Lecture on Progressivism - Stratford Academy



The Progressive Era

i. Purpose: Few periods in American history witnessed more ferment than the years between the founding of Hull House and American entry into World War I. This movement touched every aspect of American life. It transformed government into an active, interventionist entity, at the national level, most notably under Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but also at the state and local levels. For the first time Americans were prepared to use government, including the federal government, as an instrument of reform.

Progressive reformers secured a federal income tax based on the ability to pay, inheritance taxes, a modern national banking system, and government regulatory commissions to exercise oversight over banking, insurance, railroads, gas, electricity, telephones, transportation, and manufacturing.

Education, too, became a self-conscious instrument of social change. Influenced by the ideas of the educator and philosopher John Dewey, progressive educational reformers broadened school curricula to include teaching about health and community life; called for active learning that would engage students' minds and draw out their talents; applied new scientific discoveries about learning; and tailored teaching techniques to students' needs. Progressive educators promoted compulsory education laws, kindergartens, and high schools and raised the literacy rate of African Americans from 43 to 77 percent.

For all its flaws and limitations, the Progressive era was instrumental in formulating the rationale for much of the welfare state, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, and aid to single parent families.

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ii. Key Terms:

1. Muller vs. Oregon 1908

2. United Mine Workers’ Strike (1902)

3. The Hepburn Railway Act, 1906

4. The Roosevelt Corollary

5. The Payne-Aldrich Bill

6. The Clayton Anti-Trust Act, 1914

7. The establishment of the Federal Trade Commission

8. Keating-Owen Child Labor Law

9. NAWSA

10. Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896)

Listening Guide to the Lecture on Progressivism

I. Grassroots Progressivism

“What motivated comfortable, middle-class women and men to undertake the series of reforms that together constituted one of the major movements for social and political reform in U. S. history? There is no one answer because there is no single progressive profile. The “progressives,” as they called themselves, were a diverse group with a variety of goals…” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 802-803).

a. Civilizing the City

“Progressive reform efforts were multifaceted, and reformers of many stripes participated in the campaign to civilize the city. Typically, progressives attacked the problems of the city on many fronts: The settlement house movement attempted to bridge the distance between the classes; the social gospel called for the churches to play a new role in social reformation; and the social purity movement campaigned to clean up vice, particularly prostitution” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 803).

b. Progressives and the Working Class

“Day-to-day contact with their neighbors made settlement house workers particularly sympathetic to labor unions….During the Pullman strike in 1894, Hull House residents organized strike relief and lent their prestige and financial resources to the strike. ‘Hull-House has been so unionized,’ grumbled one Chicago businessman, ‘that it has lost its usefulness and become a detriment and harm to the community.’ But to the working class, the support of middle-class reformers marked a significant gain” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 805).

II. Progressivism: Theory and Practice

“Progressive reformers developed a new theoretical basis for their activist approach by countering social Darwinism with a dynamic new reform Darwinism and by championing the uniquely American philosophy of pragmatism” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 809).

a. Reform Darwinism and Pragmatism

“The active, interventionist approach of the progressives directly challenged social Darwinism, with its insistence that the world operated on the principle of survival of the fittest and that human beings were powerless in the face of the natural law of selection. Without abandoning the evolutionary framework of Darwinism, a new group of sociologists argued that evolution could be advanced more rapidly if men and women used their intellects to alter the environment” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 811).

b. Scientific Management and the cult of Efficiency

“Increased emphasis on means as well as ends marked progressive reform. Efficiency and expertise became watchwords in the progressive vocabulary. The journalist and critic Walter Lippmann, in Drift and Mastery (1914), a classic statement of the progressive agenda, called for skilled technocrats who would use scientific techniques to control social change, substituting mastery for aimless drift” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 811).

III. Progressivism Finds a President: Theodore Roosevelt

“An activist and a moralist, imbued with progressive spirit, Roosevelt would turn the White House into a ‘bully pulpit’ and, in the process, shift the nation’s center of power from Wall Street to Washington” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 813).

a. The Square Deal

“At the age of forty-two, Roosevelt was the youngest man ever to move into the White House. A patrician by birth and an activist by temperament, Roosevelt brought to the job tremendous talent and energy….The ‘absolutely vital question’ facing the country, Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1901, was ‘whether or not the government has the power to control the trusts’” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 802-803).

b. Roosevelt and Regulation

“’Tomorrow I shall come into my office in my own right,’ Roosevelt is said to have remarked on the eve of his election. ‘Then watch out for me!’ The conservative Republicans who had helped to elect him intended to do just that. No longer under the illusion that Roosevelt would continue McKinley’s role as a silent partner to business interests, they reassured themselves that Congress remained firmly in the grip of conservative, standpat Republicans. The old guard in the Senate was led by Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, who was called ‘the senator from Standard Oil’ (an alliance cemented when his daughter married John D. Rockefeller Jr.). In an era when state legislatures still chose U. S. senators, like Aldrich openly served business interests. The old guard stood squarely in the path of Roosevelt and reform” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 816).

c. Roosevelt and Big Business

“When a sharp business panic developed in the fall of 1907, business interests quickly blamed the president. The panic of 1907 proved to be severe but short. Once again, J. P. Morgan stepped in to avert disaster, switching funds from one bank to another to prop up weak institutions and keep them from failing. For his services, he claimed as a prize the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, an independent steel business that had long been coveted by his U. S. Steel” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 818).

d. Roosevelt the Diplomat

“A man who relished military discipline and viewed life as a constant conflict for supremacy, Roosevelt believed that the ‘civilized nations’ should police the world and hold the ‘backward’ countries in line” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 819).

e. The Troubled Presidency of Howard Taft

“When Roosevelt retired from the presidency in 1909 at the age of fifty to go on safari and shoot big game in Africa, he turned the White House over to his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft. Any man would have found it difficult to follow in Roosevelt’s footsteps, but Taft proved hopelessly ill-suited to the task” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 823).

IV. Woodrow Wilson and Progressivism at High Tide

“Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia, Woodrow Wilson was the first Southerner to be elected president since James K. Polk (in 1844) and only the second Democrat to occupy the White house since Reconstruction. Before he was finished, Wilson would preside over progressivism at high tide and see enacted not only the platform of the Democratic Party but the humanitarian reforms championed by Roosevelt’s Progressive Party as well ” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 827-828).

a. Tariff and Banking Reform

“In March 1913, Wilson, proud of his ability as an orator, became the first president since John Adams to go to Capitol Hill and speak directly to Congress, calling for tariff reform. ‘The object of the tariff,’ Wilson told his audience, ‘must be effective competition.’ Eager to topple the high tariff, the Democratic House of Representatives hastily passed the Underwood tariff, which lowered rates by 15 percent” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 828).

b. Wilson and the Trusts

“Flushed with success, Wilson tackled the trust issue. When Congress reconvened in January 1914, Wilson supported the Clayton bill to outlaw interlocking directorates (directors from one corporation sitting on the board of another) and unfair practices. By spelling out which practices were unfair, Wilson hoped to guide business activity back to healthy competition without resorting to regulation” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 829).

c. Wilson, Reluctant Progressive

“Progressives watched in dismay as Wilson repeatedly obstructed or obstinately refused to encourage further progressive reforms. He failed to support labor’s demand for an end to injunctions and for a promise to exempt unions from prosecution under antitrust laws as conspiracies ‘in restraint of trade.’ He twice threatened to veto legislation providing for farm credits on non-perishable crops. He refused to support child labor legislation or woman suffrage, he vetoed legislation sponsored by labor to curb immigration” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 830).

V. The Limits of Reform

“Progressivism, no matter how much it challenged standpat conservatism, was never a radical movement. Its goal remained the preservation of the existing system, by government intervention if necessary, but without uprooting any of the traditional American political, economic, or social institutions. Progressivism’s basic conservatism can be seen by comparing it to more radical movements of the era and by looking at the groups that were left out of progressive reform” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 830).

a. Radical Alternatives

“It was inevitable, given the turbulence of the times, that the progressivism of Roosevelt and Wilson would be challenged by more radical voices. The most cogent criticism of progressivism came from American socialists” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 830).

b. Progressivism for White Men Only

“The day before President Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration in March, 1913, more than five thousand demonstrators marched in Washington to demand the vote for women. The march served as a reminder that the political gains of progressivism were not spread equally in the population. When the twentieth century dawned, women could still not vote in most states” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 833).

c. Progressivism in perspective

“The limitations of progressive reform should not obscure its very real achievements. The progressive movement brought significant gains as government moved away from laissez-faire and social Darwinism to embrace a more active role designed to bring about social justice and to establish a better balance between business and government” (James L. Roark, The American Promise, 838).

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