a big difference. In Wisconsin, the Progressive state par excellence, Governor (and later Senator) Robert La Follette (governor from 1900 to 1904) created something he called the “Wisconsin idea,” a confluence of mutually reinforcing Progressive innovations and institutions in which an activist government, drawing on research conducted at the great state university in Madison and referred to a Legislative Reference Bureau, would enact “enlightened” policies based on the “science of governance,” rather than the impure machinations of contending political factions, to produce good government, government in the public interest. Wisconsin under La Follette also embraced other classic Progressive innovations: direct primaries, railroad regulation, workman’s compensation, natural-resources conservation, and other measures in the Progressive playbook. If there was a single place that was the best showcase for Progressive reforms, it was Wisconsin.
Progressives agreed on a great many other things, such as the outlawing of child labor in mines and factories and the protection of women in the industrial workforce. But one set of issues on which they did not entirely agree were those revolving around the matter of alcoholic beverages. Here it should be stressed that, as we have already seen in the mid-nineteenth-century rise of the temperance movement, the objections to alcohol on the part of Progressives were not merely prudish or pleasure-hating, as many today are likely to assume, but flowed in part from a concern about the ways that the excessive consumption of alcohol undermined the health, cohesiveness, living standards, and life prospects of working-class people. But the issues of temperance or prohibition produced something of an urban/small-town split. Big-city Progressives were wary of saloons, which they suspected not only as breeding grounds for crime and prostitution but as gathering places for the bosses and cronies who ran the corrupt urban political machines. But they were not drawn to the temperance movement, which would ultimately seek to ban the manufacture and distribution of all alcoholic beverages. More rural and small-town reformers, such as the members of the Anti-Saloon League, felt differently. For them, Demon Rum was an all-pervading enemy at the root of nearly all social and economic problems and needed to be attacked without ceasing.
The case of temperance provides an important window onto some of the underlying features of Progressive thinking. As we’ve observed, Progressivism was a middle-class movement, reflecting the legacy of Protestant moral and ethical teaching – although conspicuously lacking in the hard-edged doctrine of original sin. That was a key omission. The Progressive view of human nature saw humans as fundamentally good, and evil as a function of bad social systems and corrupted institutions, not something irremediably wrong or sinful deep in the souls of individual persons. There was no inherent limit to the improvability of the world. No problem was beyond solution.
The problems of the day would never, they thought, be corrected by a Madisonian system of raw competition, in which (as Madison said) ambition would be made to counteract ambition and interests to counter interests. Instead, they would be corrected through the exercise of scientific intelligence applied by disinterested experts. Hence the Progressive emphasis on the transformation and renewal of social and political institutions as the key to the renewal of the world. Hence the responsibility of government, acting as the “social intelligence” of an informed public, to order the community in a way that would order the souls of its members. Hence the central importance of schools and education, as the vehicles by which the findings of scientific research could be incorporated into the lives of families and individuals, for the betterment of all.
External change, then, would come before internal change. The deep social problems of the day, the unhappiness and insecurity of so many people whose lives had been upended by the new order of things – those problems could not be solved by religion, or the search for some other source of psychological “sense of wholeness.” They could only be solved by the reordering of the social world along fresh lines, in a way that embraced the realities of modernity rather than seeking to negate or repeal them. The most eminent philosopher of the Progressive Era, John Dewey, expressed that idea in concise if somewhat dense form in his 1922 book Individualism, Old and New, as in the following paragraph:
For the idea that the outward scene is chaotic because of the machine, which is a principle of chaos, and that it will remain so until individuals reinstitute wholeness within themselves, simply reverses the true state of things. The outward scene, if not fully organized, is relatively so in the corporateness which the machine and its technology have produced; the inner man is the jungle which can be subdued to order only as the forces of organization at work in externals are reflected in corresponding patterns of thought, imagination and emotion. The sick cannot heal themselves by means of their disease, and disintegrated individuals can achieve unity only as the dominant energies of community life are incorporated to form their minds.
Or, as Dewey goes on to say, “the disintegration of individuality” has come about because of a “failure to reconstruct the self so as to meet the realities of present social life.” The rugged individualism that so many Americans celebrated? That was a thing of the past.
Not all Progressives would have agreed with, or even understood, every element of Dewey’s formulation. But what one would find to be consistent is the sense that Progressivism was an outlook that cared deeply about the common people and knew, far better than they did, what was best for them. Who after all would determine when “the dominant energies of community life” had been properly “incorporated to form their minds”? Who would have the authority to say that the “reconstruction of the self” had succeeded in meeting “the realities of present social life”? Some superior person would have to be available to certify such things.
Thus there was always in Progressivism a certain implicit paternalism, a condescension that was all the more unattractive for being unacknowledged. But that was not the worst of its blind spots. Progressives also had very little comprehension of the situation of racial and religious minorities and in many cases failed to see that, for example, the propensity of Italian immigrants to have large families was a legitimate cultural difference and not a pathology. An interest in uplifting society could easily turn into a desire to remold or purify it; hence many Progressives came to support immigration restriction and racial segregation as a means to that end. A surprising number of Progressives even saw considerable merit in the theory and practice of eugenics, as a form of scientific human engineering that would over time eliminate “undesirable” or “unfit” elements from society. This could even turn into support for such noxious practices as selective infanticide, the sterilization of the “defective,” population control, and the like, all in the name of social improvement.
To be sure, not all Progressives saw things this way. But no account of the Progressive years would be complete and accurate without some mention of them. Eugenics was not a fringe phenomenon in its time, and it was not confined to the most reactionary elements; it was endorsed by leading scientists and scientific organizations as well as by figures such as the feminist Margaret Sanger, the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan and was actively supported by such respected organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute.
In the end, the scientific roots of Progressivism were likely to be incompatible with its religious ones. How could one reconcile the “purifying” impulse of eugenics, however much it might be sanctioned by the proclamations of “science,” with the Christian requirement that respect be shown for all human life, as made in the image of God? How could the “gospel of efficiency” that Progressive business reformers like Frederick Winslow Taylor brought to the workplace, prescribing the exact motions and techniques to be used, automaton-like, on the assembly line to maximize productivity, be reconciled to a religious tradition that insisted upon the dignity of work and of the worker? It was Progressivism’s fate to try to hold on to both sets of values at the same time – an impossible task.
The Progressives were not class-conscious radical socialists. They did not seek to overthrow modern industrial capitalism or to seize all private property. Indeed, they feared and fought against such radicalism. As middle-class reformers who drew on their Protestant religious traditions for moral instruction, they simply did not think that way. Nor did they seek to repeal the Industrial Revolution. Instead, they wanted to make modern capitalism more humane, soften its hard edges, heal its negative effects, improve its workplaces, and distribute its benefits more widely and fairly. Therefore the central task facing them, the one whose importance overshadowed all others, was the task of proper regulation. If the vast productivity of modern industry was not to be rejected and dismantled but was instead to be controlled and directed, made to serve the public interest and not private interests alone, then the chief question was how one was to do it.
To that question, there were basically two Progressive answers. Each would involve the vigorous use of government, but each would involve using government in nearly opposite ways. The first, which we shall call the antitrust method, would wherever possible use the power of government to break up the largest concentrations of corporate wealth and power, prevent the formation of monopolies, and endeavor to restore wherever it could a healthy competition between and among smaller entities within their respective spheres of the economy. The second approach, which we shall call the consolidation method, would accept bigness and concentration as an inevitable and even optimal feature of modern economic development, productive of stupendous efficiencies and economies of scale that could be matched in no other way. Instead of breaking up large combinations, it would actively and vigorously regulate them, with the public interest always in view.
Both approaches had already been introduced into political practice during the late nineteenth century. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 had been an effort to take the first approach and ended up being used to break up the Northern Securities Company, the Standard Oil Company, and the American Tobacco Company, among others. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, on the other hand, was set up to regulate the railroad industry as a whole and involved establishing the first independent regulatory agency of the U.S. government. The question of which, if either, would come to dominate reform in the years ahead would be one of the most interesting underlying debates within the Progressive ranks. Either way, it was clear that Progressivism would grow into a national movement, addressing itself to national issues and proposing national remedies.
It soon became clear, too, that one of the burning questions raised by the Progressive movement would have to do with the status of the Constitution itself. Was it still the indispensable foundation of American law and life? Or had the new America passed it by and rendered it outmoded, a creaking eighteenth-century document no longer able to keep up with the needs of a twentieth-century world?
The presidential phase of Progressivism began in 1901 with the ascent to the office of Vice President Theodore Roosevelt upon the assassination of President William McKinley. Roosevelt had spent six restless months in the office of the vice presidency, an office without any power, affording him no outlet for his considerable energies. Members of his own party wondered if he was suitable for the office, and they were even more concerned when McKinley’s death presented him with the presidency. McKinley’s political mentor and friend Mark Hanna put it this way: “I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia. I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die. Now look, that damned cowboy is president of the United States!”
A cowboy was only one of the things that Theodore Roosevelt, or TR as he was widely known, had been during a career in which he had already packed several lifetimes into a mere forty-two years on the planet. We’ve encountered TR already in our story, as an unabashed imperialist favoring a war with Spain. But perhaps it is time for us to pause and give a more thorough introduction to one of the most fascinating characters in all of American history.
He was born in New York City in 1858, to a wealthy patrician family of Dutch extraction, and was schooled at Harvard and Columbia universities. But the most important thing about his younger life was his relentless struggle to overcome a weak and illness-prone constitution, a struggle that shaped his character decisively. He suffered from asthma and poor eyesight and had trouble with chronic headaches, fevers, stomach pains, and such, all of which made it difficult for him to exercise. But he attacked those disabilities with the intensity and determination that would become his trademark, and after an experience of being mistreated by two bullies on a camping trip, he was determined never again to be brought up short in his own self-defense. His father built a gym in their home, and the young TR worked relentlessly to improve himself, with a program that included weightlifting, gymnastics, wrestling, boxing, horseback riding, hiking, climbing, swimming, and rowing. His indomitable resolve won out, and he was able to build up a high degree of strength and physical stamina, which he was not reluctant to display to others, with an irrepressible boyish enthusiasm that charmed many and annoyed many others.
Homeschooled in his early years, “Teedy” (as he was then known) was clearly a prodigy, with strong historical and scientific interests. While in college at Harvard, he published his studies in ornithology and began writing a book on the naval war of 1812, based on careful research in the relevant U.S. Navy archives. That book was published in 1882 and remains to this day a standard study of the war. Athlete, scientist, historian: it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do.
But what he wanted was a career in politics. He was sufficiently wealthy that he did not need to work but chose instead to run for the New York State Assembly, a position he won, and went on to serve a total of three years. After his wife’s unexpected and tragic death, he went west to North Dakota, to reconsider his life’s direction, and learned to ride western style, rope, and mingle with the cowboys. When he returned in 1886, he was ready for a steady rise through the ranks of New York and national politics, from New York City police commissioner to assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy to governor of New York to vice president to president. Along the way, he developed elements of a distinctive governing philosophy.
First of all, he was an activist. Just as he could not be passive in his personal life so he could not see any reason to refrain from using the powers of government to make life better; so laissez-faire capitalism did not appeal to him. Nor, though, did socialism, which he distrusted as excessively radical. A balance between the two extremes was the position most congenial to him. That balance included, though, an expansive and vigorous view of the presidency, in which the president would set the legislative agenda for Congress. The activist power of the presidency had been relatively dormant ever since the death of Lincoln and the rise of congressional Reconstruction. Roosevelt would seek to restore it.
Second, and connected to the first, he was not inclined to be excessively deferential to the Constitution. As he said in his First Annual Message speech to Congress on December 3, 1901, “when the Constitution was adopted, at the end of the eighteenth century, no human wisdom could foretell the sweeping changes, alike in industrial and political conditions, which were to take place by the beginning of the twentieth century.” The Constitution’s plan was adequate for those times, but “the conditions are now wholly different and wholly different action is called for.” Hence Roosevelt was pleased to make extensive use of independent executive power; he argued that he was permitted to do anything that was not expressly forbidden by the Constitution. This was a change from the Founders. He was now interpreting the Constitution as a charter, not of enumerated powers, but of enumerated prohibitions. This came to be known as his “stewardship” theory of the presidency: as the “steward” of the people, the president was permitted to do anything necessary for the well-being of the people.
By 1902, TR had already gotten his sea legs in the presidency and was endorsing the concept of a “square deal” for all. Roosevelt meant this to signify the promise that he, unlike presidents before him, would not routinely favor capital over labor but would seek to treat the two equally. An anthracite coal workers’ strike in May 1902 gave him a chance to test out his ideas and leadership style. When the mine owners refused to negotiate, and it appeared that the country might head into a long, cold winter with a paralyzed coal industry, Roosevelt threatened to send in the army to operate the mines. Asked whether such an act would be constitutional, Roosevelt replied, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” The stewardship theory in action! But it worked, and the strike was soon settled.
Roosevelt was not eager to use the antitrust powers under the Sherman Act and did not seek to legislate further such powers. Although he has always had a reputation in American folklore as a “trust buster,” that characterization is not entirely accurate. Roosevelt in fact tended to favor the consolidationist approach to regulation, a preference that would grow stronger over the years of his presidency. He did use his antitrust powers, as in the Northern Securities case, against what he regarded as “bad” trusts, those that, in his view, had abused their monopoly powers. “Good” trusts were left unmolested. How to decide between the good and the bad? It would be the responsibility of the executive branch of the national government, operating through the Bureau of Corporations in the new Department of Commerce and Labor, to decide which was which. Henceforth the government, TR said, must be “the senior partner in every business” – a stunning change to the most fundamental American conceptions about the relationship between business and government.
After winning election in his own right by a large margin in the 1904 presidential contest, Roosevelt stepped up his campaign for railroad regulation. After a bruising legislative battle, he managed in 1906 to get Congress to pass the Hepburn Act, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission the power, for the first time, actually to set “just and reasonable” railroad rates as well as giving it power over bridges, ferries, and terminals.
Two other areas in which Roosevelt’s second term had notable accomplishments were consumer protection and conservation, two issues that had never much concerned previous presidents. Activity in the first area was occasioned directly by the fierce public outcry stirred up by the writer Upton Sinclair’s disturbing exposé of the meat-packing industry, a novel called The Jungle (1906). That same year saw two pieces of legislation passed in rapid response: the Pure Food and Drug Act banned the manufacture and sale of impure or fraudulent food and drugs, while the Meat Inspection Act provided that federal inspectors would visit meat-packing plants to ensure that meat shipped in interstate commerce met minimum standards of sanitation and came from healthy animals.
Conservation of natural resources was the second area of significant activity, and conservation soon became one of Roosevelt’s signature concerns, forever thereafter associated with his name. Roosevelt was an outdoorsman, and his experiences in the Dakotas gave him a keen appreciation of the open spaces of the American West – and a concern that their wild and natural qualities be preserved as much as possible. He saw this preservation as a moral imperative: “We have fallen heirs to the most glorious heritage a people ever received,” he said, “and each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune.” The nation’s natural beauty could be thought of as a great common trust, one in dire need of benevolent protection and regulation to keep it whole and sound for generations to come. The scientific management of natural resources, such as forests and waterways, would be yet another opportunity for Progressive principles to bring order to what they feared was in danger of becoming chaotic and wasteful.
Roosevelt responded to this moral imperative with a wide array of actions. He established the U.S. Forest Service, signed into law the creation of five national parks, and signed the 1906 Antiquities Act, under which he proclaimed eighteen new U.S. national monuments. He also established the first 51 bird reserves, 4 game preserves, and 150 national forests, including Shoshone National Forest, the nation’s first. The total area of the United States that he placed under federal control was approximately 230 million acres.
Roosevelt was said to be prouder of these measures than of anything else he ever did, and they certainly have brought him great honor in subsequent generations. Roosevelt and his friend Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the Forest Service, insisted on the careful stewardship of the land, with the needs of future generations always in mind. They are better understood as conservationists, then, rather than preservationists. As good Progressives, they sought to conserve nature for the sake of ongoing human benefit, striking a balance between exploiting nature heedlessly, on one hand, and treating it as sacred, on the other.
Not all agreed, as can be illustrated by their dispute with the naturalist John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, over the creation of a water reservoir at Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. Roosevelt and Pinchot favored the human needs of the city of San Francisco over the ideal of pristine nature that Muir favored. “The delight of the few men and women who would yearly go into the Hetch Hetchy Valley,” said Pinchot, “should not outweigh the conservation policy, [which is] to take every part of the land and its resources and put it to that use in which it will serve the most people.” Muir fired back, lambasting the two men as “temple destroyers” with “a perfect contempt for Nature,” who, “instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” The dispute would echo through the century to come, even as the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir would became the principal source of water for the city of San Francisco.
By the end of 1907, buoyed by his successes and anxiously eyeing the imminent end of his term as president, Roosevelt turned up the heat even more and began calling for even more reforms, such as income and inheritance taxes, federal controls over the stock market, and stricter regulation of interstate corporations, among other things. His rhetoric also became notably more strident, as he denounced the “malefactors of great wealth” for their “predatory” behavior. Such proposals and such rhetoric still fell far short of a socialist vision, but they were strident enough to antagonize the conservative “Old Guard” of the Republican Party and ensure that the last months of TR’s administration would not be very productive, even though his popularity remained high. Once out of office, TR immediately stormed off to Africa for a nearly yearlong expedition that combined game hunting with specimen-gathering for the Smithsonian Institution and the American Museum of Natural History.
Roosevelt chose William Howard Taft as his successor, based partly on his success in the Philippines and his loyal support for the Square Deal and Roosevelt’s presidency. Taft easily won election in 1908 over William Jennings Bryan, who was taking a third unsuccessful run at the presidential office as the Democratic candidate. But Taft quickly turned out to have been an unsatisfactory choice in Roosevelt’s eyes, being much more comfortable in the traditional Republican mold than the Progressive one. Although he dutifully tried to continue most of Roosevelt’s policies, and in fact was far more of a trust buster than Roosevelt himself had been, he lacked Roosevelt’s vigor and leadership ability and had deep qualms about Roosevelt’s use of executive authority, which Taft regarded as bordering on illegality. Ultimately, he was not a Progressive at heart. And when he made the mistake of firing Gifford Pinchot over a controversy between Pinchot and Taft’s interior secretary, a move that was seen as a betrayal of TR’s conservation agenda, it was only a matter of time before Roosevelt turned against him.
It soon became clear that this was not just a personal squabble. The Republican Party was dividing between its Old Guard and its Progressives, and Taft and Roosevelt were coming to represent the two factions. Not long after his return from Africa, Roosevelt delivered an important speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, in which he put forward a comprehensive plan for sweeping social legislation, which he called the New Nationalism. Invoking the memory of the Civil War and the Grand Army of the Republic, Roosevelt called for a Grand Review–like devotion to the ideal of the nation itself as the source and object of all loyalties. And he emphasized that it was futile to prevent large industrial combinations; the better path forward lay in “completely controlling them.” More ominously for a great many old-line Republicans, Roosevelt began to talk enthusiastically about instituting new means of amending the Constitution much more easily – in effect, by majority vote, thus making an end run around the complex process laid out in the Constitution. He was eventually coaxed into standing for the Republican nomination.
Roosevelt failed to get the nomination, however, as Taft and his loyalists went all out to control the Republican Party convention in Chicago and defeat him. Disgusted Progressive supporters of Roosevelt walked out and formed the Progressive Party to support Roosevelt as an independent candidate. Roosevelt did not need much persuading; the cause was all-important, and he loved a good fight. “We stand at Armageddon,” he cried, “and battle for the Lord!” The Progressive Party convention, also held in Chicago, was suffused with such openly religious rhetoric, and with the singing of songs like “Onward Christian Soldiers,” as Roosevelt presented a “confession of faith” that included all of the classic Progressive regulatory reforms as counters to the “invisible government” of the special interests.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, meeting in Baltimore, took forty-six ballots to nominate Woodrow Wilson, a relatively unknown former professor of political science and president of Princeton University, the sum total of whose political experience was two years served as governor of New Jersey. On the central issue of regulation, Wilson was a convert to Progressivism, but of the antitrust variety. He came to call his platform the New Freedom, in deliberate contrast to Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. The government should break up the great trusts, he argued, and establish the rule by which business should conduct itself, eliminate privileges of special interests, and then stand aside to allow renewed competition and free enterprise to assert themselves.
A tall, slender man with the angular face and overbearing manner of a tightly wound schoolmaster, Wilson may have lacked for political experience, but he did not lack for self-confidence. He had thought and written extensively about American government and was brimming over with ideas for reform. To begin with, he was, like Roosevelt, convinced that the U.S. Constitution was defective and inadequate. He favored something closer to the British parliamentary system, which would draw the executive and legislative branches together more closely and make the president as active in the legislative process as in the execution of the laws. In other words, like Roosevelt, he favored a very strong presidency. He found the constitutional system of checks and balances intolerably inefficient and complained that it diffused responsibility for errors and misdeeds: as he expressed it in his book Congressional Government, “how is the schoolmaster, the nation, to know which boy needs the whipping?”
Above all else, he thought that American government should be built on a more fluid and organically evolving basis rather than being tied to unchanging formal directives and protocols such as those contained in the Constitution. Governments arise to address the needs of their particular epoch and must be free constantly to adapt, just as Darwin had showed that the nature of organic life must constantly evolve in response to changes in climate and habitat. “Government does now,” he remarked in his book The State, “whatever experience permits or the times demand.” Even the natural-rights doctrines of human equality and fundamental rights stated in the Declaration of Independence were subject to this counterdoctrine of fluidity: “We are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence,” he insisted in a 1907 speech. “We are as free as they were to make and unmake governments.”
Wilson also thought and wrote extensively about the field of “public administration,” a field of study that he helped to create. Wilson understood administration to denote the actual executive function of government, which he, being a typical Progressive, wanted to make ever more efficient. One way of doing so was to acknowledge that “administration lies outside the proper sphere of politics,” that it was indeed something quite distinct from politics, and that one should seek to separate the two as much as possible. Administration was the sphere of scientific expertise, operating independently of the hurly-burly of everyday politics and above the winds of changing opinion. This separation is highly reminiscent of the separation envisioned by the city-manager system of municipal governance or by a highly professionalized and independent civil service. As such, it is a classic example of Progressive thinking.
Thus the stage was set for one of the more dramatic elections in American history, the only time so far in which a third-party candidate, Roosevelt, had a genuine chance to win. In the end, the split in the Republican Party was fatal to the chances of both Roosevelt and Taft, and Wilson was able to win easily, running up a commanding margin in the Electoral College (435 to 88 for Roosevelt and a mere 8 for Taft). It is worth noting one of the most extraordinary features of the election: that two of the three major candidates in the election were strongly Progressive and reformist in their sentiments; and if one adds the surprisingly strong nine hundred thousand votes for Eugene Debs, the Socialist candidate, we can say that of the fifteen million votes cast, eleven and a half million of them were for strongly reformist candidates. The public sentiment in favor of Progressive ideas and candidates was at high tide.
Once elected, Wilson went on, despite his inexperience, to enjoy one of the most impressive beginnings of any president in American history. Ever the activist, he moved quickly, putting his theories about a parliamentary-style presidency to the test. First he sought to lower tariffs, thereby fulfilling a campaign promise and, to compensate for revenues that would be lost by this change, introduced a bill creating a federal income tax, drawing upon the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Then he proposed the Federal Reserve Act, which provided the country with a central banking system for the first time since Jackson’s destruction of the Bank of the United States. The creation of a system of regional reserve banks gave activist government a key lever that could be used to regulate elements of the national economy. Finally, he enhanced the government’s capacity for trust busting, using the newly strengthened Federal Trade Commission as its institutional home for such activity.
There were many other reforms in his first term: advances in labor organizing, creation of a system of federal farmland banks, a Federal Highways Act to stimulate road construction, child labor laws, an eight-hour workday for rail workers: in short, a dazzling array of legislative and executive accomplishment. In addition, the ratification in 1913 of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Amendments, the latter being a measure to establish that senators be chosen by the direct election of the people and not by the respective state legislatures, seemed to betoken the dawning of a new and more streamlined, more efficient, more nationalized era. As he went, Wilson seemed more and more to shed the ideas of the New Freedom on which he had campaigned and to act in a way indistinguishable from the New Nationalism. In any event, it was a moment when Progressivism seemed triumphant.
Two serious concerns about the record of Progressivism remained and would reflect problems bedeviling the country in later years. First, as has already been mentioned, Progressivism generally tended to be indifferent to the plight of minorities, and in the case of black Americans living under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, that indifference was closer to hostility. Here the contrast with Roosevelt is worth noting. Roosevelt was no crusader for racial justice, but his record was generally respectable, and he had expended considerable political capital in, for example, inviting Booker T. Washington, a leading black intellectual and educator, to the White House. Wilson, on the other hand, was a Virginian who supported racial segregation and sympathized with the postbellum restoration of white rule in the South. He should, of course, be judged upon the totality of his record. But those facts about his views have to be considered as a part of that totality.
The second troubling problem is not unrelated to the first, and that was the Progressives’ growing tendency to disparage the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and their readiness to embrace radical changes in the very structure of the latter. It is always a temptation for well-meaning reformers to want to set aside the cumbersome restrictions that the rule of law places upon them. But Abraham Lincoln had built his entire presidency upon resisting any such temptation. He believed the preservation of those two foundational documents was essential to the enduring success of any serious attempts to reform American society. One can well understand the impatience that tugged at both Roosevelt and Wilson as they sought to address themselves vigorously to the titanic problems of their era. But it could prove a perilous matter to launch into a great project of national self-improvement while setting aside the two chief sources of American political continuity and moral guidance. G. K. Chesterton enunciated an important principle of reform: before you tear down a fence, be sure you first fully understand the use that the fence was erected to serve.
In any event, Progressivism’s moment of unquestioned triumph was destined not to last much longer. Wilson had enjoyed phenomenal success in promoting his Progressive domestic agenda. That success was about to be tested in the larger and more unforgiving arena of world politics.