The Progressive Era in the USA: 1890–1921
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The Progressive Era in the USA: 1890–1921

Kristofer Allerfeldt, Kristofer Allerfeldt

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The Progressive Era in the USA: 1890–1921

Kristofer Allerfeldt, Kristofer Allerfeldt

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Few periods in American history have been explored as much as the Progressive Era. It is seen as the birth-place of modern American liberalism, as well as the time in which America emerged as an imperial power. Historians and other scholars have struggled to explain the contradictions of this period and this volume explores some of the major controversies this exciting period has inspired. Investigating subjects as diverse as conservation, socialism, or the importance of women in the reform movements, this volume looks at the lasting impact of this productive, yet ultimately frustrated, generation's legacy on American and world history.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351883481
Topic
History
Edition
1

[1]
IN SEARCH OF PROGRESSIVISM

Daniel T. Rodgers
No one needs to be told that the concept of “progressivism” fell into trouble in the 1970s. For decades the notion that the political and intellectual ferment of the Roosevelt and Wilson years cohered into an entity called progressivism was one of the central organizing principles of American history.1 How that coherence should be defined was a matter of starkly divided opinion; but the term itself was as crucial a part of the historiographical scaffolding as “republicanism” or “Jacksonian democracy.” The search for progressivism —undertaken with implicit confidence that the expedition would reveal some typical progressive profile, coherent political agenda, or, at least, definable ethos—helped attract more historical talent to the first two decades of the twentieth century than to any other period of modern America. Yet the 1970s had barely begun when Peter Filene attacked the whole notion of a coherent progressive movement as a semantic and conceptual muddle, and declared it dead and buried.2
Those who shared Filene’s doubts did not win the easy victory Filene had envisioned. Progressivism shuffled through the 1970s as a corpse that would not lie down. Few historians seriously tried to get along without the term “progressivism” or “progressive movement.” For every historian who, like Jack Kirby, declared outright that the covering term “progressivism” “cannot withstand rigorous definition,” there were others ready to try their hand at the task.3 But it was impossible to miss the mounting undertone of apology behind the efforts at definition, the increasingly elaborate qualifications attached to lists of shared “progressive” goals and values, the occasional candid admission that the conflicting interpretations of progressivism could not be made to add up, and the suggestions that the traditional questions had been played out, if not in some way misconceived.
The nervous tick was particularly conspicuous in that litmus test of historiographical moods: the undergraduate survey text. By the mid 1970s, many undergraduates were being warned at the outset that they would find the Progressive era “confusing.” “The concept of progressivism turns out to be curiously elusive,” they were cautioned. The movement “may never be fully understood,” they were told, before being shuttled off to the obligatory chapters on Roosevelt and Wilson and the unenviable task of demonstrating their triumph over professional disagreement and confusion on their final exams.4 But there was nothing in these candid asides that professional historians did not know full well. The “babble of disagreement” over the meaning of progressivism, as David Kennedy put it in 1975, was acute and troubling.5
Yet by the end of the decade there were signs that beneath the definitional wrangling historians had been striking out in significantly new directions—away from the debate over the essence of progressivism, so brilliantly started by Richard Hofstadter’s generation, and toward questions of context. Much of the best writing of the 1970s inquired less about the progressives themselves than about their surroundings; less about the internal coherence of the progressive “movement” than about the structures of politics, power, and ideas within which the era’s welter of tongues and efforts and “reforms” took place. The answers were important and wide-ranging: some pointed to critical changes in the rules of the political game; some emphasized revolutions in power and organization; others hinted at new ways of comprehending the era’s rhetoric and social thought. Set beside these gains, the 1970s failure to agree on the characteristics of progressivism may turn out not really to matter.6
Of these developments, one of the most significant has been the emergence of a pluralistic reading of progressive politics, in which the fundamental fact of the era is not reform in any traditional sense of the term, but the explosion of scores of aggressive, politically active pressure groups into the space left by the recession of traditional political loyalties. The first intimations of this account of the period came in Filene’s “obituary” of 1970 and a companion essay by John D. Buenker in 1969.7 Both historians began by insisting that the progressive movement was not, in the strict sense of the term, a “movement” at all. Those whom historians had labeled progressives shared no common party or organization. They were rent by deep disagreements over anti-trust policy, women’s suffrage, direct democracy, and any number of other specific issues. Finally, Buenker argued, the Procrustean exercise of trying to stretch those who called themselves progressives over a single ideological frame, far from revealing a common ethos, had either produced a list of ideas “so general as to be held by practically everyone or so ambiguous, and even contradictory, as to foreclose the possibility that members of the same movement could hold them simultaneously.”8 Only by discarding the mistaken assumption of a coherent reform movement could one see the progressives’ world for what it really was: an era of shifting, ideologically fluid, issue-focused coalitions, all competing for the reshaping of American society.
The more devastating the attack, the fiercer the resistance, and the unconvinced were quick to point out that no one had really claimed that progressivism was a “movement” in the narrow sense of the term that Filene and Buenker employed. That progressive politics was coalition politics, prone to internal fissures, was a commonplace.9 For a good many historians, in fact, the progressives had made most sense when divided in two. By the end of the 1970s one could take one’s pick of nearly a dozen dichotomies: “social” reformers vs. “structural” reformers (Holli), western democratic Bryanites vs. eastern elitist Rooseveltians (Hackney), “social justice” progressives vs. “social order” progressives (Church and Sedlak), consumer conscious “insurgents” vs. job conscious “modernizers” (Thelen), or in Buenker’s case, heedless of his own theoretical advice, new-stock, urban liberals vs. old-stock, patrician reformers.10
If Buenker and Filene meant to imply, however, that the rage for bifurcation had not really helped resolve the problem of coherence, they were surely right. Though the ideological checklists looked considerably less muddled when sliced in two, that clarity was purchased at the cost of finding any sizable number of self-professed progressives who did not draw their ideas from both sides of all such divisions. The post facto dichotomies touched deep moral nerves in the historians who employed them. But what usually amounted to routing the false progressive ideas out of genuine “progressivism” did not succeed in making it clear why a “democratic” progressive like Charles Beard should have cozied up so closely to the “structural reformers” of the Bureau of Municipal Research; why an “insurgent” like Robert La Follette should have thrown in his lot with a social gospeler turned efficiency expert like John R. Commons; why an archetypical “social justice” progressive like Jane Addams and an archetypical “corporate liberal” like George W. Perkins should have landed in the same political camp in 1912; or why, in short, the air was so full of what Robert Wiebe shrewdly described as “strange theoretical combinations.” 11 What Buenker and Filene proposed was to accept these apparent anomalies as characteristic: to split the progressive movement not in two but into dozens of pieces, bound only by the rules of competitive, pluralistic politics.
But why then did so many issue-oriented groups demanding so many novel changes burst on the scene at once? That, clearly, was the critical question, and Buenker could only appeal to the big, driving forces of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, all of which had been around for an embarrassingly long time before the turn-of-the-century explosion of pressure groups they were said to have triggered. It was here that the political scientists entered the argument, and the key book was Walter Dean Burnham’s Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (1970). What impressed Burnham about the Progressive era was that it coincided with what appeared to be a seismic shift in American electoral behavior: not a party realignment of the sort familiar to the nineteenth century, but a critical weakening of all party loyalties and a massive decline in voting itself.12 Why, given the heated political atmosphere of the Progressive years, Americans chose that moment to begin their long twentieth-century slide toward political inactivity has now become a matter of intense debate among political scientists and political historians. Some of the withdrawal from politics was, of course, deliberately contrived in the form of tighter registration laws and, in the South, outright disfranchisement of black and many poor white voters. But the rest now seems closely related to the failure of the political parties to bring their partisans to the polls in the numbers characteristic of the late nineteenth century. Whether the parties weakened because of new ballot laws which made ticket splitting easier, because the party realignment of the 1890s left more and more states without meaningful electoral contests, the direct primary system shattered the power base of the old-style party managers, new mass circulation newspapers eclipsed the old party sheets as primary information sources, or because the issues of the Progressive era simply did not touch deep popular nerves—no one really knows.13 But as party loyalties eroded, the parties could no longer sustain their former role as the single most important channel through which Americans tried to affect the policies of governments.
The result was to spring open the political arena to extra-party pressure groups of all sorts: manufacturers’ organizations, labor lobbies, civic leagues, trade associations, women’s clubs, professional associations, and issue-oriented lobbies, all trying directly to shape policy. This was the context within which maverick politicians could vault into office and “reform” (and “antireform”) coalitions of all sorts could blossom. Progressive politics—fragmented, fluid, and issue-focused—was, in short, part of a major, lasting shift in the rules of the political game.
Such a scheme is easier to sketch in broad strokes than to work out in detail, but its promise is already apparent in Richard L. McCormick’s fine study of New York politics, From Realignment to Reform (1981).14 By looking most closely not at the reformers but at the old-time bosses, McCormick demonstrates how their hold was shaken by the assaults of mugwump, anti-party crusaders, by muckracking, and by the unsettling rise of new zero-sum issues not resolvable by the parties’ traditional method of distributing favors all around—how, in sum, one form of politics gave way to another. What happened in New York is not likely to be precisely duplicated elsewhere.15 Neither McCormick nor anyone else has yet described how the new extra-party techniques of lobbying and coalition building exactly worked, how quickly or how thoroughly they supplanted the old party channels, or how and by whom the new-style legislative contests were most often won. The causes of party disaffection remain, even in McCormick’s hands, dauntingly complex and interdependent, and no one has yet tried to write a historical sociology of party disengagement. But at the least the discernment that the voters drawn to progressive issues formed a slimmed-down electorate of highly specific loyalties, always in flux, promises a major gain over the old wrangle about the identity of the “typical” progressive.16
The recovery of the particular political fluidity of the Progressive years also promises to reopen the question David Thelen raised at the beginning of the 1970s as to how the reform coalitions came together: how techniques and grievances were passed from one issue group to another, how channels of communication were established and supported, how new methods of mobilizing public opinion were invented and employed—muckracking, the celebrity picket line, the forcing of an official witness-calling investigation, the launching of a referendum campaign, or the puffing of fads like city planning or commission government.17 To insist that reform efforts come in clusters precisely because of this sort of interlocking of techniques and activists is not to deflate the progressives’ moral fervor. Like all reformers, those of the Progressive era were made piece by piece, as unease and anger were channeled into vocabularies and techniques that were always in motion.
What is at hand, however, is not simply a new set of questions. In the work of McCormick, Burnham, and Buenker one senses the beginning of a major new synthesis which will situate the progressives in the context of a much bigger phenomenon: the rise of modern, weak-party, issue-focused politics.
For other historians writing in the 1970s the central fact of the Progressive era was not its political fluidity at all; rather it was its unprecedentedly tight organization of social and economic power. Thus Filene had barely proclaimed the death of any simple understanding of the era when Louis Galambos swept the period’s fragments together into what seemed to him and to others a fundamental revolution in social organization: the eclipse of the local, informal group as the basic frame of American life, and its replacement by vastly bigger, bureaucratically structured formal organizations, among them the big business corporation and its putative adversary, t...

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