Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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Progressivism sprang from both liberal concerns for the poor and conservative impulses toward efficiency and order. The progressive desire to enlist an activist government to create a good society especially focused on problems of the industrial city. The chapter therefore opens with an urban, industrial tragedy, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, a case study of the progressive response.

The Roots of Progressive Reform

Progressive reformers aimed to fix a range of social ills without overturning the American system. They pursued different paths to this end: measures to curb the advancing power of corporations and end widespread corruption; efforts to bring order and efficiency to economic and political life; attempts by new interest groups to make business and government more responsive to their needs; moralistic urges to rid society of such perceived evils as drink and prostitution. They became moderate modernizers, at once nostalgic and innovative. They aimed at redeeming such traditional American values as democracy, Christian ethics, individual opportunity, and the spirit of voluntary public service.

Progressives operated on the principles of pragmatism, looking to what works, and relying on modern techniques of research, analysis, diagnosis, and prescription. Emphasizing efficiency and the shaping effects of environment, they found an appealing organizational model in the corporation, stressing careful management and planning, coordinated systems, and specialized bureaucracies of experts to carry out their reforms.

Progressive educators and social scientists sought to mold individuals by controlling their environment. Legal theorists looked to social experience rather than fixed principles. Meanwhile, a new breed of investigative journalists called "muckrakers" furnished an agenda of reform and the public indignation necessary to implement it. When volunteerism and public anger failed to curb abuses, progressives turned to politics. At all levels, new agencies and commissions staffed by impartial experts began to investigate and regulate society.

The Search for the Good Society

If progressivism ended in politics, it began with social reform, mostly of cities, where poverty and blight were so evident. Mixing middle-class professionalism and lower-class uplift, progressive reformers redefined poverty as the social consequence of deprivation, not the individual consequence of personal failure or immorality. Settlement houses helped to produce a new profession, social work, which applied more scientific approaches to helping the poor and troubled.

Women, often single and well educated, often members of women's clubs, moved into the forefront of social reform. In the process they became "social housekeepers," extending the traditional woman's sphere of nurturance into society at large. Birth control, housing reform, child labor, consumers' issues: all were promoted by women and other reformers as matters of social welfare and social justice. For many progressives woman suffrage promised to help clean up society and, just as important, politics as well. In 1920, after much agitation, the Nineteenth Amendment finally granted women the right to vote.

Controlling the Masses

The progressive vision sought to bring about the good society through controlling social environments. Thus for many progressives, urban society needed to be controlled, lest it be destroyed by immigrants and low-lifes. Some progressives therefore pressed for immigration restriction, prohibition of alcohol, and an end to urban vice, particularly prostitution. Whenever possible reformers tried to take the profit out of human misery.

The Politics of Municipal and State Reform

Increasingly politics seemed the only way to clean up the rest of society, but first politics itself had to be cleaned up. Through commission and city-manager plans, progressives tried to make municipal government less corrupt and political and more efficient. Colorful reform mayors such as Hazen Pingree of Detroit and Tom Johnson of Cleveland fought boss-dominated machines and monopolistic transit and utility companies.

Building on municipal success, progressives turned to state government. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, governors like Robert La Follette injected both democratic reforms and more experts into state government, shifting power from interest-dominated legislatures to executives and administrative agencies. Boss politics, whether at the municipal or state level, nonetheless survived because machines promoted social welfare reforms that aided their working-class constituents. Working-class "urban liberalism," whose leading advocates were often women's associations, thus became a powerful instrument of reform.

Progressivism Goes to Washington

In the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism moved to Washington and an era of federal reform began. A conservative reformer, Roosevelt accepted growth-whether of business, labor, or capital-as a natural development that promoted stability and order. He sought only to curb abuses with big government mediating among the various factions. The result, he said in 1904, would be a "Square Deal" for all Americans. Despite the compromises he usually made, Roosevelt established a dominant executive, enhanced the regulatory functions of the federal government (including regulating food processing and protecting the natural environment), and laid the groundwork for a widening federal bureaucracy. When he handed over the reins of government to his successor, William Howard Taft, conservatives in Congress had already begun to lash back. Taft's single term in office, in spite of its demonstrated progressive achievements, ended in frustration, divided the Republican Party, and allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality

Under Wilson national progressivism peaked. Rejecting Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" of private and public consolidation, Wilson promised a "New Freedom" of regulated, orderly competition and strict limits on size, whether in business or government. The achievements of his first term were considerable: downward revision of the tariff, centralization of the banking system, a federal trade commission, and a new anti-trust law. Together they raised progressive reform to new heights, even as they moved Wilson closer to the big government espoused by Roosevelt.

In the end, a decade and a half of progressivism-not always successful-had transformed American politics without overturning market capitalism. Though they sometimes failed to live up to their own ideals, such as when regulatory agencies came under the influence of industry, progressives had established that government could and should regulate private corporations for the public good.

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