America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1914

Lewis L. Gould

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317879978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1914 provides a readable, analytical narrative of the emergence, influence, and decline of the spirit of progressive reform that animated American politics and culture around the turn of the twentieth century. Covering the turbulent 1890s and the era of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the book covers the main political and policy events of a period which set the agenda for American public life during the remainder of the twentieth century.

Key features include:
- A clear account of the continuing debate in the United States over the role of government and the pursuit of social justice
- A full examination of the impact of reform on women and minorities
- A rich selection of documents that allow the historical actors to communicate directly to today's reader
- An extensive Bibliography providing a valuable guide to additional reading and further research

Based on the most recent scholarship and written to be read by students, America in the Progressive Era makes this turbulent period come alive.

Part One Background

Chapter One

The Roots of Progressive Change

The origins of the Progressive Era can be extended back into the 1880s, but the outlines of what would become the reform campaign began to appear about 1890. In a number of areas, Americans identified major social problems, called for an expanded role for the state, and pursued a more active regulatory government. The older beliefs in a government that encouraged enterprise, but did not regulate it, yielded slowly to these newer attitudes.

Twenty-five years after the end of the Civil War in 1865, the United States had become a major economic power. There were 63 million Americans in 1895, most of whom still lived in rural areas. The growth of cities had marked the years since the South had surrendered. More than 22 million people lived in towns and cities of more than 2,500 residents by 1890, and the increasing perception of urban problems would be a major force in the progressive reform spirit. The nation had also become industrialized, with 250,000 miles of railroad track, the most in the world. Of the nation’s gross national product of $27 billion (expressed in 1929 dollars), non-farm products contributed some $20 billion of the total. With the rise of manufacturing, issues of regulating the burgeoning industries were coming to the fore.

The railroads, for example, were the first big business. The lines employed thousands of people and did business in many different states. The rates that they set affected whether countless shippers made or lost money in carrying on a business. The ability of the rail lines to determine the economic health of a town or city, their direct impact on the lives of farmers and manufacturers, and their capacity to influence legislatures and courts all made the railroads a significant political issue. By 1890 the United States had already begun to oversee the operations of rail lines through state regulatory commissions and the Interstate Commerce Commission (created in 1887). For many Americans, the interstate railroads remained an economic power that seemed outside the bounds of government control.

One reason that government seemed such an unlikely opponent for concentrated economic power in the last decade of the nineteenth century was its relatively small size compared to the reach of the national government a century later. The government in Washington affected the average citizen of the United States only in small ways in 1890. The main body of employees of the federal government worked in the Post Office Department or in the armed services. The army and navy were small forces, and the primary task of the 25,000-man army was to guard the frontier in what had become the increasingly unlikely event of an Indian attack. The country had raised huge armies for the Civil War, but that conflict was only a receding memory. There was no federal income tax and no large federal bureaucracy. Most citizens could go from month to month without directly encountering an agency of the national government in Washington.

The tasks that the government was expected to perform were also minimal. No system of old-age insurance existed. Individuals were expected to rely on family and friends when they could no longer work for themselves. In the same way, when a person was fired or laid-off from a job, there was no provision for unemployment insurance. An individual would have to live off savings or relatives until another position was located. If a disabling injury occurred in the factory or mill, no workmen’s compensation program existed to allow the employee time to regain their health. Young children labored in factories and textile mills, often from the age of nine or ten onward, and their work days were ten to twelve hours. For older employees the six-day week and the twelve-hour day were standard in many businesses. The privilege of a vacation was rare, and holidays were few. Almost no effective protections existed for American workers in the emerging industrial society [20 pp. 42–5].

Labor unions, which might have been expected to have assisted industrial workers, were only in their infancy. The American Federation of Labor, formed in 1886, embraced members of skilled craft unions, and did not seek to enroll the large body of factory laborers or unskilled employees. The most recent such union, the Knights of Labor, had peaked in 1886 and was four years later only a remnant of what it had been. Effective union power to challenge management was more than a half century in the future.

The conventional wisdom of the society believed that a nation with a weak national government reflected the best possible answers to social concerns. Individuals were seen legally as existing on an equal basis with large corporations. It was not the responsibility of business or of society to help a person who was out of work. Intervening in that predicament would erode the self-reliance and moral character of the person involved.

In 1890, the main mechanism for expressing political attitudes was the well-entrenched two-party system. The Democrats were the older of the two organizations. They traced their roots back to the earliest days of the Republic and the organizing efforts of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s. The Democratic hero was Andrew Jackson, who had brought the party to power in 1828 and had entrenched the principles of small government and state rights in which all Democrats believed. The party was strongest in the South because of the lingering effects of the Civil War and the identification of the Republicans with the Union cause. As one southern Democrat put it, ‘no historian will ever find such contradiction in the political world as a Democrat who does not believe in state rights’ [21; 28; 39; 53 p. 262].

The Republicans were a younger party. They had burst onto the scene in the 1850s as a way for northerners to express their opposition to slavery and the political power of the South. They also included individuals who thought that national power could be used to enhance the growth of the economy or to make Americans achieve a more godly and devout society. The experience of winning the Civil War was a basic element in the Republican party and its members regarded the Democrats as somehow unpatriotic and disloyal. A Republican senator summed up the party’s philosophy: ‘One of the highest duties of Government is the adoption of such economic policy as may encourage and develop every industry to which the soil and climate of the country are adapted’ [20 p. 190].

In the decades following the war, the Republicans and Democrats had adopted positions very different from the ideological attitudes they would take up during the twentieth century when the Democrats were the party of a powerful central government and the Republicans stood for a smaller, less intrusive government. In broad terms, the late nineteenth-century Republicans were the party of economic nationalism and an activist government to encourage industrial growth. Their main policy commitment was to the protective tariff, which they saw as a way of encouraging business enterprise and providing jobs for American workers. Opposition to Great Britain, the most powerful free trade nation in the world, was another staple of Republican tariff rhetoric.

The Democrats, on the other hand, were the party of limited government, state rights, and localism. They opposed the tariff and high taxation. Democrats saw Americans as consumers who would be adversely affected by higher taxes and an activist government. Neither party as yet believed that government regulation was an appropriate policy.

By 1890, a prolonged stalemate in national politics had become an accepted fact of life for partisan leaders. Since the mid-1870s and the end of Reconstruction, the Republicans and Democrats had battled on even terms with neither one enjoying a clear ascendancy. Presidential elections were decided by very narrow margins. In the most recent contest, pitting Democrat Grover Cleveland against Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, for example, Cleveland had won a majority of the popular vote, but had lost to Harrison when the votes of the states in the Electoral College were tabulated. During the two decades from 1872 to 1892, the Democrats usually controlled the House of Representatives and the Republicans had an advantage in the Senate. With divided government went a reluctance to adopt strong policies that might alienate key blocs of voters [49].

After the presidential election of 1888, with the Republicans having elected Benjamin Harrison as president and gained control of both houses of Congress, the deadlock started to break apart. To the Republicans, the moment seemed propitious to enact their economic goals. Using their majorities in the Fifty-First Congress, the Republicans, or the ‘Grand Old Party’ (GOP) as they called themselves, pushed an activist program that included higher tariffs, the expansion of the currency (the Sherman Silver Purchase Act), and regulation of large corporations (the Sherman Antitrust Act). The Republican leader who pushed this agenda was Speaker Thomas B. Reed of Maine. He used the House rules and the power of the chair to persuade his colleagues to adopt their program of tariff protection, an antitrust statute, and currency legislation. The Republicans hoped that positive program would translate into a permanent majority status [20 pp. 224–5].

To their dismay, the Republicans found that their legislative energy in the Fifty-First Congress (1889–90) produced a serious backlash at the polls in the congressional elections of 1890. Using the argument that the Republicans had passed costly tariffs and embarked on a policy of government spending, the Democrats assailed the Republicans as big spenders who had been responsible for the ‘Billion Dollar Congress,’ the first session to appropriate that much money to run the government. As a result of these appeals, the Democrats regained control of the House of Representatives and made gains in the Senate. In the wake of the setback, the administration of Benjamin Harrison faced serious problems for the president’s re-election in 1892. The voters had said no to the Republican effort to use national power to promote economic growth. In the process, the electorate had shaken up the stalemated system and encouraged new ideas.

The 1890 elections saw the rise of a third party from the South and West that would challenge the Democrats and Republicans during the next several years. The People’s Party, or the Populists, as they called themselves, grew out of the Depression and low commodity prices that plagued the farm sector at the end of the 1890s. Prices for wheat and cotton had plummeted from the profitable levels of the mid-1880s. Wheat that had brought the farmer nearly $1.20 a bushel in 1881 yielded only $0.70 a bushel eight years later. Cotton experienced similar declines. In the process, the farmers found that the debts they had assumed to start their businesses were now much more of an economic burden. The angry farmers wanted the government to raise crop prices and inflate the currency to make their debts easier to pay. They also called for government control or tighter regulation of railroads and monopolies. While the Populists would not succeed in their crusade, they would be an important force in making more legitimate ideas of increasing governmental power to oversee the economy. Their platform in 1890, for example, called for postal savings banks, a graduated income tax, and the direct election of United States senators [20; 22].

The Populists became participants in the 1892 presidential election when they nominated James B. Weaver as their candidate against the major party contestants. President Harrison sought a second term, although his party was unenthusiastic about his chances. Grover Cleveland received a third consecutive nomination and was favored to win. The Populists denounced the current state of politics in their platform, adopted at their convention in Omaha. Its preamble said that ‘we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin’ [Doc. 1]. The Populists received more than a million popular votes, but Cleveland easily defeated them and Harrison. He gained 277 electoral votes to Harrison’s 145 and Weaver’s 22. As a result, Cleveland became the only president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

The Beginnings of Reform

In the early 1890s, other currents of change stirred in the United States. Greater attention focused on the plight of the nation’s major cities, where an exploding population and powerful political machines made urban life an urgent social problem. To address the ills of city life, men and women opened ‘settlement houses’ in the neighborhoods of Chicago and New York. The most famous of these settlements was Hull House, started by Jane Addams and Ellen Starr in 1889. Starr and Addams, and the other settlement workers, lived among the people they were trying to help and brought activities, education, and a sympathetic presence to the neighborhood. Addams would later remark that the settlement movement was ‘an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.’ Other settlement house experiments appeared in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. From the settlement house experience would emerge a generation of reformers who would pursue crusades for other issues such as limiting the hours of work, inspection of factories, and regulation of public utilities [29 p. 14].

Closely linked to the spirit of the settlement house effort at the end of the 1890s was what became known as the Social Gospel. During the 1880s there had been many examples of labor unrest, most notably the Haymarket Riot of 1886 in Chicago, in which a bomb killed policemen and for which anarchists were blamed. The alleged participants were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Four men were executed. It seemed for a moment as though European-style anarchy might be gaining a foothold in the new metropolises.

The incident sent shockwaves through respectable circles as a sign of imminent social disruption, but some Protestant and Catholic clergy regarded what had happened as a miscarriage of justice. They believed that city-dwellers had legitimate grievances that the political system was not addressing. They asked themselves how the churches were responding to the needs of working people. Many of the champions of what became known as the Social Gospel decided that Protestantism needed to be more sensitive to the plight of the poor and unfortunate in society. Among the leaders of the movement were Walter Rauschenbusch, who said that the church should be ‘the appointed instrument for the further realization of that new society in the world about it’ [29 p. 14]. Similar attitudes were expressed by Roman Catholic priests and rabbis of Jewish congregations.

The spirit of the Social Gospel spilled over into what became progressivism. The sense that they were doing God’s work in the world affected reformers from Jane Addams to Theodore Roosevelt. To some degree there was also condescension in the way that advocates of the Social Gospel sought to uplift the less fortunate without understanding their culture and values. Other reformers saw their movement as a way of forestalling more radical change among the poor and in that way used their doctrines as a form of controlling social unrest. But at their core the Social Gospel and the settlement movement embodied a real sense of concern about the plight of the disadvantaged and the direction of society as industrialism became more prevalent.

Another element in the emerging spirit of reform grew out of changes in American higher education, where academics were questioning the doctrines of limited government that had been part of the orthodoxy of college courses throughout the period after the Civil War. The theory known as laissez-faire (or let alone) had important champions, such as William Graham Sumner of Yale University and the British Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer. But as the 1880s proceeded, these principles seemed to younger scholars less and less relevant to the needs of society. Those younger faculty who had studied in Germany, where the state under Otto von Bismarck had created social insurance programs, asked why such answers might not be applied in the United States [42].

New professional organizations dedicated to expanding the role of the state soon appeared. One of these was the American Economic Association, founded in 1885, which said that social problems would need ‘the united efforts, each in its own sphere, of the church, the state, and of science’ [29 p. 42]. The economists, historians, and political scientists who taught these newer ideas in their classrooms during the 1880s and 1890s imbued a generation of their students with the precept that men and women of energy and devotion co...