The Progressive Movement,

1900-1920

Between Irresponsible Standpatters and Radical Socialists: How the

American Middle Class and some Strong Presidents Invented a “Politics

of the Third Way”

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Themes and Topics

• Role of Government Phase One of American Regulatory and Welfare State

Presidential Leadership Theodore Roosevelt

Presidential Leadership William Taft

Presidential Leadership Woodrow Wilson

State and Local Government Political, Social Welfare and Social and Racial Control “Reforms”

• Private Enterprise Business embrace of the Regulatory State

Imposition of Minimal Ethical Standards on Business conduct

• Cultural Change Embrace of an ethic of social solidarity and Nobless Oblige

• Social and Cultural Outsiders The Socialist Party of America, 1904-1920

Central Analytical Questions

• What were the conditions that led a rejection of laissez faire?

• What was the social basis of progressive reform?

• What were the Achievements of Progressive Reformers?

• Was the Progressive Movement Anti-Capitalist or Anti-Socialist?

• What defined Presidential Leadership during the Progressive Era?

Linguistic Analysis

• What does “Progressive” Connote?

What kind of image does it suggest?

What does its root word, progress imply?

Mythology of Progressive Era

• Myth of Liberal Reform Celebration of beginnings of the regulatory and welfare

state

Celebrate use of government to solve social problems for first time

Celebrate beginning of a modern reform oriented government

• TR’s Square Deal and New Nationalism, Wilson’s New Freedom, FDR’s New Deal, Truman’s Fair Deal, JFK’s New Frontier, LBJ’s Great Society

• (Later, Clinton’s “Raw Deal”; Bush’s “No Deal” Obama’s “Big Deal!”)

• This point of view amounts to the myth of liberal optimism

Mythology of Progressive Era

• Myth of Conservative Rejection Decry a century of error

Decry the growth of a leviathan state threatening Liberty (of Contract)

Fear a “Road to Serfdom” (Frederick Hayek)

This point of view amounts to the myth of conservative pessimism

The Problem with the Old Regime

• 19th century Laissez faire state Defined the role of government as

business promotion

Protection of business from the consequences of private enterprise

Government could create opportunity, but not address the inequalities or problems that followed

Calls for intervention were dismissed as illegitimate, given Liberty of Contract, if not insane

Intervention threatened individualism-the idea that individuals are responsible for their actions

Lower East Side Rent Plantation, 1890

The Problem with the Old Regime

• 19th century Laissez faire state Presided over a rural and urban

industrial nightmare

• Farm upheaval

• Grinding poverty

• Unsafe conditions at home on the streets, and at work

• Food and water contamination

• Inequality

• Pollution

• Exploitation of children’s labor

• Resource exhaustion

It appeared to many, US was creating a “satanic mill”

Lower East Side Homeless Children, 1890

Who Were the Progressives?

• Response of a specific strata of society The Old and New Middle Classes

Affluent, well educated, native born, urban based, professional

• Doctors, lawyers, educators, university professors (especially from the social sciences), intellectuals, editors, journalists, social health professional, government bureaucrats

• New supervisory and managerial Middle Class

• White Anglo Saxon Protestants

Role of the working class and their political reps

Role of corporate leaders

Who Were the Progressives?

• People who felt ‘de-classed’ by industrialism Above them now stood the new rich

Below them were the strangely foreign immigrant workers in urban areas

• What Progressives feared The triumph of the irresponsible rich

The triumph of the dangerous poor

• Progressive politics as a “third way” Operate from tradition of “noblesse oblige”

• Society’s benevolent guardians

• Mass mobilizations and strong, charismatic political leaders

Especially like efficiency and rationality

Three Achievements

• Creation of a reform consensus Reform consensus dominated politics for two decades

Preconditions • Affluence and prosperity

• Outrageous Media Exposures: “the muckrakers”

• Well financed reform organizations

Focused on three kinds of problems • Urban problems associated with the corruption of municipal

government and squalor in urban centers The city as stinkhole and criminal dens-good government, moral

reform, forced assimilation movements

The city as political machine spoils system-non-partisan government/gas and electric municipal socialism movements

Three Achievements

• Creation of a reform consensus Focused on three kinds of problems

• State problems that extended beyond the boundaries of cities State welfare, consumer, and regulatory interventions

Direct Democracy initiatives

Alliance with state universities as social researchers-The Wisconsin Idea

• Federal problems that extended beyond the boundaries of states

Consumer and regulatory interventions

Environmental protection

Constitutional Amendments related to direct democracy (17 and 19 Amendments), inequalities in wealth (16th Amendment), and moral control (18th Amendment)

Three Achievements

• Creation of reform and professional organizations State and National Consumer’s Leagues

State and National Child Labor Committees

Settlement Houses

American Association for the Advancement of Labor Legislation

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

National American Women’s Suffrage Association

American Medical Association

American Society of Mechanical Engineers

Three Achievements

• Development of a Reform Persuasion Redefines aspects of the economic and political thinking about

• relationship of individual to individual

• Relationship of individual and society

• Relationship of individual and state

• Relationship of individual and nature

• Relationship of men to women (gender relations)

Developed by first and second generation progressive social science, political science, historians, and philosopher intellectuals in Higher Education: 1880s-1920s

• Openly embrace state intervention in economy and society to guide social evolution

Critiqued laissez faire and conservative Social Darwinism

Affirmed statism and Reform Social Darwinism

Role of Women

• Women played a critical role in the Progressive movements

Dominate Humanitarian Reform

Build Reform Organizations

Advocate for women’s rights

Women and Race

Critique of Conservative Thought

• Conservative thought linked to a “revolt against formalism” Rejection of abstract

principals and absolute laws of nature, human nature, economics, social evolution, and history

Such laws operate as illicit restraints on human action and experimentation

• Rejection of Conservative Social Darwinism Dismissed as deterministic

Society is always in a process of change and evolution, but there is nothing deterministic about it

Evolution involves chance, change, and opportunity, not fate and law

Human evolution is a willed process, not a predetermined process, because mankind changes the environment, and dominates nature with technology

Reform Ideology

• Lester Ward’s “Dynamic Sociology” Accepted evolution

Focused on the role of the collective human mind as a force outside nature • Psychic Factors: consciousness, intelligence, reason

• Plan and imagine

• Human mind separated mankind from lower animals and therefore, evolutionary laws

• Measure evolutionary progress by intellectual mastery of nature

Conservative versus Progressives: Where are

social ethics derived from?

• Conservatives

Insisted their vision of society faithfully reflected human nature

• Self-interest

• Natural Inequality

Insisted society draw its ethics from nature

• Survival of the fittest as an ethical position

• Progressives Insisted mankind

participates in two distinct processes of life

• The evolutionary process with nature

• A social process

Insisted nature teaches nothing about ethics

• Is nature really about competition and the survival of the fittest or strongest?

• Ethics should transcend natural differences

Education is key

What about Christianity?

• Some Progressives were inspired by religious ideals derived from the “Social Gospel” – a form of evangelical liberalism

Protestant Clergyman Walter Rauschenbush

Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)

What would Jesus do?

Politics of the Third Way in Context

Conservatives Radicals Progressives/Liberals

Private Enterprise Socialize Means of Production

Mixed Economy of Public/Private Systems

Stress Individual Freedom

Stress Social Equality Balance Freedom and Equality

State: Laissez Faire in relation to market system

State: Party Dictatorship in relation to Centrally Planned Economy

State: Interventionist to limit freedom and establish minimal ethical standards

Fear: Socialist/ Communist Encroachment

Fear: Plutocracy and the “Iron Heel” (Jack London)

Fear: Plutocratic Rich and Irrational Working Class

Were Progressives Anti-Socialist?

• The Socialist Threat

Socialist strength in pre-WW I America

• Showed surprising strength in numerous industrial cities Socialist Party of America formed 1904

Between 1910 and 1919, the Socialist Party of America elected municipal officers in 350 cities

In industrial cities like Milwaukee, Schenectady, and Buffalo, SPA elected city’s mayors, city councilmen

First socialist congressman Victor Berger elected from Milwaukee in 1910, 1918, 1920, 1922-1928

Socialists opposed U.S. entry in to World War One and paid a very high price for their principled stand.

Progressives Versus Socialists

• Civic Reform as an Alternative to Socialist and Democratic Party Urban Strength Socialists and Democrats benefit from ward representation

Progressives • Replace ward representation with city wide election to office

• Replace partisan campaigns with non-partisan campaigns

• Replace elective government with a commission form of local government

What is behind these reforms? • The ideal that politics of class should be replaced by the politics of

good citizens acting as individuals

• The reality of politics was progressives formed alliances with big business if they were to defeat socialist candidates

Presidential Election,1904

Teddy Roosevelt Alton B. Parker

Presidential Election, 1908

William H. Taft William J. Bryan

Eugene Debs

The GOP’s “Western Strategy” and the

Shifting Regional Basis of Parties

Presidential Election, 1912

Socialist Party Strength, 1912

Note the surprising strength of the socialist party in the mid-west (especially Oklahoma and Minnesota)

Election of 1916

Charles Hughes

Woodrow Wilson

Were Progressives Anti-Working Class?

• Interventions effecting the working class at the state level Focus on work rules

• Hours

• Wages

• Inspections

• Child Labor

• Compensation for Injury

• Collective Bargaining

• Unemployment Insurance

• Effects of Intervention

Insert State between capital and labor

• Increase costs

• Decrease profit share

• Decrease capital control

• Improve conditions

• Improve compensation

• Improve safety

• Shift risk to state or corporations

Political Impacts: Working class are the principal beneficiaries of reform, hence progressives foster social solidarity, stabilize politics

Robert Wagner

Were Progressives Anti-Capitalist?

• Business Interventions Creation of political or

regulated capitalism • Work Rules

• Trust Busting

• Regulate Competition

• Protect Investors

• Conserve Resources

• Effects of Intervention Impose minimal ethical

standards on business conduct toward workers, competitors, investors, consumers, and the environment

• In relation to labor Yes, because groups of

capitalists like the National Association of Manufacturers opposed all progressive reforms

No, because groups of capitalists like the National Civics Federation favored reforms because they protected property, strengthened bipartisanism, and social solidarity

Were Progressives Anti-Capitalist?

• Focus on the Monopoly Issue

Is the break up of monopoly or the regulation of business competition, or requirements of minimal investor protection laws anti-capitalist?

• It may be against the interests of specific businessmen, corporations, and groups of capitalists

• Progressives disagreed about what needed to be done about big business

Roosevelt’s Approach: The New Nationalism

Wilson’s Approach: The New Freedom

Were the Progressives Anti-

Capitalist?

Focus on the Environment: Are National Parks and Recreation Areas anti-capitalist? Yes, if resources are denied; No, if they become the basis of new recreational forms of leisure

Critical Thinking Exercise

• Were Progressives Anti-Capitalist?

• Who is really conservative?

Critical Thinking Exercise

• Were Progressives Anti-Capitalist? Yes, some capitalists lost autonomy

No, only anti-unregulated capitalism

Creates political capitalism, interventionism, statism, in short, a new political economy

• Who is really conservative? Principled Conservatives: Abstract Freedom

Progressives • Interventions conserve and rationalize new socio-economic

hierarchy with state interventions

• Create social and economic stability and protection from the attacks of a potentially democratic political system

Limits of the Progressive Agenda

• Progressives were not big advocates for

Civil Rights for minorities

Civil Liberties for Individuals

Conclusions

• Progressive movement represents first tentative steps toward restructuring of the state in relation to the new economic and social order

• Whether the new order would be more democratic, or more corporatist depended on who controlled the direction of the state

• World War One and the 1920s pointed toward a new corporatism