Progressive movement

Spanning roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century, was a reform movement through which Americans struggled to cope with a wide range of social, economic, and cultural changes. Progressives differed in their perceptions of the nature of the nation's problems and of how best to resolve them, but most shared the conviction that government at all levels must play an active role in reform. They sought legislation to broaden the state's power to curb the excesses of large‐scale corporate capitalism and to address the host of inequities that had resulted from rapid and unprecedented economic and social change. Since their vision of the function of government was somewhat unorthodox by traditional American standards, reformers had not only to secure the passage of new legislation but also to persuade the judicial system that such laws were both warranted and constitutional.

While contemporary social activists sometimes perceived the judiciary as a barrier to change, the Supreme Court actually upheld most of the legislation passed during the Progressive Era, in particular supporting reformers' efforts to expand the federal government's power to regulate commerce and to curb the growth of monopolies. The Hepburn Act of 1906 broadened the scope and authority of the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), giving it genuine power for the first time. The Court sustained the invigoration of the ICC, and affirmed the constitutionality of administrative regulation.

Initially, the Court rendered the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) virtually ineffectual when in United States v. E. C. Knight Co. (1895) it drew a sharp distinction between commerce and manufacturing, thus limiting the government's regulatory power over the latter. For several years thereafter the law was of value primarily to conservative judges who employed it as a weapon in the struggle to curb the power of organized labor. During the first decade of the twentieth century, however, the Supreme Court revived the Sherman Act in several important cases. In Northern Securities Co. v. United States (1904), the Court resurrected the antitrust statute when it found a railroad holding company to be an illegal combination in restraint of trade. The following year in Swift and Co. v. United States (1905), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing the majority opinion, circumvented the commerce versus manufacturing distinction by espousing the doctrine of “stream of commerce,” which stressed the impact of manufacturing upon commerce (see Commerce Power). Like many Progressive reformers, the justices of the Supreme Court believed that a large company's size, business practices, and substantial market share were not necessarily detrimental to the economic or social progress of the nation. In Standard Oil Co. v. United States (1911), the Court adopted the “rule of reason,” indicating that it would interpret the Sherman Act in such a way as to break up only those companies whose existence constituted an unreasonable restraint of trade.

The police power, the authority to protect the public's health, safety, and morals, was traditionally reserved to the states. Progressive legislators interpreted this power broadly and passed a variety of economic and social measures at the state level, including child labor minimum wage, maximum hour, factory safety, employer liability, and workmen's compensation statutes. In several famous decisions, most notably Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court overturned some of these laws. However, in Muller v. Oregon (1908) and other cases, the Court sustained much of this legislation on the grounds that the statutes represented valid exercises of the states' police power.

When state government proved incapable of dealing effectively with economic and social problems, Progressives sometimes turned to Washington for help. Between 1906 and 1916 Congress passed several significant pieces of social justice legislation such as the Pure Food and Drug, Meat Inspection, Mann, Adamson, and Keating‐Owen Acts. When challenged, most of these laws, which were based on the commerce or taxing power of the federal government, were upheld by the Supreme Court. On several occasions, however, the justices concluded that Congress had overstepped constitutional bounds in its efforts to exercise federal police power. In 1908, in the first Employer Liability Case, the Court found that a 1906 employer's liability law represented a misuse of the commerce power since it affected workers not directly engaged in interstate commerce. In Adair v. United States (1908), the Court ruled that the Erdman Act (1898) prohibiting yellow‐dog contracts violated the liberty of contract under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. In Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918), the Court found that the Keating‐Owen Child Labor Act (1916) was not a legitimate regulation of commerce and intruded upon the police power of the states.

As the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of the Progressive legislative agenda, the justices sometimes construed judicial review narrowly, ruling only on the question of whether there was a clearly constitutional basis for the statute in question. On other occasions the Court interpreted its power broadly, assuming the right to examine the substance of state legislation. In the 1890s an activist conception of judicial review had often been used to protect property rights, but in the early twentieth century Progressive judges and lawyers such as Louis D. Brandeis often successfully marshaled it to the cause of social change.

Although sometimes labeled reactionary by reform‐minded critics, the Supreme Court during the Progressive Era was generally sensitive to the massive changes occurring within American life and struggled to reconcile legal tradition with the demands of modernity. While it sometimes obstructed reform in the name of individual liberty, property rights, or federalism, the Court ultimately sanctioned an expansion of both state and federal power in order that government at both levels might cope more effectively with the unprecedented problems of the age.

See also Capitalism; Contract, Freedom of; Due Process, Substantive.

Bibliography

• John W. Johnson, American Legal Culture, 1908–1940 (1981).
• Melvin I. Urofsky, State Courts and Protective Legislation during the Progressive Era: A Reevaluation, Journal of American History 72 (June 1985): 63–91

— Robert F. Martin

An amorphous, cross-party tendency towards economic and political reform prevalent in the United States especially from 1896 to 1916.

In that era Democrats, Republicans, and non-partisans alike became alarmed by developments in American life that had been under way for some time. They viewed with concern the rise of trusts—monopolies in commerce and industry—and the parallel emergence of party bosses and political machines. Such concentrations of economic and political power, so it was argued, not only led to exploitation and corruption, but also ran counter to the values of equality, individualism, and democracy upon which the country had been founded. Progressivism and its forerunner populism were responses to these concerns. Progressivism, while it drew strength from Populist agrarian protest, had its roots in the cities among the urban middle class, mainly of white Anglo-Saxon, Protestant origin.

All progressives were much exercised by the stranglehold on the American economy that the trusts were believed to have gained. However, they disagreed over solutions to the problem. Some such as Woodrow Wilson favoured restoring competition by enforcing and adding to legislation such as the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 which made structures ‘in restraint of trade’ illegal. Theodore Roosevelt, by contrast, saw trusts as inevitable, but wanted to bring them under the control of regulatory commissions.

There was greater agreement among progressives on political reform. They saw a need to purify politics by destroying the odious bosses and their machines, and returning government to where it properly belonged, in the hands of the people. Progressives accordingly became enthusiasts for various devices of direct democracy such as the presidential primary, the direct primary, the initiative, and the referendum, as well as the recall of public officials.

It is difficult to place progressives on a conventional left-right spectrum. Whilst they were committed to reform they were also, in a sense, deeply conservative. They harked back to an alleged golden age in American history—one of small farms, small towns, and small business where there was opportunity for all and where self-government was a reality. Although they sought to ameliorate some of the adverse consequences of capitalism, progressives were far from being anti-capitalist. They objected to trusts not out of any objection to capitalism itself, but because those organizations restricted or eliminated opportunities for small entrepreneurs and thereby curtailed equality of opportunity and individualism. Progressives also looked askance at organized labour and abhorred the collectivism associated with socialism even though the reform aspirations of trade unionists and socialists provided some common ground with progressives.

— David Mervin

Like romanticism or Victorianism, progressivism is one of those words people frequently use but rarely define with precision. Both at the time and in subsequent histories, a person seemed progressive who supported one or more reforms popular after the turn of the twentieth century. Any political activity that pretended to make the American economic or political system fairer in some way qualified. Although the term applied most obviously to the short-lived Progressive party of former president Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 elections, progressivism as a general stance clearly applied to many members of the Republican, Democratic, Socialist, and Prohibition parties as well.

Progressivism in this context was a blanket term for many political movements: on the local level, it included efforts to reform the structure of city governments, to grant them home rule, to lower transit fares, to regulate or socialize natural monopolies such as electricity and natural gas, and to rid politics of the stench of the saloon and the open control of politicians by those engaged in dubious business practices. At both state and local levels, progressives argued for the right of citizens to initiate legislation, to nominate candidates in open primary elections, to vote on laws directly, to elect and recall judges, to have secret ballots, and to revise the tax system to spread burdens more justly.

At the national level, progressive movements supported antitrust laws, the establishment of the Federal Reserve System of currency management, lower tariffs, imposition of an income tax, the right of women to vote and of all voters to elect senators directly, and the prohibition of the sale of alcoholic beverages. This list is long but hardly exhaustive.

Scholars have viewed the period in conflicting ways. Some have assumed that progressivism was the form liberalism took for the first fourteen years of the century, a firm if inadequate step toward the welfare legislation of the New Deal. Others have countered this view with the observation that many elements of the movement were reactionary, pointing out the fundamentalist religion, the puritanical legislation in morals, and the nostalgia for a yeoman farmer past clearly evident in so eminent a leader as William Jennings Bryan. They have stressed the middle-class nature of the reformers and the fear many seemed to have that they were losing status in economic and social life to those from untraditional backgrounds. Radicals have argued that because some businessmen were involved in the enactment of reforms and in the machinery of their administration, progressive legislation actually fended off true reform. Social scientists have stressed the way modernization affected the class structure and accelerated the shift from rural to urban living patterns. Many analysts have asserted that amid such a tangle of factors, generalization becomes meaningless and clear definition impossible.

The "progressive movement" lingers as a term but should disappear. It is too precise and insistently political, too redolent of Whig assumptions of inevitable progress, to fit the larger picture now available. "Progressivism" fits better, as a climate of creativity, an ethos, a persuasion, making the events of the thirty years between 1889 and 1920 cohere as everyone assumed they did at the time. Progressivism in this broader context was political only on its surface. At its core it was religious, an attempt by Americans from all social classes, but chiefly the middle class, to restore the proper balances among Protestant moral values, capitalistic competition, and democratic processes, which the expansion of business in the Gilded Age seemed to have changed in alarming ways. Having lost the literal faith of their ancestors, progressive leaders still wanted religious values to dominate political and economic life; they wanted better and fairer competition; and they wanted every citizen to participate in the polity. Such views could be either reactionary or enlightened, depending on context, and among themselves progressives disagreed on practically every specific proposal. In other words, they agreed on the need to remoralize society, but disagreed about how to accomplish it.

Religious thinkers were prominent in ways they never were again in American history. Conscious that many influential citizens were leaving their churches, both for reasons of belief and reasons of residence in outlying suburbs, clergy in most Protestant faiths began to apply Christian doctrine to policy concerning the poor who often lived close by. Washington Gladden preached largely to his local congregation; George D. Herron taught college students and then spoke across the country; Walter Rauschenbusch redefined the Christian mission from his quiet study in a theological seminary. Gladden's autobiography, Herron's collected speeches, and Rauschenbusch's Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907) and Christianizing the Social Order (1912) formulated the essential elements of Christian progressivism: work in this world to establish a Kingdom of God with social justice for all.

Progressives were primarily members of a post-Civil War generation that had to master a world very different from that of their parents. They were children of religious homes, and their autobiographies repeat the tales of discipline, of long Sundays with two or three church services, and of the duty everyone had of choosing a calling in which to work. But these children grew up in an age of Darwinism and big business; they did not have the religious fervor of their parents, nor did they have any special desire to grow rich. Farming bored them, the ministry was no longer attractive, and other professional opportunities few. Young progressives channeled Protestant energies into the forming of new professions, which they pursued with the same zeal their parents had displayed in converting sinners and fighting slavery. They went to the new graduate schools founded along the lines of Johns Hopkins University; they created modern journalism and social work; they went into teaching and the law; and a few entered politics, finding in statesmanship the best outlet for Christian stewardship. Jews and Roman Catholics occasionally worked on the edges of progressivism, but those who set the tone and wrote the manifestos were Protestants.

Considered on this broad scale, progressivism began with the founding of Hull-House by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in the fall of 1889. These pioneers of social work in Chicago soon became role models for young men and women in other cities, attracting such figures as John Dewey and George Herbert Mead to study what they were doing and to work their insights into a pragmatic philosophy that would solve the problems of democracy. A new breed of journalists soon appeared, often referred to as "muckrakers," who publicized the problems social workers faced and illuminated the business and political conditions that made social work important in the modern city. No one spoke of "networking" in the years around 1900, but social workers, intellectuals, and journalists all quickly came to know of each other. Journalists such as Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, social scientists such as Richard Ely and Woodrow Wilson, and politicians such as Brand Whitlock and Robert La Follette were soon in touch through letters and occasional meetings. With the inauguration of President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, they had a national hero capable of dramatizing issues and providing leadership insofar as he was willing.

Progressivism produced three presidents, and their achievements comprise the most important legacy in the eyes of many analysts. Roosevelt moved against the trusts and backed railway regulation, pure food and drug laws, and the conservation of natural resources. William Howard Taft compromised on several issues, such as the tariff and conservation, but pursued a policy of vigorous judicial progressivism in his efforts to break up trusts, strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission, and facilitate the workings of the courts. Woodrow Wilson lowered the tariff, reformed the currency, and toughened the trust laws yet again. He then carried progressive ideals into World War I, seeing it as a fight for democracy; at Versailles, however, he failed to work out a treaty capable of maintaining a free and peaceful world. Progressivism died twice: at Versailles itself, where Wilson compromised his position repeatedly in the face of European pressures, and in the U.S. Senate, which refused to ratify the treaty or permit American participation in the League of Nations.

But politics was only one discipline in which progressivism flourished; even the inclusion of journalism and social work in no way exhausts the scope of its influence. In literature, many novelists wrote about prison conditions, political corruption, prostitution, and other evils; the best-known volume is The Jungle (1906), Upton Sinclair's socialist examination of Chicago's Packingtown, its savage working conditions and unsanitary products. Painters entered the slums, the sporting halls, and the circuses to produce the Ashcan school of realistic portrayal that, in many cases, held manifest political content: Robert Henri was an anarchist, for example, and John Sloan a socialist. The poetry of Vachel Lindsay recalled William Jennings Bryan and William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, and that of Carl Sandburg celebrated Chicago. Charles Beard and Frederick Jackson Turner wrote progressive histories, reinterpreting the past so it would be "useful" and "relevant" to democratic citizens and legislators. John Dewey's pragmatism entered the public schools and dominated pedagogy for three generations, making "progressive education" perhaps the most enduring, both for better and for worse, of the achievements of those years.

The two most eminent of the creative personalities whom progressivism produced, ironically and untypically, were in the fine arts. In music, Charles Ives looked back at the transcendentalists to create an aesthetic of innovative nostalgia; by trying to recapture the lost paths of Emerson and Thoreau, the romances of Hawthorne, and the antiabolitionist riots of his forebears, he made so many experiments in dissonance, polytonality, and polyrhythm that he emerged after World War II as the most important pioneer in American musical history. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright exceeded even Ives's achievements. Sharing an affection for the organic ideas of the American Renaissance before the Civil War and asserting that form and function were one, Wright developed the Prairie school of architecture, which sought to integrate the design of housing and the land it used and forced Americans to think more carefully about rapid urbanization. In terms of impact abroad, perhaps the most useful yardstick of achievement, Wright's work still influences architects and city planners.

For a climate that began with optimism, progressivism ended with extreme pessimism. President Wilson's foreign policy lay in rubble, and few politicians or publicists dared to recommend intervention in world affairs for the next generation, thus preventing Franklin D. Roosevelt from taking proper steps against the Japanese and the Germans in the 1930s. The political reforms worked no miracles. Women used their new right to vote to help elect Presidents Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover and did little to purify the political process. Race relations, never a progressive priority, went from bad to worse. The initiative, referendum, and recall had only minor impact. Only in financial matters did any important legacy remain: the Federal Reserve System, despite changes, remained at the heart of the economy, and the income tax paid many of the bills for important welfare measures and the fighting of World War II. Surviving progressives themselves often grew disillusioned, and a majority opposed the more significant New Deal measures. The largest exception to this generalization was the group that identified with social settlement work: from Jane Addams to Eleanor Roosevelt, these progressives supported the New Deal and helped usher the welfare state into the American system.

Bibliography:

Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920 (1982); Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955).

Author:

Robert M. Crunden

See also Ashcan School; Beard, Charles A., and Beard, Mary R.; Dewey, John; Ives, Charles; Jungle, The; Muckrakers; Progressive Parties: 1912, 1924, 1948; Roosevelt, Theodore; Settlement Houses; Taft, William Howard; Turner, Frederick Jackson; Wilson, Woodrow.

A movement for reform that occurred roughly between 1900 and 1920. Progressives typically held that irresponsible actions by the rich were corrupting both public and private life. They called for measures such as trust busting, the regulation of railroads, provisions for the people to vote on laws themselves through referendum, the election of the Senate by the people rather than by state legislatures, and a graduated income tax (one in which higher tax rates are applied to higher incomes). The Progressives were able to get much of their program passed into law. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were associated with the movement.