Progressivism Outline
by This is an outline about Progressivism in the United States.
I. Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt, 1901-1912 A. Progressive Roots
1. Nearly 76 million Americans greeted the new century in 1900. Of them, almost one in seven was foreign-born.
2. In the 14 years of peace that remain before the great war of 1914 engulf the globe, 13 million more immigrants would carry their bundles down the gang planks to the land of promise.
3. Hardly had the 20th century dawned on the ethnically and racially mixed American people than they were convulsed by a reform movement, the like of which the nation had not seen since the 1840s.
4. The new Crusaders, who called themselves “progressives,” wage war on many evils, notably monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social injustice.
5. The progressive Army was large, multicolored, and widely deployed, but it had a single battle cry: “strengthen the state.” The “real part of the movement,” explained one of the progressive reformers, was “to use government as an agency of human welfare.”
6. The groundswell of the new reformist wave went far back-to the greenback Labor Party of the 1870s and the populists of the 1890s, to the mounting unrest throughout the land as grasping industrialists concentrated more and more power in fewer and fewer hands.
7. And outworn philosophy of hands-off individualism seemed increasingly out of place in a modern machine age.
8. Social and economic problems were not too complex for the designedly feeble Jeffersonian organs of government.
9. Progressive theorists were insisting that society could no longer afford the luxury of limitless “let alone policy” (laissez-faire ).
10. The people, through government, must substitute mastery for drift.
11. Well before 1900, perceptive politicians and writers had begun to pinpoint targets for the progressive attack.
12. Bryan, Altgeld, and the populists loudly branded the “bloated trust” with the stigma of corruption and wrongdoing.
13. In 1894 Henry Demarest Lloyd charge headlong into the standard oil Company with his book entitled Wealth against Commonwealth.
14. Eccentric Thorstein Veblen assailed the new rich with his prickly pen in the theory of the leisure class (1899), a savage attack on “predatory wealth” and “conspicuous consumption”
15. Other pen wielding knights likewise entered the fray.
16. The keen eyed in key knows Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun, shocked middle-class Americans in 1890 with “how the other half lives.”
17. His account was a damning indictment of the dirt, disease, vice, and misery of the rat gnawed human rookeries known as the New York slums.
18. The book deeply influence the future New York City police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt.
19. Novelist Theodore Dreiser uses blunt prose to batter promoters and profiteers in “the financier”(1912) and the “Titan “(1914).
20. Socialists, now swelling in numbers, must take high rank among the caustic critics of existing injustices.
21. Many of them were European immigrants who decried “bloody capitalism,” and they began to register appreciable strength at the ballot boxes as the new century dawned.
22. They receive much of their inspiration from abroad, where countries like Germany were launching daring experiments in state socialism.
23. In faraway a failure and New Zealand, socialist reforms were also being undertaken that attracted much notice in America.
24. High-minded messengers of the social Gospel also contributed mightily to the upsurge in wave of reform, as did the ever-growing women’s movement.
25. Feminists and multiplying numbers added social justice to suffrage on the list of needed reforms.
26. With urban pioneers like Jane Addams blazing away, women entered the fight to clean up corrupt city governments, to protect women on the clanging factory floor, to keep children out of the smudgy mills in studio minds, and to ensure that only safe food products found their way to the family table.
27. Much of progressivism reflected the new public concerns of women, born of their changing role in the still stretching cities.
B. Raking Muck with the Muckrakers
1. Beginning about 1902 the exposing of evil became a flourishing industry among American publishers. A group of aggressive $.10 and $.15 popular magazines surged to the front, notably the McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and Everybody’s.
2. Waging fierce circulation wars, they dug deep for the dirt that the public love to hate.
3. Enterprising editors financed extensive research and encouraged pugnacious writing by their bright young reporters, whom Pres. Roosevelt branded as “muckrakers” in 1906.
4. Annoyed by the excess of zeal, he compared the mudslinging Magazine dirt diggers to the figure in Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress who was so intent on raking manure that he could not see the celestial crown dangling overhead.
5. Despite presidential scolding, these muckrakers boom circulation, and some of their most scandalous exposures were published as best-selling books.
6. The reformer writers ranged far, wide, and deep in their crusade to late bear the mark of iniquity on American society.
7. In 1902 brilliant New Yorker reporter, Lincoln Steffens, launched a series of articles in McClure’s entitled “the shame of the cities.”
8. He fearlessly unmasked the corrupt alliance between big business and municipal government.
9. Steffens was followed in the same magazine by I am Karpel, a pioneering woman journalist who published a devastating but factual exposé of the standard oil Company. (Her father had been ruined by the oil interests.)
10. Fearing legal reprisals, the muckraking magazines went to great pains and expense to check their material-paying as much as $3000 to verify a single Tarbel article.
11. Muckrakers fearlessly tilted their pen lances and varied targets.
12. They assailed the malpractices of life insurance companies in tariff lobbies.
13. They roasted the beef trust, the “money trust,” the railroad barons, and the corrupt amassing of American fortunes.
14. Thomas W. Lawson, an erratic speculator who had himself made $50 million on the stock market, laid bare the practices of his accomplices in “frenzied finance.”
15. This series of articles, appearing in 1905 to 1906, rocketed the circulation of Everybody’s.
16. Lawson, by fouling his own nest, made many enemies among his rich Associates, he died as a poor man.
17. David G. Phillips shocked an already startled nation by his series in Cosmopolitan entitled “The Treason of the Senate” (1906).
18. He boldly charged that 75 of the 90 senators did not represent the people at all but the railroads and trusts.
19. This withering indictment, buttressed by facts, impressed Pres. Roosevelt.
20. Phillips continued his attacks or novels and was fatally shot in 1911 by deranged young man whose family he allegedly maligned.
21. Some of the most effective fire of the muckrakers was directed at social evils.
22. The ugly list included the immoral “white slave” traffic in women, the rickety slums, and the appalling number of industrial accidents.
23. The sorry subjugation of America’s 9 million blacks-of whom 90% still lived in the South, and one third were illiterate-was spotlighted in Ray Stannard Bakers “Following the color line” (1908).
24. The abuses of child labor were brought luridly to light by John Spargo’s “the bitter cry of the children” (1906).
25. Vendors of the potent patent medicines (often heavily spiked with alcohol) likewise came in for bitter criticism.
26. These conscienceless Folgers sold incredible quantities of adulterated or habit-forming drugs, while “doping” the press with lavish advertising.
27. Muckraking attacks in Collier’s were ably reinforced by Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, who with his famous “poison squad” performed experiments on himself.
28. Full of sound and fury, the muckrakers signified much about the nature of the progressive reform movement.
29. They were long on lamentation and short on sweeping remedies.
30. To write social wrongs they counted on publicity and an aroused public conscience, not drastic political change.
31. They sought not to overthrow capitalism but declined to the cure for the ills of American democracy, they earnestly believed, was more democracy.
C. Political Progressivism
1. Progressive reformers were mainly middle-class men and women who felt themselves squeezed from above and below.
2. They sensed pressure from the new giant corporations, the restless immigrant hordes, and the aggressive labor unions.
3. The progressives simultaneously sought to goals: to use state power to curb the trusts and to stem the socialist threat by generally improving the common person’s condition of life and labor.
4. Progressives emerged in both major parties, in all regions, and at all levels of government.
5. The truth is that progressivism was less a minority movement and more a majority mood.
6. One of the first objectives of progressives was to regain the power that had slipped from the hands of the people into those of the “interests.”
7. These ardent reformers pushed for direct primary elections so as to undercut power-hungry party bosses.
8. They favored the “initiated” so that voters could directly propose legislation themselves, thus bypassing the boss bought state legislatures.
9. Progressives also agitated for the “referendum.”
10. This device would place laws on the ballot for final approval by the people, especially laws that had been railroaded through a compliant legislature by freespending agents of big business.
11. The “recall” would enable the voters to move faithless elected officials, particularly those who had been bribed by bosses or lobbyists.
12. Rooting out graft also became a primary goal of earnest progressives.
13. A number of the state legislatures passed corrupt practice acts, which limited the amount of money that candidates could spend for their election.
14. Such legislation also restricted huge gifts from corporations, for which the donors would expect special favors.
15. The secret Australian ballot was likewise being introduced more widely in the states to counteract boss rule.
16. Bribery was less feasible when drivers could not tell if they were getting their money’s worth from the bribed.
17. Direct election of US senators became a favorite goal of progressives, especially after the muckrakers had exposed the scandalous tie in between greedy corporations in Congress.
18. By 1900 the Senate had so many rich men that it was often sneered as the “millionaires club”.
19. Too many of the prosperous solons, elected as they then were trust dominated legislatures, he did the voice of their “masters” rather than that of the masses.
20. The constitutional amendment to bring about the popular election of senators had rough sledding in Congress, for the plutocratic members of the Senate were happy with existing methods.
21. But a number of states established primary elections in which the voters express their preferences for the Senate.
22. The local legislatures, when choosing senators, found it politically wise to heed the voice of the people.
23. Partly as a result of such pressures, the 17th amendment to the Constitution, approved in 1913, established the direct election of US senators.
24. But the expected improvement in caliber was slow in coming.
25. Women’s suffrage, the goal of feminists for many decades, likewise received powerful new support from the progressive’s early in the 1900s.
26. The political reformers believed that women’s votes would alleviate the political tone; foes of the saloon felt that they could count on the support of enfranchised females.
27. The suffragists, crying “votes for women” and “equal suffrage for men and women,” protested bitterly against “taxation without representation.”
28. Many of the states, especially the more liberal ones in the West, gradually extended the vote to women by 1910 nationwide female suffrage was still a decade away; and the suffragists could still be sneeringly defined as “one who went ceased to be a lady and has not yet become a gentleman.”
D. Progressivism in the cities and states
1. Progressives scored some of their most impressive gains in the cities. Frustrated by the inefficiency and corruption of machine oiled city government, many localities follow the pioneering example of Galveston, Texas.
2. In 1901 it had appointed expert staff commissions to manage urban affairs.
3. Other communities adopted the city manager system, also designed to take politics out of municipal administration.
4. Some of these “reforms” obviously valued efficiency more highly than democracy, as control of civic affairs was further removed from the people’s hands.
5. Urban reformers likewise attacked “slumlords,” juvenile delinquency, and wide open prostitution (vice at a price), which flourished in red light districts unchallenged by bribed police.
6. Public spirited sea dwellers also moved to halt the corrupt sale of franchises for streetcars and other public utilities
7. Progressivism naturally bubbled up to the state level, notably in Wisconsin, which became a DC laboratory of reform.
8. The governor of the state, pompadoured Robert M. (”fighting Bob)” La Follette, was an undersized but overengined crusader who emerged as the most militant of the progressive Republican leaders.
9. After a desperate fight with entrenched monopoly, he reached the governor share 1901.
10. Routing the lumber and railroad “interests,” he wrestled considerable control from the crooked corporations and returned it to the people.
11. He also perfected a scheme for regulating public utilities, while laboring in close association with experts on the faculty of the state University in Madison.
12. Other states marched steadily toward the progressive camp, as they undertook to regulate the railroads and trusts, chiefly through public utilities and commissions.
13. Oregon was not that far behind Wisconsin and California made giant boost strides under the stocky Hiram W. Johnson.
14. Elected Republican governor in 1910, this dynamic prosecutor of grafters helped break the dominant grip of the southern Pacific Railroad on California politics and then, like La Follette, set up a political machine of his own.
15. Heavily whiskered Charles Evans Hughes, the able and fearless performance Republican governor of New York, had earlier gained national fame as an investigator of malpractices by gas and insurance companies and by the coal trust.
16. In these and other states, fired a Progressives tackled head on a whole array of social problems.
17. One of the most remarkable features of this era was the energy and confidence with which reformers did battle with a host of evils.
18. They finally secured the enactment of safety and sanitation codes for industry and close certain harmful trades to juveniles.
19. Progressives further protected the toiler with Worker’s Compensation laws, thus relieving the injured laborer from the burden of lawsuits to prove negligence on the part of the employer.
20. The reformers also secured laws setting maximum hours and minimum wages
21. Steaming and unsanitary sweatshops were a public scandal in many cities.
22. The issue was thrust into the public eye in 1911, when a fire at the triangle shirt waist Company in New York City incinerated 146 women workers, mostly girls.
23. Lashed by the public outcry, the Legislature of New York and later other legislatures passed laws regulating hours and conditions of toil in such fire traps.
24. In the landmark case of Muller versus Oregon (1908), crusading attorney Louis D. Brandeis persuaded the Supreme Court to accept the constitutionality of the laws protecting women workers, because of “women’s peculiar structure” although that reasoning seemed sexist and discriminatory by later standards, progressives at the time held Brandies’ achievement as a triumph
25. But the Crusaders for these humane measures did not always have smooth sailing.
26. One dismaying setback came in 1905, when the Supreme Court, in Lochner versus New York, invalidated a New York law establishing a 10 hour day for bakers.
27. Yet the reformist progressive wave finally washed up in the judiciary and in 1917 The Court upheld a 10 hour law for factory workers.
28. Gradually, the concept of the employer’s responsibility to society was replacing the old dog eat dog philosophy of unregulated free enterprise.
29. Corner saloons, with their shutter doors, naturally attracted the ire and fire of Progressives.
30. Alcohol was intimately connected with the prostitution in red light districts, with the drunken voter, with crooked city officials dominated by “boost” interests, and with the blowsy “boss” who counted poker chips by night and miscounted ballots by day (including the “Cemetery vote”).
31. By 1900 cities like New York and San Francisco had one saloon for about every 200 people.
32. Anti-liquor campaigners received powerful support from several militant organizations, notably the woman’s Christian temperance Union.
33. Piuos Frances E. Willard. One of its founders, would fall on her knees in prayer on saloon floors.
34. She found a vigorous ally in the anti-saloon league, which was aggressive, well-organized, and well-financed.
35. Caught up in the crusade, some states and numerous counties passed “dry” laws, which controlled, restricted, or abolished alcohol.
36. The big cities were generally “wet” for they had a large immigrant vote accustomed in the old country to the free flow of wine and beer.
37. When World War I erupted in 1914, nearly 1/2 of the population lived in “dry” territory, and nearly 3/4 of the total area had outlawed saloons.
38. Demon rum was groggy and was to be floored-temporarily-by the 18th amendment in 1919.
E. Theodore Roosevelt’s Square deal for labor
1. Theodore Roosevelt, although something of an imperialistic busybody abroad, was touched by the progressive wave at home.
2. Like other reformers, he feared that the “public interest” was being submerged in the drifting seas of indifference.
3. Everybody’s interest was nobody’s interest. Roosevelt decided to make it is.
4. His sportsman’s instincts spurred him into demanding “square deal” for capital, labor, and the public at large.
5. Broadly speaking, the president’s program embraced the three C’s: control of corporations, consumer protection, and conservation of natural resources.
6. The square deal for labor received its acid test in 1902, when a crippling strike broke out in the anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania.
7. Some 140,000 besooted workers, many of them illiterate immigrants, have long been frightfully exploited and accident plagued.
8. They demanded among other improvements, a 20% increase in pay and a reduction of the working day from 10 to 9 hours.
9. Unsympathetic mine owners, confident that the chilled public would react against the miners, refused to arbitrate or even negotiate.
10. One of their spokesman, multimillionaire George F. Baer, reflected the high and mighty attitude of certain ungenerous employers.
11. Workers, he wrote, would be cared for “not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian man to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests in this country.”
12. Closed minds and meant closed mines.
13. As coal supplies dwindled, factories and schools were forced to shut down, and even hospitals felt the icy grip of winter.
14. Desperately seeking a solution, Roosevelt summoned representatives of the striking miners and the mine owners to the White House.
15. He was vastly annoyed by the “extraordinary stupidity and bad temper” of the mines.
16. As he later confessed, it had not been for the dignity of his high office, he would’ve taken one of them “taking him by seat of the breeches” and “Chucked him out of the window”
17. Roosevelt finally resorted his trusty big stick when he threatened to seize the mines and operate them with federal troops.
18. Faced with this first time ever threat to use federal bayonets against the capital, rather than labor, the owners grudgingly consented to arbitration.
19. A compromise decision ultimately gave the miners a 10% pay boost and a working day of nine hours.
20. But their union was not officially recognized as a bargaining agent.
21. Keenly aware of the mounting antagonisms between capital and labor, Roosevelt urged Congress to create a new Department of Commerce and labor.
22. This goal was achieved in 1903. (10 years later the agency was split in two.)
23. An important arm of the newly born Department of Commerce and labor was the Bureau of corporations, which was authorized to probe business engaged in interstate commerce.
24. The bureau was highly useful in helping to break the stranglehold of monopoly and in clearing the road for the era of “trust busting”.
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