The Beginning of American Progressivism: Excerpt from Let's Do What Works and Call it Capitalism
Excerpt from my book, Let's Do What Works and Call it Capitalism.
Chapter 4. American Progressivism Begins: Food & Drugs, Trust-Busting, Women’s Right to Vote
“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.”
- Abraham Lincoln, 1854[1]
“If it can be shown that Wisconsin is a happier and better state to live in, that its institutions are more democratic, that the opportunities of all its people are more equal, that social justice more nearly prevails, that human life is safer and sweeter – then I shall rest content in the feeling that the Progressive movement has been successful. And I believe all these things can really be shown, and that there is no reason now why the movement should not expand until it covers the entire nation.”
- Robert LaFollette, LaFollette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences, (1911)[2]
In her 2014 book,
The Bully Pulpit,[3] Doris Kearns Goodwin relates how excited progressives were when Theodore Roosevelt suddenly became President in 1901, following the assassination of William McKinley, because they believed him to be the first progressive to be President since Lincoln. While reviled by Republican Party leaders such as party boss Sen. Mark Hanna (R-Ohio), who called him “that damned cowboy,” Roosevelt considered himself a conservative and a capitalist. He believed that because of its excesses capitalism was in danger. He feared that radical socialists such as union leader Eugene Debs would lead a violent revolution, much like the revolution he predicted would happen in Russia. He decided that capitalism had to be saved from itself. It was in his actions and words as President that Roosevelt initiated the first of the three progressive periods in the 20th Century.
At the end of the 19th Century, laissez-faire capitalism was at its zenith, dominating American culture, but not without criticism and opposition. Reaction against the “Gilded Age,” the robber barons, and oppressive industrialism manifested itself in a variety of ways. The horrible working conditions in the factories and living conditions in cities, including little or no sanitation, began to draw the attention of journalists. While laissez-faire philosophy dominated business, academia and government, journalists, activists, union leaders and reformers actively opposed it in newspaper and magazine articles, books and speeches. Jane Addams established Hull House in Chicago to provide a refuge for the impoverished and for new immigrants. Mandatory free secondary school education was adopted in many states before 1900, and in all within a few years afterward.
The political reform movement began with the populist People's Party in the 1880s blossomed as the Progressive movement shortly after the turn of the 20th Century with the emergence of dynamic leaders such as Roosevelt and Robert LaFollette, and the rapidly growing influence of the Socialist leader, Debs.
Reformers managed to gain control of some states and initiate regulations at the state level designed to rein in out of control corporations. The most important and influential state action occurred in Wisconsin in 1900 when LaFollette was elected Governor, defeating an entrenched, corrupt, political machine.
It seems inconceivable today that the idea of government serving all the people, not just special interests, with honesty and integrity, was quite a sensational concept in 1900, usually attributed to radicals such as Debs. But such an idea was brought to fruition mostly by Republican reformers, especially LaFollette. who formulated the basic concepts of progressivism that survive to this day, and Roosevelt, whose actions on the national stage displayed their vitality.
As it originally developed, progressivism was a philosophy of government, not an ideology, and not just a specific package of programs. LaFollette, who was a governor and U.S. senator from Wisconsin in the first two decades of the 20th Century, was the principal leader in the development of the progressive philosophy of government. It was first applied in Wisconsin by LaFollette and others, and became known as the “Wisconsin Idea.”
Progressivism was a philosophy of “good” government that imposed on public officials the duty to be honest and to do what was in the best interest of the greatest number of people, to be responsive and responsible to the people, and not be the tool of special interests.[4] Progressives advocated the recruitment of “experts” from academia to solve problems. Many of the faculty of the University of Wisconsin became involved in state government, and later, with the federal government. The author of the Social Security Act was Wisconsin native Edwin Witte, who had been a student of the University of Wisconsin's famous progressive economist, John R. Commons.
While Theodore Roosevelt may have considered himself a conservative, his reformist career as Governor of New York, and the chief of New York City's police department followed him to Washington. He didn't disappoint progressives with his first “Message” to Congress in 1901 outlining legislation he wished to have adopted, including, for the first time in American history, provisions for the regulation of corporations. In those days the President's “Message” essentially was similar to today's “State of the Union” message, except the Pesident did not deliver the message in person. It was read out loud by the clerk.
“There is a widespread conviction ...that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right. It is no limitation upon property rights, or freedom of contract, to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form ...they shall do so, upon absolutely truthful representations … Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions....In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations....The nation should, without interfering with the power of the States in the matter itself, also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business.[5]”
It would take only slight revisions to make his statements relevant to the issues of regulating the behavior of today's Wall Street banks and multinational corporations. His Bureau of Corporations in the Commerce Department was the first government agency to have regulatory power over corporations.
Roosevelt was the first modern President, greatly expanding the powers and the role of the Presidency, daring to use Presidential powers not seen since Lincoln and Jackson, and some never seen before. He was the first President to help settle a labor dispute, intervening in the 1902 Pennsylvania coal mine strike, and forcing mine owners to talk directly to the union leadership for the first time. When he intervened, even his closest advisers did not believe he had the power to do so. But he had something far more controversial in mind if his intervention did not succeed. He planned to have the U.S. Army seize and operate the mines, recounting the actions Lincoln and Jackson had taken before him.
He held to what he called the “Jackson-Lincoln theory of the Presidency; That is, that occasionally great national crises arise which call for immediate and vigorous executive action, and that in such cases it is the duty of the President to act upon the theory that he is the steward of the people, and that the proper attitude for him to take is that he is bound to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the people demand, unless the Constitution, or the laws explicitly forbid him to do it.”[6]
He did not have to seize the mines, and probably that was fortunate. When President Harry Truman seized the steel plants during a strike 50 years later even a Supreme Court much more liberal than the one in place in Roosevelt's time found the seizure to be unconstitutional.
Roosevelt was the first President to publicly support unions. He urged that workers be given a fair share of the profits resulting from their work. He called it a “Square Deal.” He initiated the first major government action against the trusts, bringing a suit that eventually broke up the Northern Railroad trust. Even though he came from the wealthy, educated, class, and was personally friendly with many of the nation's wealthiest men, he called them the “malefactors of great wealth.”
He also was the first President to become involved in foreign affairs that did not directly involve the United States. His mediation that ended the Russo-Japanese War earned him the Nobel Peace Prize.
That he saw himself also as the capitalist-in-chief, in charge of the nation's economic well being, as well as commander-in-chief, was best illustrated by his clever and devious manipulation of the political situation in Colombia, causing a revolt that led to independence for Panama, construction of the Panama Canal, and its control by the United States. The Canal was an enormous economic boon to the U.S., as well as an enhancement of national security.
Roosevelt was a master of the use of public opinion to pressure Congress. In 1906, a bill to provide the federal government the power, for the first time, to regulate food and drugs was about to be killed in committee in the House of Representatives just when ardent socialist Upton Sinclair's novel, The Jungle,[7] was published. The novel portrayed horrible conditions in the Chicago meat packing plants, and vividly exposed laissez-faire capitalism – the incredible evil extent to which businesses would go when there were no limits on their exploitation of their workers, or how they operated their facilities. The dangerous and filthy conditions described in the novel, including the grinding up of workers, and the making of sausage out of rotten meat treated with poisonous chemicals, rats and excrement, shocked the nation.
Roosevelt met with Sinclair, and said he remembered the bad canned meat sent to his troops in Cuba during the Spanish-American War by the Chicago meat packing company Sinclair had written about. He sent a team of investigators to Chicago and they confirmed nearly all of what Sinclair described.[8] Roosevelt used the public outrage from the sensational newspaper stories to force a successful vote in the House that resulted in the enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act.
While Sinclair's purpose in writing the novel was to promote socialism, the initial impact of The Jungle was different. Sinclair's vivid descriptions of the horribly filthy and unhealthy conditions and processes in the meatpacking plants, which he intended only as “color,” drew the greatest outrage from the public. The lasting impact of the novel, what made it a “classic,” was his exposure of the fallacies and cruelties of laissez-faire philosophy, and the results of its actual application in business. His portrayal of the vicious exploitation of desperate workers remains one of the most effective arguments for government regulation of business ever written. Among all American novels, probably only Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath rival The Jungle for the dramatic effect it had on the nation.
Sinclair was not the only one to attack the trust-dominated business world of that time. Other journalists, nicknamed “muckrakers” by Roosevelt, did graphic exposes of other industries.[9] Many of the prominent “muckraker” journalists were friends of Roosevelt, and often provided him with information and advice. When he became the police chief in New York City, the first thing he did was to ask advice on how to carry out his duties from the city's ace police reporter, Lincoln Steffens. As President, he continued to rely on journalists to provide him with information. In return, he created the White House Press Room.
Government regulation of industry became not only acceptable to the public, but demanded by them. Support grew substantially for the Debs' Socialist Party, which advocated government takeover and management of industry to improve employee incomes and working conditions. Roosevelt was determined to counter the appeal of the socialists with reforms designed to save capitalism from a radical revolution. His actions as President generally were practical and progressive, and gave the movement its greatest prestige.
The Progressive Movement drew its intellectual inspiration from many sources, but the three major influences were the perfection of man concepts of Puritanism, the classical liberalism from the18th Century Enlightenment and the progress of history concept of the German philosopher G.F.W. Hegel.
The Puritan influence was strongest in the earliest days of the progressive movement when it supported Prohibition, and when there was a religious-like fervor among progressives. However, the adoption of Prohibition in 1920 and its subsequent enormous unpopularity, was one of the factors that turned the people away from progressives.
A strong belief in the “social contract” is a major underpinning of progressivism, the idea that in a democratic civilization citizens have duties to one another, and willingly give up some of their freedom to ensure everyone's freedom and welfare. This concept comes from the Enlightenment, especially from philosophers John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The founders of the United States were greatly influenced by those thinkers and were living in the Enlightenment. The Constitution is a document of the Enlightenment, and is a social contract among the people. It clearly states this in the Preamble, which is a perfect description of the goals of progressivism.
The name of the progressive movement is directly derived from the concept of progress of history, which came to the U.S. from Germany in the late 19th Century. By 1900 the faculties of many of the most prominent colleges and universities contained many with degrees earned in Europe where the German influence was greatest, but also from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins brought German-style university scholarship to the U.S. One of the most prominent members of the Hopkins faculty was Herbert Baxter Adams, who earned his Ph.D. in history in Germany. He was the first professor in the U.S. to teach with the seminar method and his classes included some men who went on to be among the most influential in the progressive movement. They included Woodrow Wilson (who also taught at Hopkins), Frederick Jackson Turner, John Dewey and Thorstein Veblen.
Hegel wrote that history went through stages of progress and that "The development of the perfected nation-state is the end or goal of history because it provides an optimal level of realization of self-consciousness, a more comprehensive level of realization of freedom than mere natural individuals, or other forms of human organization, can produce."[10]
Hegel had much to say about executives and legislatures and balances of power, which he didn't like. He may have greatly influenced Woodrow Wilson, who did not like the checks and balances in the Constitution, and wrote extensively about the use of the powers of the Presidency long before he became President, with a view remarkably similar to Hegel's. His views may explain why he became so imperious as President, especially in his second term.
Today the terms “liberal” and “progressive” frequently are used interchangeably, but in its basic concepts of governance, progressivism is neither “liberal” nor “conservative.” Progressives will borrow good ideas from any source, and are not afraid to experiment with an untested idea if it seems to make sense as a solution to a particular problem. However, it must be noted that most progressive programs have liberal origins. But then, so does the government of the United States. Progressivism captures the fundamental optimistic American spirit of progress, of making things better.
While many progressives were religious and had high standards of morality – including, unfortunately, support for Prohibition – Progressivism is not Puritanical. It does not impose a rigid set of values, other than the expectation that public officials should act honestly, responsibly, and intelligently. Progressives seek to expand, rather than limit, individual freedom and opportunities, and they will use government as a means to achieve these ends.
Socialists have many progressive ideas, but progressives are not socialists. Progressives do not seek to change the existing economic, or political system. They support American democratic capitalism, and believe their methods and practices only strengthen it. Theodore Roosevelt frequently said that he wanted to protect the existing capitalist system, but that reform and regulation were necessary to do so.
Libertarians also may support some progressive ideas, but progressives are not libertarians. Unlike libertarians, progressives strongly believe in the social contract, and the compact among the people of the United States that was forged when the Constitution was adopted. Libertarians tend to be suspicious of, if not downright hostile to, government.
The original Progressives believed government was a force for good. Later, after Wilson's Presidency, they realized that government also could be a force for curtailment of personal freedom, and they became much more protective of civil rights, and more willing to put constraints on government actions when it came to personal freedom.
Because progressivism is a philosophy of government, not an ideology, there have been many progressive members of both major political parties. Republicans provided most of the leadership of the first progressive movement, although there were a number of famous early progressive Democrats as well. In addition to William Jennings Bryan, whose popularity influenced Roosevelt to be more progressive, there was Cleveland Mayor Tom Johnson, an early advocate of the municipal ownership of public utilities who was described by Lincoln Steffens as "the best mayor of the best governed city in America,"[11] and Joseph Folk, whose prosecution of corrupt politicians and businessmen in St. Louis was described in the opening chapter of Steffens' famous book, The Shame of the Cities,[12] which helped Folk to be elected Governor. He later served as a lawyer in Woodrow Wilson's State Department.
Many of the programs of the early progressive movement were adopted from the People's Party that a coalition of Midwestern and Southern populists formed in the 1880s in opposition to both major political parties they said did not represent the people. In particular, they attacked the gold standard and the tight supply of money, which had not grown since the Civil War despite enormous economic and population growth. To expand the money supply, particularly to help farmers, they advocated the minting of coins from silver and significant increases in the printing of paper money (“Greenbacks”).
The populists viewed big business and Wall Street bankers as enemies of the people. They advocated the creation of a federal reserve system to take the control of the nation's money away from the bankers, and they proposed government regulation of the railroads and big business. They opposed the high tariffs that had existed since the Civil War. They also advocated the secret ballot, women having the right to vote, the initiative, referendum, recall, a progressive income tax and a much more aggressive role for the federal government in the economy.
The People's Party's Presidential candidate in 1892, James Weaver, received a little over one million votes – 8.5% of the total - and carried four states, winning 22 Electoral votes. The People's Party elected five U.S. senators, ten congressmen, and three state governors. During Cleveland's second term, there was a populist-led march on Washington called “Coxie's Army,” demanding government action to end the depression. The march was broken up and soldiers drove the demonstrators out of the nation's capital.
The People's Party was absorbed into the Democratic Party in 1896, when William Jennings Bryan, an ardent opponent of the gold standard, was that party's Presidential candidate. The 36-year old Bryan won the Democratic nomination with his “Cross of Gold” speech, which still is considered to be one of the greatest political speeches ever delivered. He lost to McKinley, lost again in 1900 to McKinley and Roosevelt, and again in 1908 to William Howard Taft. Bryan may not have won any national elections, but his continuing popularity kept pressure on the Republicans and helped the progressives, like Roosevelt, gain power and influence.
While the populists quickly disappeared as a national political movement, many of their ideas were adopted by progressives in both major political parties, and implemented during the next 25 years. Some of the core anti-big business, anti-bank, concepts of populism continued to have a following and recently were revived by "Tea Party" groups.
With specific and practical goals, the Progressives gained broad support, and over a period of time, almost everything they proposed was achieved. Women won the right to vote. Unions were granted the right to organize workers. Senators became elected by voters, instead of state legislatures. The recall and referendum were adopted by many states. Government began to regulate food and drugs, banks and corporations. The money supply, nearly frozen since the Civil War, was expanded through the increased minting of silver coins and printing of paper money. An estate tax was adopted by Congress, and a Constitutional Amendment permitted the imposition of the progressive income tax. Prohibition also was imposed through a Constitutional Amendment. A minimum wage, a 40-hour week and regulation of the working hours of children also eventually were adopted.
The Progressives succeeded because their programs focused on three principal areas that had wide appeal: expanding economic opportunity, increasing personal freedom and security, and making government more responsive to the people. Unlike the socialists, the Progressives did not seek to change the basic structures of the capitalist economy. They simply sought to bring it under the control of the people, to limit its excesses through responsive and responsible government regulation, and to make its opportunities and advantages available to a much greater number of people.
With Progressives effectively in control of the national government in those years before World War I, the role of government changed. The national government expanded its influence and power, especially the Presidency.
The 1912 Presidential election was the high-water mark of the progressive reform movement. LaFollette was not a factor in this election because he was recovering from a nervous breakdown. At this time party bosses still controlled political party presidential nominations. Roosevelt had antagonized enough of the Republican hierarchy that despite his enormous popularity among the public he was unable to wrest the nomination away from incumbent President William Howard Taft, formerly his protegé and one of his closest friends, Roosevelt turned to the new Progressive Party that LaFollette had helped create. With Roosevelt as its standard-bearer it acquired the nickname of the “Bull Moose” Party.
It was a truly remarkable election because there really was no real conservative candidate. All of the candidates were progressives to varying degrees, although Roosevelt severely chastised Taft for being a conservative. In fact, the differences between the two were relatively minor. Taft was a tougher “trust-buster” than Roosevelt, and the Income Tax was adopted during his Presidency. He just had a more passive and modest personality than Roosevelt, and was not a natural politician, and those attributes made him appear to be more conservative than he really was.
The strength of the pro-progressive spirit in the nation – among the white men who would vote – was demonstrated by the vote Eugene Debs received on the Socialist ticket – more than 900,000 votes out of a total of only about 15 million cast, more than a fourth of what Taft received..[13] That turned out to be the highest percentage of the Presidential vote ever received by a Socialist candidate. However, considering that Wilson also was a progressive – although not at the time admitting to be the believer in an activist national government that Roosevelt was – the candidates who were considered reformers, or progressives, obtained 75 per cent of the votes, far more than such candidates ever received before, or since.
A major issue in the campaign was the role of the national government.
To Roosevelt's supporters, however, Wilson seemed a relic of a bygone era, whose program served the needs of small businessmen but ignored the interests of professionals, consumers, and labor. The New Freedom (Wilson's platform), wrote (Walter) Lippmann, meant “freedom for the little profiteer, but no freedom for the nation from the narrowness, the ...limited vision of small competitors.” Wilson and Brandeis spoke of the “curse of bigness”; what the nation actually needed, Lippmann countered, was frank acceptance of the inevitability and benefits of bigness, coupled with the active intervention of government to counteract the abuses while guiding society toward common goals, Lippman was articulating the core of the New Nationalism, Theodore Roosevelt's alternative vision of 1912. Wilson's statement that limits on governmental power formed the essence of freedom, Roosevelt pointedly remarked, “has not one particle of foundation in the facts of the present day.” It was a recipe for “the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check by the extension of governmental power”; only the “regulatory, the controlling, and directing power of the government” could represent “the liberty of the oppressed.”[14]
Roosevelt and the Progressive Party proposed a series of government actions and programs “to promote social justice.”
Inspired by a group of settlement house feminists, labor reformers, and Progressive social scientists, the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with women's suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day, and a “living wage” for all workers, the right of workers to form unions, and a national system of social insurance covering unemployment, medical care and old age. Roosevelt called it the “most important document” since the end of the Civil War and the platform brought together many of the streams of thought and political experience that flowed into Progressives.”[15]
Wilson turned out to be as aggressive a President as Roosevelt, but without the engaging swagger, the common touch, and the common sense. He expanded the powers of the Presidency and the national government well beyond any that had previously been exercised. No other President had ever studied the Presidency and American government as had Wilson before he became President. He was a leading American historian and has written extensively for many years on government and the Presidency. His major contribution to the organization of the national government was his expansion of the use of independent government agencies.
Wilson distrusted the political process. He particularly did not like the checks and balances among the three branches of the federal government. He did not believe that political oversight of government functions was particularly beneficial to their performance. He believed in having government agencies run by experts independent of political control.
He created the Federal Trade Commission to oversee business, incorporating into it the Commerce Department's Bureau on Corporations that Theodore Roosevelt had gotten Congress to create. Many more independent agencies have been created since Wilson's time, some of which, like the Federal Communications Commission, have had an enormous impact on the nation's culture and economy. The Federal Trade Commission, however, has never been able to perform well the functions it originally was created to do. Regulation of business remains fragmented among many different agencies and cabinet departments.
The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913, the year J.P, Morgan died. It was apparent that something more than reliance on one major investment banker was needed to keep the banking system stable. However, the Fed, designed by a group of bankers, meeting in secret at a Morgan-owned estate, did not turn out to be the kind of reforming organization that many in the populist and progressive movements had hoped for. Its principal powers were control of the nation's money supply, and interest rates, and its purpose was to maintain financial stability by preventing inflation and maintaining full employment. It did not directly control, or regulate the banks.
Under Wilson, Civil War-era tariffs finally were reduced significantly and the lost government revenue was replaced by the progressive Income Tax, approved by Constitutional Amendment while Taft was President.
In 1914 the Clayton Anti-Trust Act was passed, strengthening the government's ability to fight anti-competitive business competitions. It also was the first legislation providing protection to unions, forbidding that the Sherman Anti-Trust Act be used against them, although the conservative Supreme Court was to weaken this act as it had the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
The Supreme Court blocked the federal government's effort to regulate child labor. The movements to give women the right to vote, and to outlaw liquor made enormous progress towards the Constitutional amendments that, in 1920, would bring both to reality.
In Roosevelt and Wilson progressives got the more activist government they sought. The two set the precedents for a more aggressive role by the federal government, and by the President, in the economy, as well as in other areas. But there were problems for which the progressives of this period have been criticized ever since.
The progressive agenda did not include support for expanded civil liberties. Progressives ignored the Jim Crow laws in the South that prevented most blacks from voting. No federal action was taken against the lynching of blacks, which was widespread in the early years of the 20th Century, although Roosevelt spoke out against it. In fact, there were no federal laws that could be enforced against it, and no significant popular support for its suppression.
Roosevelt was the first President to openly seek support from black Republicans in the South. Even though they were blocked from voting in elections, they did have votes in Republican presidential conventions. When Booker T. Washington had dinner with Roosevelt in the White House it was the first time a black man had ever been hosted to a dinner by a President. It caused a storm of protest in the South.
As to civil rights, the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation - “separate but equal”_ - was constitutional, and, unlike the 1950s and 60s, there was no organized black resistance. There was no civil rights movement for progressives to support.
Roosevelt turned down the Progressive Party Presidential nomination in 1916, and there was not another major Progressive Party presidential candidate until Robert La Follette in 1924, and none again until Henry Wallace in 1948.
The first Progressive period essentially ended when the United States entered World War I in 1917. Wilson seized control of the economy, imposed price controls, and drove up prices to provide incentives for greater production. The result was the highest inflation in the 20th Century, approaching 20 percent by the end of the war. It was the most direct action on the economy the federal government ever had taken. The war caused an economic boom in the U.S., and improved economic conditions lessened support for additional reforms.
What Wilson did during World War I became the model for Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. He took control of the economy and created the War Industrial Board with the investor, Bernard Baruch as its head. Baruch was to return to government service under Roosevelt as a key figure in the New Deal. There also was a War Finance Corporation and a National War Labor Board. Industries, labor and government were coordinated, a process called associationalism. That was the concept behind FDR's National Industrial Recovery Act, which subsequently was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
There was a reason other than the war that caused erosion of support for progressives, a problem with the stronger federal government and Presidents progressives had not anticipated. A stronger federal government could be a greater force for good, which is what the progressives wanted, but it also could be a force of repression, which is what happened under Wilson. Progressives had not anticipated that the power of a strengthened national government would be used against the people, instead of for them.
Wilson's crackdown on dissent during World War I, including the imprisonment of Eugene Debs, combined with Attorney General Palmer's 1919 midnight “Red Scare” raids, in which thousands of persons suspected of being communists were arrested, disillusioned many about progressivism.
Then there was Prohibition, which had been supported by many progressives, but was hated by a great number of Americans. Its enactment by Constitutional amendment was the last straw. Many Americans no longer saw government as a force for good. The enormous support for progressives that voters displayed in 1912 no longer existed in 1920 when Republican Warren Harding, whose bland and pleasant personality appealed to those tired of the intensity of personalities like Wilson and Roosevelt, swept into power in the biggest Presidential landslide up to that time.
Despite the problems, the positive changes that were made in American government in this first period of progressivism have lasted to the present time. Roosevelt completely altered the Presidency, and he and fellow progressives like LaFollette, and Wilson, and even Taft, completely changed the role of government by establishing the principles that there should be regulation of corporations, food and drugs, that labor unions had a right to represent workers, that workers had a right to a fair share of the profits of the businesses where they worked, that a living wage was a right, that women had the right to vote, that government should act on behalf of all the people, not just for special interests, and that government should take action to restrict consolidation within industries that would limit competition and harm the public interest.
The emergence in the 1920s of a sizable middle class was a direct result of the impact of progressive ideas that also penetrated the business world and American culture in many different ways. The rapid spread of electricity generated a market for home appliances. Labor-saving devices of all kinds were directly the result of progressive ideas about freeing women to do more than take care of a house and a family. The idea of labor-saving produced “efficiency experts” who were widely employed in business and industry. While the practical goal of “efficiency” was to increase profits, it also was instrumental during the 1920s in many businesses voluntarily shortening the work day and the work week without reducing wages.
The Progressive Party collapsed in the 1920s following the death of LaFollette, and after Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, most remaining progressives became Democrats. A “liberal” wing of the Republican Party survived for another 50 years, with leaders like Thomas Dewey and Nelson Rockefeller of New York, William Scranton of Pennsylvania, Theodore McKeldin and Charles Mathias of Maryland, and Earl Warren of California, among others.
The activist role of the national government in response to the Depression of the 1930s came directly from progressive thought. And the basic progressive concept of the government serving the interests of all the people lasted from the Depression to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
[1] Abraham Lincoln Speeches and Writings 1832-1858. New York: Library of America, 1984. p.301.
[2] as excerpted in Pestrito, Ronald, J and William J.Atto. American Progressivism, A Reader. Lanham, Md: Lexington Books, 2008, p.237
[3] Goodwin, Doris Kearns. The Bully Pulpit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
[4] For a contemporary view of early 20th Century Progressivism, see Hochstein, Irma. A Progressive Primer. Madison: Wisconsin Women's Progressive Association, 1922. “We must elect to represent us in the city councils and in the legislative bodies, men and women who understand the problems of government and who are honestly endeavoring to pass laws so that no injustice will be done to the people's interests.” p. 10. and “The progressive in politics is one who sees what the next steps are in bringing a better civilization , and who knows how to take those steps without being retarded.” p 62 http://content.wisconsinhistory.org/...
[5] Morris, Edmund. Theodore Rex. New York: Random House, 2001. pp. 73-74.
[6] Goodwin, p 314.
[7] The Jungle first appeared as a serial in the socialist newspaper, Appeal to Reason, in Chicago in 1905, and it was published in book form in 1906, and remains in print. At one time it was the most widely translated American novel, published in 60 languages.
[8] In 1965, at the age of 87, Sinclair, who by then had written 85 books, wrote a new Preface to the illustrated edition of The Jungle, published by The Limited Editions Club, and subsequently reprinted by The Heritage Press, and the Easton Press, in which he revealed, for the first time, this account of his meeting with Roosevelt, and how he told the New York Times the results of the government investigation. The newspaper stopped the presses to insert the story that caused a national sensation. Mark Sullivan did not have the benefit of Sinclair's account of his meeting with Roosevelt when he wrote America Finding Herself, the second volume of his wonderful Our Times series in 1927, but he did provide a very colorful account of the efforts to have government regulation of food and drugs, and Roosevelt's use of The Jungle to political advantage. Sinclair, Mark. Our Times The United States 1900-1925 II America Finding Herself. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927. pp. 471-483.
[9] Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit recounts the history of McClure's Magazine, and other periodicals of the time that employed some of America's greatest journalists: Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker and William Allen White, and their relationships with Roosevelt and the progressive reformers of the period.
[10] “Hegel: Social and Political Thought.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/... (accessed August 25, 2014). For the detailed argument see the Introduction to, Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. The Philosophy of History. With Prefaces by Charles Hegel and the Translator, J Sibree. London and New York: The Colonial Press, 1900. pp. 54-72.
[11] The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. http://ech.case.edu/... (accessed August 25, 2014)
[12] Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904. (many reprint copies available)
[13] The 1912 vote: Wilson, 6,296,284 (41.84% ); Roosevelt, 4,122,721 (27.40%), Taft, 3,486,242 (23.17% ); Debs, 901,551 (5.99% ). Debs received 913,693 votes in 1920, but it was only 3.4% of the total of 26.8 million votes cast in the first Presidential election when women could vote No Socialist has since come anywhere close to either of those vote totals.
[14] Foner, Eric. The Story of American Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998, p.160 (italics, mine)
[15] Ibid.