Who were the progressives, and what were their major causes? Who were the muckrakers, and what impact did they have?
What were Theodore Roosevelt’s and William Howard Taft’s progressive programs, and what were those programs’ goals?
Why was the election of 1912 significant?
How was Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism different from Roosevelt’s?
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Heodore Roosevelt’s emergence as a national political leader coincided with the onset of what historians have labeled the Progressive Era (1890-1920), a period of dramatic political reform and social activism. During those thirty years, governments—local, state, and federal—grew in scope, power, and activism. Progressive reformers attacked corruption and inefficiency in government and used government authority to regulate businesses and workplaces through regular on-site inspections, regulatory commissions, and antitrust laws. The Progressive Era also witnessed the passage of a graduated (“progressive”) federal income tax, the creation of a new national banking system, and the first governmental attempts to conserve natural resources and environmental treasures. In addition, the Progressive Era saw an explosion of grassroots reform efforts across the United States, including the prohibition of alcoholic beverages and the awarding of voting rights for women.
Progressivism was a wide-ranging impulse rather than a single organized movement, a multifaceted, often fragmented, and at times contradictory
Response to the urgent problems created by unregulated industrialization, unplanned urbanization, unrelenting immigration, and the unequal distribution of wealth and power. Progressives believed that America was in a serious crisis by the late nineteenth century, and the crisis would not resolve itself. It required action—by governments, by churches, by experts, and by volunteers. As Jane Addams, the nation’s leading social reformer, who would become the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, stressed, “Action is indeed the sole medium of expression for ethics.”
Progressives came in all stripes: men and women; Democrats, Republicans, and Populists; labor unionists and business executives; teachers and professors; social workers and municipal workers; ardent religionists as well as atheists and agnostics. Whatever their motives and methods, they were earnest, well-intentioned, good-hearted people who greatly improved the quality of life and the effectiveness and integrity of government. By the 1920s, progressives had implemented significant changes at all levels of government and across all levels of society.
Yet progressivism had flaws too. The progressives were mostly middle-class urban reformers armed with Christian moralism as well as the latest research from the new social sciences, but their “do-good” perspective was often limited by class biases and racial prejudices. Progressivism had blind spots, especially concerning the volatile issues of race relations and immigration policy. Some reform efforts were in fact intended as middle-class tools to exercise paternalistic oversight of “common” people.
Elements of Reform
During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, political progressives at the local and state levels crusaded against the abuses of urban political bosses and corporate barons. Their goals were greater democracy, honest and efficient government, more effective regulation of business, and greater social justice for working people. Only by expanding the scope of local, state, and federal government involvement in society, they believed, could these goals be accomplished. The “real heart of the movement,” declared one reformer, was “to use the government as an agency of human welfare.” Progressivism also contained an element of conservatism, however. In some cases the regulation of business was proposed by business leaders who preferred regulated stability in their marketplace to the chaos and uncertainty of unrestrained competition. In addition, many reformers were motivated by conservative religious beliefs that led them to focus their energies on moral regulations such as the prohibition of alcoholic beverages and Sunday closing laws, whereby businesses were not allowed to be open on the Christian Sabbath.
THE VARIED SOURCES OF PROGRESSIVISM The progressive impulse arose in response to many societal changes, the most powerful of which were the growing tensions between labor and management in the 1880s, the chronic corruption in political life, the abusive power of big business, the hazards of the industrial workplace, especially for women and children, and the social miseries created by the devastating depression of the 1890s. The depression brought hard times to the cities, worsened already dreadful working conditions in factories, mines, and mills, deepened distress in rural areas, and aroused both the fears and the conscience of the rapidly growing middle class. Although the United States boasted the highest per capita income in the world, it also harbored some of the poorest people. In 1900 an estimated 10 million of the 82 million Americans lived in desperate poverty. Most of the destitute were among the record number of arriving immigrants, many of whom lived in city slums.
Populism was one of the primary catalysts of progressivism. The Populist platform of 1892 outlined many political reforms that would be accomplished during the Progressive Era. After the collapse of the farmers’ movement and the revival of the agricultural economy at the turn of the century, the reform spirit shifted to the cities, where middle-class activists had for years attacked the problems of political corruption and urban development.
The Mugwumps, those gentlemen reformers who had fought the spoils system and insisted that government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit, supplied progressivism with an important element of its thinking: the honest-government ideal. Over the years the honest-government movement had been broadened to include efforts to address festering urban problems such as crime, vice, and the efficient provision of gas, electricity, water, sewers, mass transit, and garbage collection.
Another significant force in fostering the most radical wing of progressivism was the influence of socialist doctrines. The small Socialist party served as the left wing of progressivism. Most progressives balked at the radicalism of socialist remedies and labor violence. In fact, the progressive impulse arose in part from a desire to counter the growing influence of militant socialism by promoting more mainstream reforms. The prominent role played by religious activists and women reformers was also an important source of progressive energy.
The Social Gospel
During the late nineteenth century more and more people took action to address the complex social problems generated by rapid urban and industrial growth. Some reformers focused on legislative solutions to social problems; others stressed direct assistance to the laboring poor in their neighborhoods or organized charity. Whatever the method or approach, however, social reformers were on the march at the turn of the century, and their activities gave to American life a new urgency and energy.
CHRISTIAN crusaders FOR REFORM Churches responded slowly to the mounting social concerns of urban America, for American Protestantism had become one of the main props of the established social order. The Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, pastor of the fashionable Plymouth Congregational Church in Brooklyn, preached the virtues of unregulated capitalism, social Darwinism, and the unworthiness of the poor. As the middle classes moved out to the new suburbs made possible by streetcar lines, their churches followed, leaving inner-city neighborhoods churchless. By the 1870s, however, a younger generation of Protestant and Catholic religious leaders had grown concerned that Christianity had turned its back on the poor and voiceless, the very people that Jesus had focused on. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a growing number of churches and synagogues began devoting their resources to community service and care of the unfortunate. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) entered the United States from England in the 1850s and grew rapidly after 1870; the Salvation Army, founded in London in 1878, came to the United States a year later.
Religious reformers Church reformers who feared that Christianity was losing its relevance among the masses began to preach what came to be called the social gospel. In 1875, Washington Gladden, a widely respected Congregational pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts, invited striking workers at a shoe factory to attend his church. They refused because the factory owners and managers were members of the church. Gladden decided that there was something wrong when churches were divided along class lines, so he wrote a pathbreaking book titled Working People and Their Employers (1876). Gladden argued that true Christianity lies not in rituals, dogmas, or even the mystical experience of God but in the principle that “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” He rejected the notion put forth by social Darwinists that the poor deserved their destitute fate and should not be helped. Christian values and virtues should govern the workplace, with worker and employer united in serving each other’s interests. Gladden endorsed labor’s right to organize unions and complained that class distinctions should not split congregations. Gladden’s efforts helped launch a new era in the development of American religious life. He and other like-minded ministers during the 1870s and 1880s reached out to the working poor who worked long hours for low wages, had inadequate housing, lacked insurance coverage for on-the-job accidents, and had no legal right to form unions.
Early Efforts at Urban Reform
THE settlement HOUSE MOVEMENT While preachers of the social gospel dispensed inspiration and promoted solidarity, other dedicated reformers attacked the problems of the slums from residential community centers called settlement houses. By 1900, perhaps a hundred settlement houses existed in the United States, some of the best known being Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr’s Hull-House in Chicago (1889), Robert A. Woods’s South End House in Boston (1891), and Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement (1893) in New York City.
Jane Addams
By the end of the century, religious groups were taking up the settlement house movement.
The settlement houses were designed to bring together prosperous men and women with the working poor, often immigrants. At Hull-House, for instance, Jane Addams focused on the practical needs of the working poor and newly arrived immigrants. She and her staff helped enroll neighborhood children in clubs and kindergartens and set up a nursery to care for the infant children of working mothers. The program gradually expanded as Hull-House sponsored health clinics, lectures, music and art studios, an employment bureau, men’s clubs, training in skills such as bookbinding, a gymnasium, and a savings bank.
Settlement house leaders realized, however, that the spreading slums made their work as effective as bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon. They therefore organized political support for local and state laws that would ensure sanitary housing codes and create public playgrounds, juvenile courts, mothers’ pensions, workers’ compensation laws, and legislation prohibiting child labor and monitoring the working conditions in factory “sweatshops.” Lillian Wald promoted the establishment of the federal Children’s Bureau in 1912, and Jane Addams, for her work in the peace movement, received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1931. When Addams died, in 1935, she was the most venerated woman in America. The settlement houses provided portals of opportunity for women to participate and even lead many progressive efforts to improve living and working conditions for newly arrived immigrants as well as American citizens.
Women’s employment and activism Settlement house workers, insofar as they were paid, made up but a fraction of all gainfully employed women. With the rapid growth of the general population, the number of employed women steadily increased, as did the percentage of women in the labor force. The greatest leaps forward came in the 1880s and the first decade of the new century, which were also peak decades of immigration, a correlation that can be explained by the immigrants’ need for income. The number of employed women went from over 2.6 million in 1880 to 4 million in 1890, then from 5.1 million in 1900 to 7.8 million in 1910. The employment of women in large numbers was the most significant event in women’s history.
As women became more involved in the world of work and wages, the women’s rights movement increasingly focused on gaining the right to vote. Immediately after the Civil War, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, seasoned leaders of the suffrage movement, demanded that the Fifteenth Amendment give the vote to women as well as black men. Such arguments, however, made little impression on the majority of men who insisted that women belonged in the domestic sphere. In 1869, a divisive issue broke the unity of the women’s movement: whether the movement should concentrate on gaining the vote at the expense of promoting other women’s issues. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to promote a women’s suffrage amendment to the Constitution, but they considered gaining the right to vote as but one among many feminist causes to be promoted. Later that year, activists formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which focused single-mindedly on the suffrage as the first and basic reform.
It would be another half century before the battle for the vote would be won, and the long struggle focused the women’s cause ever more on the primary
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In this 1870s engraving, Stanton speaks at a meeting of the National Woman Suffrage Association.
Objective of the vote. In 1890, after three years of negotiation, the rival groups united as the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), with Elizabeth Cady Stanton as president for two years, to be followed by Susan B. Anthony until 1900. The work thereafter was carried on by a new generation of activists, led by Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt. The suffrage movement remained in the doldrums until the cause of voting rights at the state level easily won a Washington state referendum in 1910 and then carried California by a close majority in 1911. The following year three more western states—Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon—joined in to make a total of nine western states with full suffrage. In 1913, Illinois granted women suffrage in presidential and municipal elections. Yet not until New York acted in 1917 did a state east of the Mississippi adopt universal suffrage.
THE MUCKRAKERS Chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and worrisome child labor in mills, mines, and factories were complex social issues; remedying them required raising public awareness and political action. The “muckrakers,” investigative journalists who thrived on exposing social ills and corporate and political corruption, got their name from Theodore Roosevelt, who acknowledged that crusading journalists were “often indispensable to. . . society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.” By writing exposes of social ills in newspapers and magazines, the muckrakers gave journalism a new social purpose, a political voice beyond simply endorsing one party or another.
The golden age of muckraking is sometimes dated from 1902, when Sam McClure, the owner of best-selling McClure’s Magazine, decided to use the publication to expose the rampant corruption in politics and corporations. “Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold” American democracy, McClure asked. His answer was investigative journalism. McClure’s and other “muckraking” magazines bravely took on corporate monopolies and crooked political machines while revealing the awful living and working conditions experienced by masses of Americans.
Without the muckrakers, the far-flung reform efforts of progressivism would never have achieved widespread popular support. In feeding the public’s appetite for sordid social facts, the muckrakers demonstrated one of the salient features of the Progressive movement, and one of its central failures: the progressives were stronger on diagnosis than on remedy. They professed a naive faith in the power of democracy. Give the people the facts, expose corruption, and bring government close to the people, reformers believed, and the correction of evils would follow automatically. The cure for the ills of democracy, it seemed, was a more informed and a more active democracy. What they failed to acknowledge was that no reform would change the essentially flawed nature of human beings.
Features of Progressivism
DEMOCRACY Progressives at the state and local levels focused on cleaning up governments. Too many elected officials, they believed, did the bidding of corporations rather than served the interests of all the people. The most important reform that political progressives promoted to democratize government and encourage greater political participation was the direct primary, whereby all party members would participate in the election of candidates, rather than the traditional practice in which an inner circle of party activists chose the nominee. Under the traditional convention system, only a small proportion of voters attended the local caucuses or precinct meetings that sent delegates to party nominating conventions. After South Carolina adopted the first statewide primary in 1896, the movement spread within two decades to nearly every state.
The party primary was but one expression of a broad progressive movement for greater public participation in the political process. In 1898, South Dakota became the first state to adopt the initiative and referendum, procedures that allow voters to enact laws directly rather than having to wait for legislative action. If a designated number of voters petitioned to have a measure put on the ballot (the initiative), the electorate could then vote it up or down (the referendum). Oregon adopted a spectrum of reform measures, including a voter-registration law (1899), the initiative and referendum (1902), the direct primary (1904), a sweeping corrupt-practices act (1908), and the recall (1910), whereby corrupt or incompetent public officials could be removed by a public petition and vote. Within a decade, nearly twenty states had adopted the initiative and referendum, and nearly a dozen had accepted the recall.
Most states adopted the party primary even in the choice of U. S. senators, heretofore selected by state legislatures. Nevada was first, in 1899, to let voters express a choice that state legislators of their party were expected to follow in choosing senators. The popular election of U. S. senators required a constitutional amendment, and the House of Representatives, beginning in 1894, four times adopted such an amendment, only to see it defeated in the Senate, which came under increasing attack as a “millionaires’ club.” In 1912 the Senate finally accepted the inevitable and agreed to the Seventeenth Amendment, authorizing popular election of senators. The amendment was ratified in 1913.
EFFICIENCY A second major theme of progressivism was the “gospel of efficiency.” In the business world during the early twentieth century, Frederick W. Taylor, the original “efficiency expert,” was developing the techniques he summed up in his book The Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylorism, as scientific industrial management came to be known, promised to reduce waste and inefficiency in the workplace through the scientific analysis of labor processes. By breaking down the production of goods into sequential steps and meticulously studying the time it took each worker to perform a task, Taylor prescribed the optimum technique for the average worker and established detailed performance standards for each job classification. The promise of higher wages for higher productivity, he believed, would motivate workers to exceed “average” expectations.
Instead, many workers resented Taylor’s innovations. They saw in scientific management a tool for employers to make people work faster than was healthy, sustainable, or fair. Yet Taylor’s controversial system brought concrete improvements in productivity, especially among those industries whose production processes were highly standardized and whose jobs were rigidly defined. “In the future," Taylor predicted in 1911, “the system [rather than the individual workers] will be first.”
In government, the efficiency movement demanded the reorganization of agencies to eliminate redundancy, to establish clear lines of authority, and to assign responsibility and accountability to specific officials.
Robert M. La Follette
A progressive proponent of expertise in government.
Two progressive ideas for making municipal government more efficient gained headway in the first decade of the new century. One, the commission system, was first adopted by Galveston, Texas, in 1901, when local government there collapsed in the aftermath of a devastating hurricane
And tidal wave. The system placed ultimate authority in a board composed of elected administrative heads of city departments—commissioners of sanitation, police, utilities, and so on. The more durable idea, however, was the city-manager plan, under which a professional administrator ran the municipal government in accordance with policies set by the elected council and mayor. Staunton, Virginia, first adopted the plan in 1908. By 1914 the National Association of City Managers had heralded the arrival of a new profession.
By the early twentieth century, many complex functions of government and business had come to require specialists with technical expertise. As Woodrow Wilson wrote, progressive ideals could be achieved only if government at all levels—local, state, and national—was “informed and administered by experts.” This principle of government by nonpartisan experts was promoted by progressive Governor Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, who established a Legislative Reference Bureau to provide elected officials with research, advice, and help in the drafting of legislation. The “Wisconsin idea” of efficient and more scientific government was widely publicized and copied. La Follette also pushed for such reforms as the direct primary, stronger railroad regulation, the conservation of natural resources, and workmen’s compensation programs to support laborers injured on the job.
ANTI-TRUST REGULATION Of all the problems facing American society at the turn of the century, one engaged a greater diversity of progressive reformers and elicited more solutions than any other: the regulation of giant corporations, which became a third major theme of progressivism. Bipartisan concern over the concentration of economic power had brought passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890, but the act had turned out to be more symbolic than effective. The problem of concentrated economic power and its abuse offered a dilemma for progressives. Efforts to restore the competition of small firms proved unworkable partly because breaking up large corporations was a complicated process. More common were efforts to “regulate” big businesses, many of whose executives preferred regulation over cutthroat competition. As time passed, however, regulatory agencies often came under the influence or control of those they were supposed to regulate. Railroad executives, for instance, generally had more intimate knowledge of the intricate details involved in their business, giving them the advantage over the outsiders who might be appointed to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC).
SOCIAL JUSTICE A fourth important feature of the Progressive movement was the effort to promote greater social justice through the creation of nonprofit charitable service organizations; efforts by reformers to clean up cities through personal hygiene, municipal sewers, and public-awareness campaigns; and reforms aimed at regulating child labor and the consumption of alcohol.
Middle-class women were the driving force behind the grassroots social justice movement. In massive numbers they fanned out to address social ills. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), founded in 1874, was the largest women’s group in the nation at the end of the nineteenth century, boasting three hundred thousand members. Frances Willard, the dynamic president of the WCTU between 1879 and 1898, believed that all social problems were interconnected and that most of them resulted from alcohol abuse. Members of the WCTU strove to close saloons, improve prison conditions, shelter prostitutes and abused women and children, support female labor unions, and champion women’s suffrage. The WCTU also lobbied for the eight-hour workday, the regulation of child labor, better nutrition, the federal inspection of food processors and drug manufacturers, free kindergartens and public playgrounds, and uniform marriage and divorce laws across the states.
With time it became apparent that social evils extended beyond the reach of private charities and grassroots organizations and demanded government intervention. In 1890, almost half of American workers toiled up to twelve hours a day—sometimes seven days a week—in unsafe, unsanitary, and unregulated conditions for bare subsistence wages. Labor legislation was perhaps the most significant reform to emerge from the drive for progressive social justice. It emerged first at the state level.
Child labor was commonplace
A young girl working as a spinner in a cotton mill in Vermont, 1910.
The National Child Labor Committee, organized in 1904, led a movement for laws prohibiting the employment of young children. Within ten years, through the organization of state and local committees and a graphic documentation of the evils of child labor by the photographer Lewis W. Hine, the committee pushed through legislation in most states banning the labor of underage children (the minimum age varying from twelve to sixteen) and limiting the hours older children might work.
Closely linked to the child-labor reform movement was a concerted effort to regulate the hours of work for women. Spearheaded by Florence Kelley, the head of the National Consumers’ League, this progressive crusade promoted state laws to regulate the long working hours imposed on women who were wives and mothers. Many states also outlawed night work and labor in dangerous occupations for both women and children. But numerous exemptions and inadequate enforcement often nullified the intent of those laws.
The Supreme Court pursued a curiously erratic course in ruling on state labor laws. In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Court voided a ten-hour-workday law because it violated workers’ “liberty of contract” to accept any jobs they wanted, no matter how bad the working conditions or pay. But in Muller v. Oregon (1908), the high court upheld a ten-hour-workday law for women largely on the basis of sociological data regarding the effects of long hours on the health and morals of women. In Buntingv. Oregon (1917), the Court accepted a maximum ten-hour day for both men and women but for twenty more years held out against state minimum-wage laws.
Legislation to protect workers against avoidable accidents gained impetus from disasters such as the March 25, 1911, fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory (called a “sweatshop”) in New York City, in which 146 of the 850 workers died, mostly foreign-born women in their teens, almost all of whom were Jewish and Italian immigrants. Escape routes were limited because the owner kept the stairway door locked to prevent theft. Workers trapped on the three upper floors of the ten-story building died in the fire or leaped to their death. The workers had wanted to form a union to negotiate safer working conditions, better pay, and shorter hours, but the owner had refused. The tragic fire served as the catalyst for progressive reforms. A state commission investigated the fire, and thirty-six new city and state laws and regulations were implemented, many of which were copied by other states around the nation.
PROGRESSIVISM AND RELIGION Religion was a crucial source of energy for progressive reformers. Many Christians and Jews embraced the social gospel, seeking to express their faith through aid to the less fortunate. Some of the reformers applied their crusade for social justice to organized religion itself. Frances Willard, who spent time as a traveling evangelist, lobbied church organizations to allow women to become ministers. As she said, “If women can organize missionary societies, temperance societies, and every kind of charitable organization. . . why not permit them to be ordained to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments of the Church?”
PROHIBITION Opposition to alcohol abuse was an ideal cause in which to merge the older religious-based ethics with the new social ethics promoting reforms. Given the importance of saloons as arenas for often-corrupt local political machines, prohibitionists could equate the “liquor traffic” with progressive suspicion of bossism and “special interests.” By eliminating booze and closing saloons, reformers hoped to remove one of the tools used by political bosses to win over converts. The battle against alcoholic beverages had begun in earnest during the nineteenth century. The WCTU had promoted the cause since 1874, and a Prohibition party had entered the national elections in 1876. But the most successful political action followed the formation in 1893 of the Anti-Saloon League, an organization that pioneered the strategy of the single-issue pressure group. Through its singleness of purpose, it forced the prohibition issue into the forefront of state and local elections. At its “Jubilee Convention” in 1913, the bipartisan Anti-Saloon League endorsed a prohibition amendment to the Constitution, adopted by Congress in 1917. By the time it was ratified, two years later, state and local action had already dried up areas occupied by nearly three fourths of the nation’s population.
Roosevelt’s Progressivism
While most progressive initiatives originated at the state and local levels during the late nineteenth century, federal reform efforts coalesced around 1900, with the emergence of Theodore Roosevelt as a national political leader. He brought to the White House in 1901 perhaps the most complex personality in American political history: he was a political reformer, an environmentalist, an obsessive hunter, a racist, and a militaristic liberal. Roosevelt developed an expansive vision of the presidency that well suited the cause of progressive reform. In one of his first addresses to Congress, he stressed the need for a new political approach. When the Constitution was drafted in 1787, he explained, the nation’s social and economic conditions were quite unlike those at the dawn of the twentieth century. “The conditions are now wholly different and wholly different action is called for.”
EXECUTIVE ACTION Roosevelt accomplished more by vigorous executive action than by passing legislation. He argued that as president he might do anything not expressly forbidden by the Constitution. In 1902, Roosevelt endorsed a “Square Deal” for all, calling for more rigorous enforcement of existing anti-trust laws and stricter controls on big business. From the outset, however, Roosevelt avoided wholesale trust-busting. Effective regulation of corporate giants was better than a futile effort to dismantle large corporations. Because Congress balked at regulatory legislation, Roosevelt sought to force the issue by a more vigorous prosecution of the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act. In 1902, Roosevelt ordered the U. S. attorney general to break up the Northern Securities Company, a giant conglomerate of interconnected railroads. In 1904 the Supreme Court ordered the railroad combination dissolved.
THE 1902 COAL STRIKE Roosevelt also used the “big stick” against corporations in the coal strike of 1902. On May 12 some 150,000 members of the United Mine Workers (UMW) walked off the job in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. They were seeking a 20 percent wage increase, a reduction in daily working hours from ten to nine, and official recognition of the union by the mine owners. The mine operators refused to negotiate. Instead, they shut down the mines to starve out the miners, many of whom were immigrants from eastern Europe. One mine owner expressed the prejudices shared by many other owners when he proclaimed, “The miners don’t suffer—why, they can’t even speak English.”
Roosevelt’s duality
Theodore Roosevelt as an “apostle of prosperity” (top) and as a Roman tyrant (bottom). Roosevelt’s energy, self-righteousness, and impulsiveness elicited sharp reactions.
By October 1902, the prolonged shutdown had caused the price of coal to soar, and hospitals and schools reported empty coal bins. President Roosevelt decided upon a bold move: he invited leaders of both sides to a conference in Washington, D. C., where he appealed to their “patriotism, to the spirit that sinks personal considerations and makes individual sacrifices for the public good.” The mine owners attended the conference but arrogantly refused even to speak to the UMW leaders. The “extraordinary stupidity and temper” of the “wooden-headed” owners infuriated Roosevelt. The president wanted to grab the spokesman for the mine owners “by the seat of his breeches” and “chuck him out” a window. Roosevelt threatened to take over the mines and send in the army to run them. When a congressman questioned the constitutionality of such a move, an exasperated Roosevelt roared, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” The threat to militarize the mines worked. The coal strike ended on October 23. The miners won a reduction to a nine-hour workday but only a 10 percent wage increase and no union recognition by the owners. Roosevelt had become the first president to use his authority to arbitrate a dispute between management and labor.
EXPANDING FEDERAL POWER Roosevelt continued to use unprecedented executive powers to enforce the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890). Altogether, his administration initiated about twenty-five anti-trust suits against oversized corporations. In 1903, Congress passed the Elkins Act, which made it illegal for railroads to take, as well as to give, secret rebates on freight charges to their favorite customers. All shippers would pay the same price. That same year, Congress created a new Bureau of Corporations to monitor the activities of interstate corporations. When Standard Oil refused to turn over its records, the government brought an anti-trust suit that resulted in the breakup of the huge company in 1911. The Supreme Court also ordered the American Tobacco Company to divide its enterprises because it had come to monopolize the cigarette industry.
Roosevelt’s Second Term
Roosevelt’s aggressive leadership built a coalition of progressives and conservatives who assured his election in his own right in 1904. The Republican Convention chose him by acclamation. The Democrats, having lost with William Jennings Bryan twice, turned to the more conservative Alton B. Parker, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. Roosevelt’s invincible popularity plus the sheer force of his personality swept the president to an impressive victory by a popular vote of 7.6 million to 5.1 million. With 336 electoral votes for the president and 140 for Parker, Roosevelt savored his lopsided victory. The president told his wife that he was “no longer a political accident.” He now had a popular mandate. On the eve of his inauguration in March 1905, Roosevelt announced: “Tomorrow I shall come into office in my own right. Then watch out for me!”
LEGISLATIVE LEADERSHIP Elected in his own right, Roosevelt approached his second term with heightened confidence and an even stronger commitment to progressive reform. The independent-minded Roosevelt took aim at the railroads first. The Elkins Act of 1903, finally outlawing rebates, had been a minor step. Railroad executives themselves welcomed it as an escape from shippers clamoring for special favors. But a new proposal for railroad regulation endorsed by Roosevelt was something else again. Enacted in 1906, the Hepburn Act for the first time gave the ICC
The meat industry
Pigs strung up along the hog-scraping rail at Armour’s packing plant in Chicago, ca. 1909.
The power to set maximum freight rates for the railroad industry.
Regulating railroads was Roosevelt’s first priority, but he also embraced the regulation of meat packers, food processors, and makers of drugs and patent medicines. Muckraking journalists revealed that companies were engaged in all sorts of unsanitary and dangerous activities in the preparation of food products. Perhaps the most telling blow against such abuses was struck by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906). Sinclair wrote the book to promote socialism, but its main impact came from its portrayal of filthy conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry:
It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them, they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together.
Roosevelt read The Jungle—and reacted quickly. He sent two agents to Chicago, and their report confirmed all that Sinclair had said about the unsanitary conditions in the packing plants. Congress and Roosevelt responded by creating the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It required federal inspection of meats destined for interstate commerce and empowered officials in the Agriculture Department to impose sanitation standards in processing plants. The Pure Food and Drug Act, enacted the same day, placed restrictions on the makers of prepared foods and patent medicines and forbade the manufacture, sale, or transportation of adulterated, misbranded, or harmful foods, drugs, and liquors.
ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION One of the most enduring legacies of Roosevelt’s leadership was his energetic support for the emerging environmental conservation movement. Roosevelt was the first president to challenge the long-standing myth of America’s having inexhaustible natural resources. In fact, Roosevelt declared that conservation was the “great material
Nathaniel Pitt Langford
The first superintendent of Yellowstone National Park, on Jupiter Terrace at Mammoth Hot Springs, ca. 18T5.
Question of the day.” Just as reformers promoted the regulation of business and industry for the public welfare, conservationists championed efforts to manage and preserve the natural environment for the benefit of future generations.
The first promoters of resource conservation were ardent sportsmen among the social elite (including Theodore Roosevelt), who worried that unregulated commercial hunters and trappers were wantonly killing game animals to the point of extermination. By 1900, most states had enacted laws regulating game hunting and had created game refuges and wardens to enforce the new rules, much to the chagrin of local hunters, including Native Americans, who now were forced to abide by state laws designed to protect the interests of wealthy recreational hunters.
Roosevelt and the sportsmen conservationists formed a powerful coalition promoting rational government management of natural resources: rivers and streams, forests, minerals, and natural wonders. Those concerns, as well as the desire of railroad companies to transport tourists to destinations featuring majestic scenery, led the federal government to displace Indians in order to establish the 2-million-acre Yellowstone National Park in
1872 at the junction of the Mon-
Gifford Pinchot
Pinchot is seen here with two children at the edge of a larch grove.
Tana, Wyoming, and idaho Territories (the National Park Service would be created in 1916 after other parks had been established). In 1881, Congress created a Division of Forestry (now the U. S. Forest Service) within the Department of the Interior. As president, Theodore Roosevelt created fifty federal wildlife refuges, approved five new national parks, fifty-one federal bird sanctuaries, and designated eighteen national monuments, including the Grand Canyon.
In 1898, while serving as vice president, Roosevelt had endorsed the appointment of Gifford Pinchot, a close friend and the nation’s first professional forester, as the head of the U. S. Division of Forestry. Pinchot and Roosevelt were pragmatic conservationists; they believed in economic growth as well as environmental preservation. To them, conservation entailed the scientific (“progressive”) management of natural resources to serve the public interest. Pinchot explained that the conservation movement sought to promote the “greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time.” Roosevelt and Pinchot used the Forest Reserve Act (1891) to protect some 172 million acres of timberland. Lumber companies were furious, but Roosevelt held firm. As he bristled, “I hate a man who skins the land.” Overall, Roosevelt’s conservation efforts helped curb the unregulated exploitation of natural resources for private gain. He set aside over 234 million acres of federal land for conservation purposes, including the creation of 45 national forests in 11 western states. As Pinchot recalled late in life, “Launching the conservation movement was the most significant achievement of the T. R. Administration, as he himself believed.”
From Roosevelt to Taft
Toward the end of his second term, Roosevelt declared, “I have had a great time as president.” Although eligible to run again, he opted for retirement. He decided that his successor should be his secretary of war, William Howard Taft, and the Republican Convention ratified the choice on its first ballot in 1908. The Democrats gave William Jennings Bryan one more chance at the highest office. Still vigorous at forty-eight, Bryan retained a faithful following but struggled to attract national support. Roosevelt advised Taft: “Do not answer Bryan; attack him. Don’t let him make the issues.” Taft followed Roosevelt’s advice, declaring that Bryan’s election would result in a “paralysis of business.”
The Republican platform endorsed Roosevelt’s progressive policies. The Democratic platform hardly differed on the need for regulation of business, but it called for a lower tariff and opposed court injunctions against labor unions that organized strikes. In the end, voters opted for Roosevelt’s chosen successor: Taft swept the Electoral College, 321 to 162. The real surprise of the election, however, was the strong showing of the Socialist party candidate, labor hero Eugene V. Debs. His 421,000 votes revealed again the depth of working-class resentment in the United States.
William Howard Taft had superb qualifications to be president. Born in Cincinnati in 1851, he had graduated second in his class at Yale and had become a preeminent legal scholar, serving on the Ohio Supreme Court and as U. S. solicitor general. In 1900, President William McKinley had appointed
William Howard Taft
Speaking at Manassas, Virginia, in 1911.
Taft as the first governor-general of the Philippines, and three years later Roosevelt named him secretary of war. Taft would become the only person to serve both as president and as chief justice of the Supreme Court. He was a progressive conservative who vowed to protect “the right of property” and the “right of liberty.” In practice, this meant that the new president was even more determined than Roosevelt to preserve “the spirit of commercial freedom” against monopolistic trusts.
TARIFF REFORM Taft’s domestic policies generated a storm of controversy within his own party. Contrary to longstanding Republican tradition, Taft preferred a lower tariff, and he made this the first important issue of his presidency. But Taft proved less skillful than Roosevelt in dealing with Congress. The resulting tariff was a hodgepodge that on the whole changed very little. Temperamentally conservative, inhibited by scruples about interfering too much with the legislative process, Taft drifted into the orbit of the Republican Old Guard and quickly alienated the progressive wing of his party, whom he tagged “assistant Democrats.”
BALLINGER AND PINCHOT In 1910, President Taft’s policies drove the wedge deeper between the conservative and progressive Republican factions. What came to be called the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy made Taft appear to be abandoning Roosevelt’s conservation policies. The strongest conservation leaders, such as Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, a Pennsylvanian, were often easterners, and Taft’s secretary of the interior, Richard A. Ballinger of Seattle, was well aware that many westerners opposed conservation programs on the grounds that they held back full economic development of the Far West. Ballinger therefore threw open to commercial use millions acres of federal lands that Roosevelt had ordered conserved. As chief of forestry, Pinchot reported to Taft his concerns about the land “giveaway,” but the president refused to intervene. When Pinchot went public with the controversy early in 1910, Taft fired him. In doing so, he set in motion a feud with Roosevelt that would eventually cost him his reelection.
TAFT AND ROOSEVELT Taft’s dismissal of Pinchot infuriated Roosevelt, who eventually decided that Taft had fallen under the spell of the Republican Old Guard leadership. During the fall of 1910, Roosevelt made several speeches promoting “sane and progressive” Republican candidates in the congressional elections. In a speech at Osawatomie, a small town in eastern Kansas, he gave a catchy name to his latest progressive principles, the “New Nationalism,” which greatly resembled the populist progressivism of William Jennings Bryan. Roosevelt issued a stirring call for more stringent federal regulation of huge corporations, a progressive income tax, laws limiting child labor, and a “Square Deal for the poor man.” He also proposed the first efforts at campaign finance reform. His purpose was not to revolutionize the political system but to save it from the threat of revolution. “What I have advocated,” he explained a few days later, “is not wild radicalism. It is the highest and wisest kind of conservatism.”
On February 24, 1912 Roosevelt challenged Taft’s leadership by entering the race for the presidency. He had decided that Taft had “sold the Square Deal down the river,” and he now dismissed Taft as a “hopeless fathead.” Roosevelt’s rebuke of Taft was in many ways undeserved. Taft had at least attempted tariff reform, which Roosevelt had never dared. He replaced Roosevelt’s friend Gifford Pinchot with men with impeccable credentials as conservationists. In the end his administration preserved more public land in four years than Roosevelt’s had in nearly eight. Taft’s administration also filed more anti-trust suits against big corporations, by a score of eighty to twenty-five.
In 1910, with Taft’s support, Congress passed the Mann-Elkins Act, which for the first time empowered the ICC to initiate changes in railroad freight rates, extended its regulatory powers to telephone and telegraph companies, and set up the Commerce Court to expedite appeals of ICC rulings. Taft also established the Bureau of Mines and the federal Children’s Bureau (1912),
Political giants
A cartoon showing Roosevelt charging through the air at Taft, who is seated on a mountain top.
And he called for statehood for Arizona and New Mexico and territorial government for Alaska (1912). The Sixteenth Amendment (1913), authorizing a federal income tax, was ratified with Taft’s support before he left office, and the Seventeenth Amendment (1913), providing for the popular election of senators, was ratified soon after he left office.
But Taft’s progressive record did not prevent Roosevelt from turning on him. Roosevelt won all but two of the thirteen states that held presidential primaries, even in Taft’s home state of Ohio. Still, the groundswell of popular support for Roosevelt was no match for Taft’s decisive position as sitting president and party leader. In state nominating conventions the Taft forces prevailed. So Roosevelt entered the Republican National Convention about a hundred votes short of victory. The Taft delegates proceeded to nominate their man by the same steamroller tactics that had nominated Roosevelt in 1904.
Roosevelt was outraged at what he called Taft’s “successful fraud” in getting the nomination. The angry Roosevelt delegates—mostly social workers, reformers, intellectuals, and executives who favored Roosevelt’s leadership—assembled in a rump convention in Chicago on August 5 to create a third political party. Roosevelt appeared before the delegates, feeling “fit as a bull moose.” Many of the most prominent progressives endorsed Roosevelt’s bid to be the first president representing a third party, the “Bull Moose” progressive party. But few professional politicians turned up, and progressive Republicans decided to preserve their party credentials and fight another day. The disruption of the Republican party caused by the rift between Taft and Roosevelt gave hope to the Democrats, whose leader, Virginia-born New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, had enjoyed remarkable success in his brief political career.
Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism
Wilson’s rise The emergence of Thomas Woodrow Wilson as the Democratic nominee in 1912 was surprisingly rapid. In 1910, before his nomination and election as governor of New Jersey, Wilson had been president of Princeton University, but he had never run for public office. Yet he had extraordinary abilities: a keen intellect and an analytical temperament, superb educational training, a fertile imagination, and a penchant for boldness. Born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, the son of a “noble-saintly mother” and a stern Presbyterian minister, Wilson had grown up in Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Young Wilson, tall and slender with a lean, long face, inherited his father’s unquestioning piety. Wilson also developed a consuming ambition to “serve” humankind. Driven by a sense of providential destiny, he nurtured an obstinate righteousness and habitual intransigence that would prove to be his undoing.
Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1879. After finishing “terribly boring” law school at the University of Virginia he had a brief, unfulfilling legal practice in Atlanta. From there he went to the new Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where he found his calling in the study of history and political science. After a seventeen-year stint as a popular college professor, he was unanimously elected president of Princeton University in 1902. Eight years later, in 1910, the Democratic party leaders in New Jersey offered Wilson their support for the 1910 gubernatorial nomination. Elected as a reform candidate, Governor Wilson turned the tables on the state’s Democratic party bosses who had put him on the ticket by persuading the state legislature to adopt an array of progressive reforms: a workers’ compensation law, a corrupt-practices law, measures to regulate public utilities, and ballot reforms. Such strong leadership brought Wilson to the attention of national Democratic party leaders. At the 1912 Democratic nominating convention Wilson faced stiff competition from several party regulars, but with the support of William Jennings Bryan, he prevailed on the forty-sixth ballot. Wilson justifiably called his nomination a “political miracle.”
THE ELECTION OF 1912 The 1912 presidential campaign involved four candidates: Wilson and Taft represented the two major parties, while Eugene V. Debs ran as a Socialist, and Roosevelt headed the Progressive party ticket. They all shared a basic progressive assumption that modern living and working conditions required active governmental regulation, but they differed in the nature and extent of their activism.
As the campaign developed, Taft quickly lost ground. “There are so many people in the country who don’t like me,” he lamented. The contest settled down to a running debate over the competing programs touted by the two front-runners: Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom. The New Nationalism would use government authority to promote social justice by enacting overdue reforms such as workers’ compensation programs for on-the-job injuries, regulations to protect women and children in the workplace, and a stronger Bureau of Corporations. These ideas and more went into the platform of the Progressive party, which called for a federal trade commission with sweeping authority over business and a tariff commission to set rates on a “scientific basis.”
Before the end of his administration, Woodrow Wilson would be swept into the current of the New Nationalism, too. But initially he adhered to the decentralizing anti-trust traditions of his party. At the start of the 1912 campaign, Wilson conferred with Louis D. Brandeis, a progressive lawyer from Boston who created the design for Wilson’s New Freedom program. It differed from Roosevelt’s New Nationalism in its insistence that the federal government should restore competition in the economy rather than focus on regulating huge monopolies. Whereas Roosevelt admired the power and efficiency of law-abiding corporations, even if they were virtual monopolies, Brandeis and Wilson were convinced that all huge industries needed to be broken up, not regulated. Wilson’s approach to progressivism required a vigorous anti-trust policy, lower tariffs to allow more foreign goods to compete in American markets, and dissolution of the concentration of financial power in Wall Street.
On election day, the Republican schism between Taft and Roosevelt opened the way for Woodrow Wilson to win handily in the Electoral College, garnering 435 votes to 88 for Roosevelt and 8 for Taft. After learning of his election, Wilson told the chairman of the Democratic party that “God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States.” Perhaps. But had the Republican party not been split in two, Wilson would have been trounced. His was the victory of a minority candidate over a divided opposition. A majority of voters had endorsed progressivism, but only a minority preferred Wilson’s program of reform, the New Freedom.
The election of 1912 was significant in several ways. First, it was a high-water mark for progressivism, with all the candidates claiming to be progressives of
One sort or another. The election was also the first to feature party primaries. The two leading candidates debated the basic issues of progressivism in a campaign unique in its focus on vital alternatives and in its highly philosophical tone. This was an election with real choices. The Socialist party, the left wing of progressivism, polled over nine hundred thousand votes for Eugene V. Debs, its highest proportion ever. Debs, the son of immigrant shopkeepers, was a fabled union organizer who had run for president twice before, but had never garnered so many votes.
Second, the election gave Democrats effective national power for the first time since the Civil War. For two years during the second administration of Grover Cleveland, from 1893 to 1895, they had held the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress, but they had fallen quickly out of power during the severe economic depression of the 1890s. Now, under
Wilson, they again held the presidency and were the majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Third, the election of Wilson brought southerners back into the orbit of national and international affairs in a significant way for the first time since the Civil War. Five of Wilson’s ten cabinet members were born in the South, three still resided there, and William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, was an idol of the southern masses. At the president’s right hand, and one of the most influential members of the Wilson circle, at least until 1919, was “Colonel” Edward M. House of Texas. Wilson described House as “my second personality. He is my independent self” House was responsible for getting Wilson’s proposals through Congress. Southern Congressmen, by virtue of their seniority, held the lion’s share of committee chairmanships. As a result, much of the progressive legislation of the Wilson era would bear the names of the southern Democrats who guided it through Congress.
Fourth and finally, the election of 1912 altered the character of the Republican party. The defection of the Bull Moose Progressives had weakened the party’s progressive wing. As a result, the leaders of the Republican party that would return to power in the 1920s would be more conservative in tone and temperament.
WILSONIAN REFORM On March 4, 1913, a huge crowd surrounded the Capitol in Washington, D. C., to witness Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration as the first Democratic president since Grover Cleveland. The president’s eloquent speech championed the ideals of social justice that animated many progressives. “We have been proud of our industrial achievements,” he said, “but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost. . . the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.” He promised specifically a lower tariff and a new nationally regulated banking system. If Roosevelt had been a strong president by force of personality, Wilson became a strong president by force of conviction. He was an expert on managing legislation through the Congress. During his first two years, Wilson pushed through more new bills than any previous president.
THE TARIFF Wilson’s leadership faced its first big test on the issue of tariff reform. He believed that corporations were misusing tariffs to suppress foreign competition and keep prices artificially high. Tariffs had thereby encouraged the growth of industrial monopolies and degraded the political process by producing armies of paid lobbyists who invaded Congress each year. In attacking high tariffs, Wilson sought to strike a blow for consumers and honest government. He acted quickly and boldly, summoning Congress to a special session (which lasted eighteen months—the longest in history) and addressing the legislators in person—the first president to do so since John Adams. Congress acted vigorously on tariff reductions; the new bill passed the House easily. The crunch came in the Senate, the traditional graveyard of tariff reform. Swarms of industry lobbyists got so thick in Washington, Wilson said, that “a brick couldn’t be thrown without hitting one of them.” The president turned the tables with a public statement that focused the spotlight on the “industrious and insidious” tariff lobby.
The Underwood-Simmons Tariff became law in 1913. It was the first time the tariff had been lowered since the Civil War. To compensate for the reduced tariff revenue, the bill created the first graduated income tax levied under the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment: 1 percent on income over $3,000 ($4,000 for married couples) up to a top rate of 7 percent on annual income of $500,000 or more.
Woodrow Wilson’s plan for banking and currency reform spells the death of the “money trust,” according to this cartoon.
THE FEDERAL RESERVE ACT Before the new tariff had cleared the Senate, the administration proposed the first major banking and currency reform since the Civil War. Ever since Andrew Jackson had killed the Second Bank of the United States in the 1
World History
