Chapter18
I
t was late afternoon on March 25, 1911, when fire broke out at the Triangle
Shirtwaist Company. The factory occupied the top three floors of a ten-story building in
the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City. Here some 500 workers, mostly
young Jewish and Italian immigrant women, toiled at sewing machines producing ladies’
blouses, some earning as little as three dollars per week. Those who tried to escape the
blaze discovered that the doors to the stairwell had been locked—the owner’s way, it was
later charged, of discouraging theft and unauthorized bathroom breaks. The fire
department rushed to the scene with high-pressure hoses. But their ladders reached only
to the sixth floor. Onlookers watched in horror as girls leaped from the upper stories. By
the time the blaze had been put out, 46 bodies lay on the street and 100 more were found
inside the building.
The Triangle fire was not the worst fire disaster in American history (seven years earlier,
over 1,000 people had died in a blaze on the General Slocum excursion boat in New York
Harbor). But it had an unrivaled impact on public consciousness. In its wake, efforts to
organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the state legislature passed new factory
inspec- tion laws and fire safety codes.
Triangle focused attention on the social divisions that plagued American society during
the first two decades of the twentieth century, a period known as the Progressive era.
These were years when economic expansion produced millions of new jobs and brought
an unprecedented array of goods within reach of American consumers. Cities expanded
rapidly—by 1920, for the first time, more Americans lived in towns and cities than in
rural areas. Yet severe inequality remained the most visible feature of the urban
landscape, and persistent labor strife raised anew the question of government’s role in
combating social inequality.
The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of describing a
broad, loosely defined political movement of indi- viduals and groups who hoped to bring
about significant change in American social and political life. Progressives included
forward-looking businessmen who realized that workers must be accorded a voice in
economic decision making, and labor activists bent on empowering industrial workers.
Other major contributors to Progressivism were members of female reform organizations
who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation, social scientists who
believed that aca- demic research would help to solve social problems, and members of
an anxious middle class who feared that their status was threatened by the rise of big
business.
FOCUS QUESTIONS
Why was the city such a central element in Progres- sive America?
How did the labor and women’s movements expand the meanings of American freedom?
In what ways did Progres- sivism include both demo- cratic and antidemocratic impulses?
How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?
544 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
As this and the following chapter will discuss, Progressive reform- ers addressed issues
of American freedom in varied, contradictory ways. The era saw the expansion of
political and economic freedom through the reinvigoration of the movement for woman
suffrage, the use of politi- cal power to expand workers’ rights, and efforts to improve
democratic government by weakening the power of city bosses and giving ordinary
citizens more influence on legislation. It witnessed the flowering of understandings of
freedom based on individual fulfillment and personal self-determination. At the same
time, many Progressives supported efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom to those
deemed fit to exer- cise it properly. The new system of white supremacy born in the
1890s became fully consolidated in the South. Growing numbers of native-born
Americans demanded that immigrants abandon their traditional cultures and become fully
“Americanized.” And efforts were made at the local and national levels to place political
decision making in the hands of experts who did not have to answer to the electorate.
Even as the idea of freedom expanded, freedom’s boundaries contracted in Progressive
America.
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER
SOCIETY
Farms and Cities
The Progressive era was a period of explosive economic growth, fueled by increasing
industrial production, a rapid rise in population, and the continued expansion of the
consumer marketplace. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the economy’s total
output rose by about 85 per- cent. For the last time in American history, farms and cities
grew together. Farm families poured into the western Great Plains. More than 1 million
claims for free government land were filed under the Homestead Act of 1862—more than
in the previous forty years combined. Irrigation trans- formed the Imperial Valley of
California and parts of Arizona into major areas of commercial farming.
But it was the city that became the focus of Progressive politics and of a new massconsumer society. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose population
exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them
Economic growth
Growth of the cities
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 545
New York, with 4.7 million residents. The twenty-three square miles of Manhattan Island
were home to over 2 million people, more than lived in thirty-three of the states.
The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive era. Immigrant
families in New York’s down- town tenements often had no electricity or indoor toilets.
Three miles to the north stood the mansions of Fifth Avenue’s Millionaire’s Row.
According to one esti- mate, J. P. Morgan’s financial firm directly or indirectly controlled
40 percent of all financial and industrial capital in the United States.
TABLE 18.1 Rise of the City, 1880–
1920
POPULATION YEAR (PERCENTAGE)
1880 20% 1890 28 1900 38 1910 50 1920 68
WITH 100,000+ POPULATION
12 15 18 21 26
URBAN NUMBER OF CITIES
The Muckrakers
Lewis Hine used his camera to chronicle the plight of child laborers such as this young spinner in a southern
cotton factory.
Some observers saw the city as a place where corporate greed undermined traditional
American values. At a time when more than 2 million children under the age of fifteen
worked for wages, Lewis Hine photographed child laborers to draw attention to persistent
social inequality. A new generation of journalists writing for mass-circulation national
magazines exposed the ills of industrial and urban life. The Shame of the Cities (1904) by
Lincoln Steffens showed how party bosses and business leaders profited from political
corruption. Theodore Roosevelt disparaged such writing as “muckraking,” the use of
journalistic skills to expose the underside of American life.
Major novelists took a similar unsparing approach to social ills. Perhaps the era’s most
influential novel was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), whose description of
unsanitary slaughterhouses and the sale of rotten meat stirred public outrage and led
directly to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act of
1906.
Immigration as a Global Process
If one thing characterized early-twentieth-century cities, it was their immigrant character.
The “new immigration” from southern and eastern Europe (discussed in Chapter 17) had
begun around 1890 but reached its peak during the Progressive era. Between 1901 and
the outbreak of World
546 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
War I in Europe in 1914, some 13 million immigrants came to the United States, the
majority from Italy, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. In fact, Progressive-era
immigration formed part of a larger process of worldwide migration set in motion by
industrial expansion and the decline of traditional agriculture.
During the years from 1840 to 1914 (when immigration to the United States would be
virtually cut off, first by the outbreak of World War I and then by legislation), perhaps 40
million persons emigrated to the United States and another 20 million to other parts of the
Western Hemisphere, including Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and the Caribbean. Millions
of persons migrated to Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, mainly from India and
China.
Numerous causes inspired this massive uprooting of population. Rural southern and
eastern Europe and large parts of Asia were regions marked by widespread poverty and
illiteracy, burdensome taxation, and declining economies. Political turmoil at home, like
the revolution that engulfed Mexico after 1911, also inspired emigration.
Most European immigrants to the United States entered through Ellis Island. Located in
New York Harbor, this became in 1892 the nation’s main facility for processing
immigrants. Millions of Americans today trace their ancestry to immigrants who passed
through Ellis Island.
At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking place in the
West. After the exclusion of immi- grants from China in the late nineteenth century,
approximately 72,000 Japanese arrived, primarily to work as agricultural laborers in
California’s fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii’s sugar plantations. Between 1910
and 1940, Angel Island in San Francisco Bay—the “Ellis Island of the West”—served as
the main entry point for immigrants from Asia. Far larger was Mexican immigration.
Between 1900 and 1930, some 1 million Mexicans (more than 10 percent of that
country’s popula- tion) entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few
European countries.
By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born, the highest
percentage in the country’s history.
Worldwide migration
Causes of emigration
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 547
The Immigrant Quest for Freedom
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived imagining the
United States as a land of freedom, where all persons enjoyed equality before the law,
could worship as they pleased, enjoyed economic opportunity, and had been emancipated
from the oppressive social hierarchies of their homelands. “America is a free country,”
one Polish immigrant wrote home. “You don’t have to be a serf to anyone.” Agents sent
abroad by the American government to investigate the reasons for large-scale
immigration reported that the main impetus was a desire to share in the “freedom and
prosperity enjoyed by the people of the United States.” Although some of the new
immigrants, espe- cially Jews fleeing religious persecution in the Russian empire, thought
of themselves as permanent emigrants,
the majority initially planned to earn enough money to return home and purchase land.
Groups like Mexicans and Italians included many “birds of passage,” who remained only
temporarily in the United States.
The new immigrants clustered in close-knit “ethnic” neighborhoods with their own shops,
theaters, and community organizations, and often continued to speak their native tongues.
Although most immigrants earned more than was possible in the impoverished regions
from which they came, they endured low wages, long hours, and dangerous working
conditions. In the mines and factories of Pennsylvania and the Midwest, eastern European
immigrants performed low-wage unskilled labor, whereas native-born workers dominated
skilled and supervisory jobs. The vast majority of Mexican immigrants became poorly
paid agricultural, mine, and railroad laborers, with little prospect of upward economic
mobility. “My people are not in America,” remarked one Slavic priest, “they are under it.”
Consumer Freedom
Cities, however, were also the birthplace of a mass-consumption society that added new
meaning to American freedom. During the Progressive era, large downtown department
stores, neighborhood chain stores, and retail mail-order houses made available to
consumers throughout the country the vast array of goods now pouring from the nation’s
factories. By 1910, Americans could purchase, among many other items, electric sew- ing
machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players.
The rise of mass consumption
548 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consump- tion. Amusement
parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city dwellers. By 1910, 25
million Americans per week, mostly working- class urban residents, were attending
“nickelodeons”—motion-picture theaters whose five-cent admission charge was far lower
than that of vaudeville shows.
The Working Woman
The new visibility of women in urban public places—at work, as shoppers, and in places
of entertainment like cinemas and dance halls—indicated that traditional gender roles
were changing dramatically in Progressive America. As the Triangle fire revealed, more
and more women were working for wages. Immigrant women were largely confined to
low-paying factory employment. But for native-born white women, the kinds of jobs
available expanded enormously. By 1920, around 25 percent of employed women were
office workers or telephone operators. Female work was no longer con- fined to young,
unmarried white women and adult black women. In 1920, of 8 million women working
for wages, one-quarter were married and living with their husbands. The working
woman—immigrant and native, working- class and professional—became a symbol of
female emancipation. “We enjoy our independence and freedom” was the assertive
statement of the Bachelor Girls Social Club, a group of female mail-order clerks in New
York.
The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remark- ably similar battles
within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents and their self-consciously
“free” children, especially daughters.
AN URBAN AGE AND A CONSUMER SOCIETY 549
Contemporaries, native and immigrant, noted how “the novelties and frivolities of
fashion” appealed to young working women, who spent part of their meager wages on
clothing and makeup and at places of entertainment. Daughters considered parents who
tried to impose curfews or to prevent them from going out alone to dances or movies as
old-fashioned and not sufficiently “American.”
The Rise of Fordism
If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. Ford did not invent the automobile, but he developed
the techniques of production and marketing that brought it within the reach of ordinary
Americans. In 1905, he established the Ford Motor Company, one of dozens of small
automobile manufacturing firms that emerged in these years. Three years later, he
introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to
navigate the country’s poorly maintained roads.
Park, Michigan, adopted the
In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland
method of production known as the moving assembly line, in which car frames were
brought to workers on a continuously moving conveyor belt. The process enabled Ford to
expand output by greatly reducing the time it took to produce each car. In 1914, he raised
wages at his factory to the unheard-of level of five dollars per day (more than double the
pay of most industrial workers), enabling him to attract a steady stream of skilled laborers.
When other businessmen criticized him for endangering profits by paying high wages,
Ford replied that workers must be able to afford the goods being turned out by American
factories. Ford’s output rose from 34,000 cars, priced at $700 each, in 1910, to 730,000
Model T’s that sold at a price of $316 (well within the reach of many workers) in 1916.
The economic system based on mass production and mass consumption came to be called
Fordism.
The Promise of Abundance
As economic production shifted from capital goods (steel, railroad equip- ment, etc.) to
consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of increasing sales, often
by linking goods with the idea of freedom.
550 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Numerous products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of
Liberty as a sales device. Economic abun- dance would eventually come to define the
“American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through acquiring material goods.
The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a “living wage” and
an “American standard of liv- ing”—that offered a new language for criti- cizing the
inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America. Father John A. Ryan’s
influential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent standard of living (one that
enabled a person to participate in the consumer economy) as a “natural and absolute”
right of citizenship. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo XIII’s
powerful statement of 1894, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce of economic
life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to organize unions, and
repudiated competitive individu- alism in favor of a more cooperative vision of the good
society. For the first time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a
central place in descriptions of American society and its future.
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM
The immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize indus- trial capitalism
and find common ground in a society still racked by labor conflict and experiencing
massive immigration from abroad. Some Progressives proposed to return to a competitive
marketplace populated by small producers. Others accepted the permanence of the large
corpo- ration and looked to the government to reverse the growing concentra- tion of
wealth and to ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the
economic and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfillment and unimpeded
self-expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused with
new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early twentieth
century.
An advertisement for Palmolive soap illustrates how companies marketed goods to consumers by creating anxiety
and invoking exotic images. The accompanying text promises
“a perfect skin” and includes an imagined image of Cleopatra, claiming that the soap embodies “ancient beauty
arts.” By 1915, Palmolive was the best-selling soap in the world.
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 551
Industrial Freedom
In Progressive America, complaints of a loss of freedom came not only from the most
poorly paid factory workers but from better-off employees as well. Large firms in the
automobile, electrical, steel, and other industries sought to implement greater control over
the work process. Efficiency expert Frederick W. Taylor pioneered what he called
“scientific management.” Through scientific study, Taylor believed, the “one best way”
of producing goods could be determined and implemented. The role of workers was to
obey the detailed instructions of supervisors. Not surprisingly, many skilled workers saw
the erosion of their traditional influence over the work process as a loss of freedom.
These developments helped to place the ideas of “industrial freedom” and “industrial
democracy,” which had entered the political vocabulary in the Gilded Age, at the center
of political discussion during the Progressive era. Lack of “industrial freedom” was
widely believed to lie at the root of the much-discussed “labor problem.” Many
Progressives believed that the key to increasing industrial freedom lay in empowering
workers to participate in economic decision making via strong unions. Louis D. Brandeis,
an active ally of the labor movement whom President Woodrow Wilson appointed to the
Supreme Court in 1916, maintained that unions embodied an essen- tial principle of
freedom—the right of people to govern themselves. The contradiction between “political
liberty” and “industrial slavery,” Brandeis insisted, was America’s foremost social
problem.
The Socialist Presence and Eugene Debs
Economic freedom was also a rallying cry of American socialism, which reached its
greatest influence during the Progressive era. Founded in 1901, the Socialist Party called
for immediate reforms such as free college educa- tion, legislation to improve the
condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic control over the economy
through public ownership of railroads and factories.
By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, published hundreds
of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American Federation of Labor, and had
elected scores of local officials. Socialism flourished in diverse communities throughout
the country. On the Lower East Side of New York City, it arose from the economic
exploita- tion of immigrant workers and Judaism’s tradition of social reform. Here, a
vibrant socialist culture developed, complete with Yiddish-language newspapers and
theaters, as well as large public meetings and street demonstrations. In 1914, the district
elected socialist Meyer London to
Peak of American socialism
Centers of socialist strength
552 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Congress. Another center of socialist strength was Milwaukee, where Victor Berger, a
German-born teacher and newspaper editor, mobilized local AFL unions into a potent
political force. Socialism also made inroads among tenant farmers in old Populist areas
like Oklahoma, and in the min- ing regions of Idaho and Montana.
No one was more important in spreading the socialist gospel or linking it to ideals of
equality, self-government, and freedom than Eugene V. Debs, the railroad union leader
who, as noted in the previous chapter, had been jailed during the Pullman Strike of 1894.
For two decades, Debs crisscrossed the country preaching that control of the economy by
a democratic govern- ment held out the hope of uniting “political equality and economic
freedom.” “While there is a lower class,” proclaimed Debs, “I am in it, . . . while there is
a soul in prison, I am not free.”
Throughout the Atlantic world of the early twentieth century, social- ism was a rising
presence. Debs would receive more than 900,000 votes
Although the Socialist Party never won more than 6 percent of the vote nationally, it gained control of numerous
small and medium-sized cities between 1900 and 1920.
Debs and socialism
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 553
VOICES OF FREEDOM
554 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
From Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics (1898)
Women and Economics, by the prolific feminist social critic and novelist Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, influenced the new generation of women aspiring to greater
independence. It insisted that how people earned a living shaped their entire lives and that
therefore women must free themselves from the home to achieve genuine freedom.
It is not motherhood that keeps the housewife on her feet from dawn till dark; it is house service,
not child service. Women work longer and harder than most men. . . . A truer spirit is the
increasing desire of young girls to be independent, to have a career of their own, at least for a
while, and the growing objection of countless wives to the pitiful asking for money, to the
beggary of their position. More and more do fathers give their daughters, and husbands their
wives, a definite allowance,—a separate bank account,—something . . . all their own.
The spirit of personal independence in the women of today is sure proof that a change has
come. . . . The radical change in the economic position of women is advancing upon us. . . . The
growing individualization of democratic life brings inevitable change to our daughters as well as
to our sons. . . . One of its most noticeable features is the demand in women not only for their
own money, but for their own work for the sake of personal expression. Few girls today fail to
manifest some signs of this desire for individual expression. . . .
Economic independence for women necessarily involves a change in the home and family
relation. But, if that change is for the advantage of individual and race, we need not fear it. It does
not involve a change in the marriage relation except in withdrawing the element of economic
dependence, nor in the relation of mother to child save to improve it. But it does involve the
exercise of human faculty in women, in social service and exchange rather than in domestic
service solely. . . . [Today], when our still developing social needs call for an ever-increasing . . .
freedom, the woman in marrying becomes the house-servant, or at least the housekeeper, of the
man. . . . When women stand free as economic agents, they will [achieve a] much better
fulfilment of their duties as wives and mothers and [contribute] to the vast improvement in health
and happiness of the human race.
From John Mitchell, “The Workingman’s Conception of
Industrial Liberty” (1910)
During the Progressive era, the idea of “industrial liberty” moved to the center of political
discussion. Progressive reformers and labor leaders like John Mitchell, head of the United
Mine Workers, condemned the prevailing idea of liberty of contract in favor of a broader
definition of economic freedom.
While the Declaration of Independence established civil and political liberty, it did not, as you all
know, establish industrial liberty. . . . Liberty means more than the right to choose the field of
one’s employment. He is not a free man whose family must buy food today with the money that
is earned tomorrow. He is not really free who is forced to work unduly long hours and for wages
so low that he can not provide the necessities of life for himself and his family; who must live in a
crowded tenement and see his children go to work in the mills, the mines, and the factories before
their bodies are developed and their minds trained. To have freedom a man must be free from the
harrowing fear of hunger and want; he must be in such a position that by the exercise of
reasonable frugality he can provide his family with all of the necessities and the reasonable
comforts of life. He must be able to educate his children and to provide against sickness, accident,
and old age. . . .
A number of years ago the legislatures of several coal producing States enacted laws requiring
employers to pay the wages of their workmen in lawful money of the United States and to cease
the practice of paying wages in merchandise. From time immemorial it had been the custom of
coal companies to conduct general supply stores, and the workingmen were required, as a
condition of employment, to accept products in lieu of money in return for services rendered.
This system was a great hardship to the workmen. . . . The question of the constitutionality of this
legislation was carried into the courts and by the highest tribunal it was declared to be an invasion
of the workman’s liberty to deny him the right to accept merchandise in lieu
of money as payment of his wages. . . . [This is] typical of hundreds of instances in which laws
that have been enacted for the protection of the workingmen have been declared by the courts to
be unconstitutional, on the grounds that they invaded the liberty of the working people. . . . Is it
not natural that the workingmen should feel that they are being guaranteed the liberties they do
not want and denied the liberty that is of real value to them? May they not exclaim, with Madame
Roland [of the French Revolution], “O Liberty! Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy
name!”
QUESTIONS
1. What does Gilman see as the main
obstacles to freedom for women?
2. What does Mitchell believe will be nec- essary to establish “industrial liberty”?
3. How do the authors differ in their view of the relationship of the family to individual
freedom?
VOICES OF FREEDOM 555
or president (6 percent of the total) in 1912. In that year, the socialist Appeal to Reason,
published in Girard, Kansas, with a circulation of 700,000, was the largest weekly
newspaper in the country.
AFL and IWW
Socialism was only one example of widespread discontent in Progressive America.
Having survived the depression of the 1890s, the American Federation of Labor saw its
membership triple to 1.6 million between 1900 and 1904. At the same time, its president,
Samuel Gompers, sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders
willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. Most employers
nonetheless continued to view unions as an intolerable interference with their authority
and resisted them stubbornly.
The AFL mainly represented the most privileged American workers— skilled industrial
and craft laborers, nearly all of them white, male, and native-born. In 1905, a group of
unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusion- ary policies formed the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW). Part trade union, part advocate of a workers’ revolution that would
seize the means of production and abolish the state, the IWW made solidarity its guiding
principle. The organization sought to mobilize those excluded from the AFL—the
immigrant factory-labor force, migrant timber and agricultural workers, women, blacks,
and even the despised Chinese on the West Coast.
The New Immigrants on Strike
A series of mass strikes among immigrant workers placed labor’s demand for the right to
bargain collectively at the forefront of the reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that
although ethnic divisions among work- ers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness
could also be a basis of unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis.
The IWW did not originate these confrontations but was sometimes called in by local
unionists to solidify the strikers. IWW organizers printed leaflets, post- ers, and banners
in multiple languages and insisted that each nationality enjoy representation on the
committee coordinating a walkout. It drew on the sense of solidarity within immigrant
communities to persuade local religious leaders, shopkeepers, and officeholders to
support the strikes.
The labor conflict that had the greatest impact on public conscious- ness took place in
Lawrence, Massachusetts. The city’s huge woolen mills employed 32,000 men, women,
and children representing twenty-five nationalities. When the state legislature in January
1912 enacted a fifty-
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
The right to collective bargaining
556 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
four-hour limit to the workweek, employ- ers reduced the weekly take-home pay of those
who had been laboring longer hours. Workers spontaneously went on strike.
In February, strikers devised the idea of sending strikers’ children out of the city
for the duration of the walkout. Socialist fami- lies in New York City agreed to take
them in. The sight of the children, many of whom appeared pale and half-starved,
marching up Fifth Avenue from the train station led to a wave of sympathy for the
strikers. The gov- ernor of Massachusetts soon intervened, and the strike was settled
on the workers’ terms. A banner carried by the Lawrence strikers gave a new slogan
to the labor movement: “We want bread and roses, too”—a declaration that workers
sought not only higher wages but the opportunity to enjoy the finer things of life.
Labor and Civil Liberties
The fiery organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, who at the age of eighty-three had been jailed
after addressing striking Colorado miners, later told a New York audience that the union
“had only the Constitution; the other side had the bayonets.” Yet the struggle of workers
for the right to strike and of labor radicals against restraints on open-air speaking made
free speech a significant public issue in the early twentieth century. By and large, the
courts rejected their claims. But these battles laid the foundation for the rise of civil
liberties as a central component of freedom in twentieth- century America.
The IWW’s battle for freedom of expression is a case in point. Lacking union halls, its
organizers relied on songs, street theater, impromptu orga- nizing meetings, and street
corner gatherings to spread their message and attract support. In response to IWW
activities, officials in Los Angeles, Spokane, Denver, and more than a dozen other cities
limited or prohibited outdoor meetings. To arouse popular support, the IWW filled the
jails with members who defied local law by speaking in public. In nearly all the freespeech fights, however, the IWW eventually forced local officials to give way. “Whether
they agree or disagree with its methods or aims,” wrote one journalist, “all lovers of
liberty everywhere owe a debt to this organization for . . . [keeping] alight the fires of
freedom.”
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM 557
The New Feminism
During the Progressive era, the word “feminism” first entered the politi- cal vocabulary.
In 1914, a mass meeting at New York’s Cooper Union debated the question “What is
Feminism?” Feminism, said one speaker, meant women’s emancipation “both as a human
being and a sex-being.” Feminists’ forthright attack on traditional rules of sexual
behavior added a new dimension to the discussion of personal freedom.
One symbol of the new era was Isadora Duncan, who brought from California a new,
expressive dance based on the free movement of a body liberated from the constraints of
traditional technique and costume. “I beheld the dance I had always dreamed of,” wrote
the novelist Edith Wharton on seeing a Duncan performance, “satisfying every sense as a
flower does, or a phrase of Mozart’s.”
During this era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex o’clock” in America.
Issues of intimate personal relations previ- ously confined to private discussion blazed
forth in popular magazines and public debates. For the generation of women who adopted
the word “feminism” to express their demand for greater liberty, free sexual expression
and reproductive choice emerged as critical definitions of women’s emancipation.
The Birth-Control Movement
The growing presence of women in the labor market reinforced demands for access to
birth control, an issue that gave political expression to chang- ing sexual behavior. Emma
Goldman, who had emigrated to the United States from Lithuania at the age of sixteen,
toured the country lecturing on subjects from anarchism to the need for more enlightened
attitudes toward homosexuality. She regularly included the right to birth control in her
speeches and distributed pamphlets with detailed information about various contraceptive
devices.
By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive infor- mation and devices,
Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish- American working-class family,
placed the issue of birth control at the heart of the new feminism. In 1911, she began a
column on sex education, “What Every Girl Should Know,” for The Call, a New York
socialist news- paper. Postal officials barred one issue, containing a column on venereal
disease, from the mails. The next issue of The Call included a blank page with the
headline: “What Every Girl Should Know—Nothing; by order of the U. S. Post Office.”
558 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
By 1914, the intrepid Sanger was openly advertising birth-control devices in her own
journal, The Woman Rebel. “No woman can call herself free,” she proclaimed, “who does
not own and control her own body [and] can choose consciously whether she will or will
not be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a clinic in a working-class neighborhood of
Brooklyn and began distributing contraceptive devices to poor Jewish and Italian women,
an action for which she was sentenced to a month in prison.
Native American Progressivism
Many groups participated in the Progressive impulse. Founded in 1911, the Society of
American Indians was a reform organization typical of the era. It brought together Indian
intellectuals to promote discussion of the plight of Native Americans in the hope that
public exposure would be the first step toward remedying injustice. It created a panIndian public space independent of white control.
Many of these Indian intellectuals were not unsympathetic to the basic goals of federal
Indian policy, including the transformation of communal landholdings on reservations
into family farms. But Carlos Montezuma, a founder of the Society of American Indians,
became an outspoken critic. Born in Arizona, he had been captured as a child by
members of a neighboring tribe and sold to a traveling photographer, who brought him to
Chicago. There Montezuma attended school and eventu- ally obtained a medical degree.
In 1916, Montezuma established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning “signal- ing”), that
called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Convinced that outsiders exerted
too much power over life on the reservations, he insisted that self-determination was the
only way for Indians to escape poverty and marginalization. But he also demanded that
Indians be granted full citizenship and all the constitutional rights of other Americans.
Indian activists would later rediscover him as a forerunner of Indian radicalism.
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM
Effective Freedom
Progressivism was an international movement. In the early twentieth century, cities
throughout the world experienced similar social strains arising from rapid
industrialization and urban growth. Reformers across the globe exchanged ideas and
envisioned new social policies. The Chinese
Goals of federal Indian policy
Worldwide progressivism
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 559
leader Sun Yat-Sen, for example, was influenced by the writings of Henry George and
Edward Bellamy.
As governments in Britain, France, and Germany instituted old-age pensions, minimumwage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regu- lation of workplace safety, American
reformers came to believe they had much to learn from the Old World. The term “social
legislation,” meaning governmental action to address urban problems and the insecurities
of working-class life, originated in Germany but soon entered the political vocabulary of
the United States.
Drawing on the reform programs of the Gilded Age and the example of European
legislation, Progressives sought to reinvigorate the idea of an activist, socially conscious
government. Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful
government posed a threat to free- dom, because their understanding of freedom was
itself in flux. “Effective freedom,” wrote the philosopher John Dewey, was far different
from the “highly formal and limited concept of liberty” as protection from outside
restraint. Freedom was a positive, not a negative, concept—the “power to do specific
things.” It sometimes required the government to act on behalf of those with little wealth
or power. Thus, freedom in the Progressive era inevitably became a political question.
State and Local Reforms
In the United States, with a political structure more decentralized than in European
countries, state and local governments enacted most of the era’s reform measures. In
cities, Progressives worked to reform the structure of govern- ment to reduce the power
of political bosses, establish public control of “natural monopo- lies” like gas and water
works, and improve public transportation. They raised prop- erty taxes in order to spend
more money on
schools, parks, and other public facilities. Gilded Age mayors and governors pioneered
urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe
manufacturer, Hazen Pingree served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897. He battled
the business interests that had domi- nated city government, forcing gas and tele- phone
companies to lower their rates, and
560 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
established a municipal power plant. Hiram Johnson, who as public pros- ecutor had
secured the conviction for bribery of a San Francisco political boss, was elected governor
of California in 1910. Having promised to “kick the Southern Pacific [Railroad] out of
politics,” he secured passage of the Public Utilities Act, one of the country’s strongest
railroad-regulation mea- sures, as well as laws banning child labor and limiting the
working hours of women.
The most influential Progressive administration at the state level was that of Robert M.
La Follette, who made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy.” After serving as a
Republican member of Congress, La Follette became convinced that an alliance of
railroad and lumber com- panies controlled state politics. Elected governor in 1900, he
instituted a series of measures known as the Wisconsin Idea, including nominations of
candidates for office through primary elections rather than by political bosses, the
taxation of corporate wealth, and state regulation of railroads and public utilities. To staff
his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of
Wisconsin.
Progressive Democracy
Progressives hoped to reinvigorate democracy by restoring political power to the
citizenry and civic harmony to a divided society. Alarmed by the upsurge in violent class
conflict and the unrestricted power of cor- porations, they believed that political reforms
could help to create a unified “people” devoted to greater democracy and social
reconciliation. Yet increasing the responsibilities of government made it all the more
impor- tant to identify who was entitled to political participation and who was not.
The Progressive era saw a host of changes implemented in the politi- cal process, many
seemingly contradictory in purpose. The electorate was simultaneously expanded and
contracted, empowered and removed from direct influence on many functions of
government. Democracy was enhanced by the Seventeenth Amendment (1917)—which
provided that U.S. senators be chosen by popular vote rather than by state legislatures—
by widespread adoption of the popular election of judges, and by the use of primary
elections among party members to select candidates for office. Several states, including
California under Hiram Johnson, adopted the initiative and referendum (the former
allowed voters to propose leg- islation, the latter to vote directly on it) and the recall, by
which officials could be removed from office by popular vote. The era culminated with a
constitutional amendment enfranchising women—the largest expansion of democracy in
American history.
Public Utilities Act
Robert La Follette and the Wisconsin Idea
Civic harmony
Initiative and referendum
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 561
Restricting democratic participation
But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation,
most strikingly the disenfranchisement of blacks in the South, as noted in Chapter 17. To
make city government more honest and efficient, many localities replaced elected mayors
with appointed non- partisan commissions or city managers—a change that insulated
officials from machine domination but also from popular control. New literacy tests and
residency and registration requirements, common in northern as well as southern states,
limited the right to vote among the poor. In the eyes of many Progressives, the “fitness”
of voters, not their absolute numbers, defined a functioning democracy.
Most Progressive thinkers were highly uncomfortable with the real world of politics,
which seemed to revolve around the pursuit of narrow class, ethnic, and regional interests.
Robert M. La Follette’s reliance on college professors to staff important posts in his
administration reflected a larger Progressive faith in expertise. The government could
best exer- cise intelligent control over society through a democracy run by impar- tial
experts who were in many respects unaccountable to the citizenry. Political freedom was
less a matter of direct participation in government than of qualified persons devising the
best public policies.
Jane Addams and Hull House
But alongside this elitist politics, Progressivism also included a more dem- ocratic vision
of the activist state. As much as any other group, organized women reformers spoke for
the more democratic side of Progressivism. Still barred from voting and holding office in
most states, women none- theless became central to the political history of the
Progressive era. The immediate catalyst was a growing awareness among women
reformers of the plight of poor immigrant communities and the emergence of the
condition of women and child laborers as a major focus of public concern.
The era’s most prominent female reformer was Jane Addams, who had been born in 1860,
the daughter of an Illinois businessman. In 1889, she founded Hull House in Chicago, a
“settlement house” devoted to improving the lives of the immigrant poor. Unlike
previous reformers who had aided the poor from afar, settlement-house workers moved
into poor neighbor- hoods. They built kindergartens and playgrounds for children,
established employment bureaus and health clinics, and showed female victims of
domestic abuse how to gain legal protection. By 1910, more than 400 settle- ment houses
had been established in cities throughout the country.
Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were more
than 80,000 college-educated women in the United
562 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
States. Many found a calling in providing social services, nursing, and education to poor
families in the growing cities. The efforts of middle-class women to uplift the poor, and
of laboring women to uplift themselves, helped to shift the center of gravity of politics
toward activist government. Women like Addams discovered that even well-organized
social work was not enough to alleviate the problems of inadequate housing, income, and
health. Government action was essential. Hull House instigated an array of reforms in
Chicago, soon adopted elsewhere, including stronger build- ing and sanitation codes,
shorter working hours and safer labor condi- tions, and the right of labor to organize.
The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” Florence Kelley, a
veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s power as consumers as a force for
social change. Under Kelley’s leader- ship, the National Consumers’ League became the
nation’s leading advo- cate of laws governing the working conditions of women and
children.
The Campaign for Woman Suffrage
After 1900, the campaign for woman suffrage moved beyond the elit- ism of the 1890s to
engage a broad coalition ranging from middle-class members of women’s clubs to
unionists, socialists, and settlement house workers. For the first time, it became a mass
movement. Membership in the National American Woman Suffrage Association grew
from 13,000 in 1893 to more than 2 million by 1917. By 1900, more than half the states
allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues, and
Hull House
Florence Kelley
A mass movement
A “suffrage float” promotes equal rights for women in Nebraska. Although most of its neighboring states had
extended the right to vote to women, Nebraska’s male voters rejected woman suffrage in a 1914 referendum.
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 563
Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah had adopted full woman suffrage. Between 1910
and 1914, seven more western states enfranchised women. In 1913, Illinois became the
first state east of the Mississippi River to allow women to vote in presidential elections.
These campaigns, which brought women aggressively into the public sphere, were
conducted with a new spirit of militancy. They also made effective use of the techniques
of advertising, publicity, and mass enter- tainment characteristic of modern consumer
society. California’s success- ful 1911 campaign utilized automobile parades, numerous
billboards and electric signs, and countless suffrage buttons and badges. Nonetheless,
state campaigns were difficult, expensive, and usually unsuccessful. The movement
increasingly focused its attention on securing a national consti- tutional amendment
giving women the right to vote.
Maternalist Reform
Ironically, the desire to exalt women’s role within the home did much to inspire the
reinvigoration of the suffrage movement. Female reform- ers helped to launch a mass
movement for direct government action to improve the living standards of poor mothers
and children. Laws provid- ing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of young
children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. These “maternalist” reforms
rested on the assumption that the government should encourage women’s capacity for
bearing and raising children and enable them to be economically independent at the same
time. Both feminists and believers
564 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
in conventional domestic roles supported such measures. The former hoped that these
laws would subvert women’s dependence on men, the latter that they would strengthen
traditional families and the mother-child bond.
Other Progressive legislation recognized that large numbers of women did in fact work
outside the home but defined them as a dependent group (like children) in need of state
protection in ways male workers were not. In 1908, in the landmark case of Muller v.
Oregon, Louis D. Brandeis filed a famous brief citing scientific and sociological studies
to demon- strate that because they had less strength and endurance than men, long hours
of labor were dangerous for women, while their unique ability to bear children gave the
government a legitimate interest in their working conditions. Persuaded by Brandeis’s
argument, the Supreme Court unani- mously upheld the constitutionality of an Oregon
law setting maximum working hours for women.
Thus, three years after the notorious Lochner decision invalidating a New York law
limiting the working hours of male bakers (discussed in Chapter 16), the Court created
the first large breach in “liberty of contract” doctrine. But the cost was high: at the very
time that women in unprec- edented numbers were entering the labor market and earning
college degrees, Brandeis’s brief and the Court’s opinion solidified the view of women
workers as weak, dependent, and incapable of enjoying the same economic rights as men.
By 1917, thirty states had enacted laws limiting the hours of labor of female workers.
The maternalist agenda that built gender inequality into the early foundations of the
welfare state by extension raised the idea that gov- ernment should better the living and
working conditions of men as well. Indeed, Brandeis envisioned the welfare state as one
rooted in the notion of universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent
income and protection against unemployment and work-related accidents.
This vision, too, enjoyed considerable support in the Progressive era. By 1913, twentytwo states had enacted workmen’s compensation laws to benefit workers, male or female,
injured on the job. This legislation was the first wedge that opened the way for broader
programs of social insurance. But state minimum-wage laws and most laws regulating
working hours applied only to women. Women and children may have needed protection,
but interference with the freedom of contract of adult male workers was still widely seen
as degrading. The establishment of a standard of living and working conditions beneath
which no American should be allowed to fall would await the coming of the New Deal.
Louis D. Brandeis and
Muller v. Oregon
The unintended effects of
Muller
A form of social insurance
THE POLITICS OF PROGRESSIVISM 565
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS
Despite creative experiments in social policy at the city and state levels, the tradition of
localism seemed to most Progressives an impediment to a renewed sense of national
purpose. Poverty, economic insecurity, and lack of industrial democracy were national
problems that demanded national solutions. The democratic national state, wrote New
Republic editor Herbert Croly, offered an alternative to control of Americans’ lives by
narrow inter- ests that manipulated politics or by the all-powerful corporations. Croly
proposed a new synthesis of American political traditions. To achieve the “Jeffersonian
ends” of democratic self-determination and individual free- dom, he insisted, the country
needed to employ the “Hamiltonian means” of government intervention in the economy.
Each in his own way, the Progressive presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard
Taft, and Woodrow Wilson—tried to address this challenge.
Theodore Roosevelt
In September 1901, the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated William McKinley while
the president visited the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. At the age of
forty-two, Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest man ever to hold the
office of president. In many ways, he became the model for the twentieth-century
president, an official actively and continuously engaged in domestic and foreign affairs.
(The foreign policies of the Progressive presidents will be dis- cussed in the next chapter.)
He moved aggressively to set the political agenda.
Roosevelt’s domestic program, which he called the Square Deal, attempted to confront
the problems caused by economic consolidation by distinguishing between “good” and
“bad” corporations. The former, among which he included U.S. Steel and Standard Oil,
served the public interest. The latter were run by greedy financiers interested only in
profit and had no right to exist.
Soon after assuming office, Roosevelt shocked the corporate world by announcing his
intention to prosecute under the Sherman Antitrust Act the Northern Securities Company.
Created by financier J. P. Morgan, this “holding company” owned the stock and directed
the affairs of three major western railroads. It monopolized transportation between the
Great Lakes and the Pacific. In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities
dissolved, a major victory for the antitrust movement.
566 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Reelected that same year, Roosevelt pushed for more direct federal regulation of the
economy. He proposed to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Commission, which the
Supreme Court had essentially limited to collecting economic statistics. By this time,
journalistic exposés, labor unrest, and the agitation of Progressive reformers had created
significant public support for Roosevelt’s regulatory program. In 1906, Congress passed
the Hepburn Act, giving the ICC the power to examine railroads’ business records and to
set reasonable rates, a significant step in the devel- opment of federal intervention in the
corporate economy. That year, as has been noted, also saw the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Many businessmen sup- ported these measures, recognizing that they would benefit from
greater public confidence in the quality and safety of their products. But they were
alarmed by Roosevelt’s calls for federal inheritance and income taxes and the regulation
of all interstate businesses.
John Muir and the Spirituality of Nature
If the United States lagged behind Europe in many areas of social policy, it led the way in
the conservation of natural resources. The first national park, Yellowstone in Wyoming,
was created in 1872, partly to preserve an area of remarkable natural beauty and partly at
the urging of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which was anxious to promote western
tourism. In the 1890s, the Scottish-born naturalist John Muir organized the Sierra Club to
help preserve forests from uncontrolled logging by timber companies.
Muir’s love of nature stemmed from deep religious feelings. Nearly blinded in an
accident in an Indianapolis machine shop where he worked in his twenties, he found in
the restoration of his sight an inspiration to appre- ciate God’s creation. He called forests
“God’s first temples.” In nature, he believed, men could experience directly the presence
of God. Muir was inspired by the Transcendentalists of the pre–Civil War era—like
Henry David Thoreau, he lamented the intrusions of civilization on the natural
environment. But unlike them, Muir developed a broad following. As more and more
Americans lived in cities, they came to see nature less as something to conquer and more
as a place for recreation and personal growth. Muir’s spiritual understanding of nature
resonated with these urbanites.
The Conservation Movement
In the 1890s, Congress authorized the president to withdraw “forest reserves” from
economic development, a restriction on economic freedom in the name of a greater social
good. But it was under Theodore Roosevelt
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS 567
that conservation became a concerted federal policy. A dedicated outdoors- man who
built a ranch in North Dakota in the 1880s, Roosevelt moved to preserve parts of the
natural environment from economic exploitation.
Relying for advice on Gifford Pinchot, the head of the U.S. Forest Service, he ordered
that millions of acres be set aside as wildlife preserves and encouraged Congress to create
new national parks. In some ways, conservation was a typical Progressive reform.
Manned by experts, the government could stand above political and economic battles,
serving the public good while preventing “special interests” from causing irreparable
damage to the environment. The aim was less to end the economic utili- zation of natural
resources than to develop responsible, scientific plans for their use. Pinchot halted timber
companies’ reckless assault on the nation’s forests. But unlike Muir, he believed that
development and con- servation could go hand in hand and that logging, mining, and
grazing on public lands should be controlled, not eliminated.
Taft in Office
Having served nearly eight years as president, Roosevelt did not run again in 1908. His
chosen successor, William Howard Taft, defeated William Jennings Bryan, making his
third unsuccessful race for the White House.
Although temperamentally more conservative than Roosevelt, Taft pursued antitrust
policy even more aggressively. He persuaded the Supreme Court in 1911 to declare John
D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company (one of Roosevelt’s “good” trusts) in violation of
the Sherman Antitrust Act and to order its breakup into separate marketing, produc- ing,
and refining companies. The government also won a case against American Tobacco,
which the Court ordered to end pricing policies that were driving smaller firms out of
business.
Taft supported the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which authorized Congress
to enact a graduated income tax (one whose rate of taxation is higher for wealthier
citizens). It was ratified shortly before he left office. A 2 percent tax on incomes over
$4,000 had been included in a tariff enacted in 1894 but had been quickly declared
unconstitutional by the Supreme Court as a “communistic threat to property.” A key step
in the modernization of the federal government, the income tax provided a reliable and
flexible source of revenue for a national state whose powers, responsibilities, and
expenditures were growing rapidly.
Despite these accomplishments, Taft seemed to gravitate toward the more conservative
wing of the Republican Party. Taft’s rift with Progressives grew deeper when Richard A.
Ballinger, the new secretary
568
Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
of the interior, concluded that Roosevelt had exceeded his authority in placing land in
forest reserves. Ballinger decided to return some of this land to the public domain, where
mining and lumber companies would have access to it. Gifford Pinchot accused Ballinger
of colluding with busi- ness interests and repudiating the environmental goals of the
Roosevelt administration. When Taft fired Pinchot in 1910, the breach with party
Progressives became irreparable. In 1912, Roosevelt challenged Taft for the Republican
nomination. Defeated, Roosevelt launched an independent campaign as the head of the
new Progressive Party.
The Election of 1912
All the crosscurrents of Progressive-era thinking came together in the pres- idential
campaign of 1912. The four-way contest between Taft, Roosevelt, Democrat Woodrow
Wilson, and Socialist Eugene V. Debs became a national debate on the relationship
between political and economic free- dom in the age of big business. At one end of the
political spectrum stood Taft, who stressed that economic individualism could remain the
founda- tion of the social order so long as government and private entrepreneurs
cooperated in addressing social ills. At the other end was Debs. Relatively few
Americans supported the Socialist Party’s goal of abolishing the “capitalistic system”
altogether, but its immediate demands—including public ownership of the railroads and
banking system, government aid to the unemployed, and laws establishing shorter
working hours and a mini- mum wage—summarized forward-looking Progressive
thought.
But it was the battle between Wilson and Roosevelt over the role of the fed- eral
government in securing economic freedom that galvanized public attention in 1912. The
two represented competing strands of Progressivism. Both believed government action
necessary to preserve individual freedom, but they differed over the dangers of increasing
the gov- ernment’s power and the inevitability of economic concentration.
New Freedom and New Nationalism
Strongly influenced by Louis D. Brandeis, with whom he consulted frequently during
Ballinger and Pinchot
A key election
Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party candidate, speaking in Chicago during the 1912 presidential campaign.
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS 569
the campaign, Wilson insisted that democracy must be reinvigorated by restoring market
competition and freeing government from domination by big business. Wilson feared big
government as much as he feared the power of the corporations. The New Freedom, as he
called his program, envisioned the federal government strengthening antitrust laws,
protecting the right of workers to unionize, and actively encouraging small businesses—
creat- ing, in other words, the conditions for the renewal of economic competition
without increasing government regulation of the economy. Wilson warned that
corporations were as likely to corrupt government as to be managed by it, a forecast that
proved remarkably accurate.
To Roosevelt’s supporters, Wilson seemed a relic of a bygone era; his program, they
argued, served the needs of small businessmen but ignored the inevitability of economic
concentration and the interests of profession- als, consumers, and labor. Espousing the
New Nationalism, his program of 1912, Roosevelt insisted that only the “controlling and
directing power of the government” could restore “the liberty of the oppressed.” He
called for heavy taxes on personal and corporate fortunes and federal regulation of
industries, including railroads, mining, and oil.
The Progressive Party platform offered numerous proposals to promote social justice.
Drafted by a group of settlement-house activists, labor reformers, and social scientists,
the platform laid out a blueprint for a modern, democratic welfare state, complete with
woman suffrage, federal supervision of corporate enterprise, national labor and health
legislation for women and children, an eight-hour day and “living wage” for all workers,
and a national system of social insurance covering unem- ployment, medical care, and
old age. Roosevelt’s campaign helped to give freedom a modern social and economic
content and established an agenda that would define political liberalism for much of the
twentieth century.
Wilson’s First Term
The Republican split ensured a sweeping victory for Wilson, who won about 42 percent
of the popular vote, although Roosevelt humiliated Taft by winning about 27 percent to
the president’s 23 percent. In office, Wilson proved himself a strong executive leader. He
was the first president to hold regular press conferences, and he delivered messages
personally to Congress rather than sending them in written form, as did all his predecessors since John Adams.
Roosevelt’s New Nationalism
The Progressive Party Platform of 1912
570
Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
With Democrats in control of Congress, Wilson moved aggressively to implement his
version of Progressivism. The first sig- nificant measure of his presidency was the
Underwood Tariff, which substantially reduced duties on imports and, to make up for lost
revenue, imposed a gradu- ated income tax on the richest 5 percent of Americans. There
followed the Clayton Act of 1914, which exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and
barred courts from issu- ing injunctions curtailing the right to strike. In 1916 came the
Keating-Owen Act, outlaw- ing child labor in the manufacture of goods sold in interstate
commerce; the Adamson Act, establishing an eight-hour workday on the nation’s
railroads; and the Warehouse Act, reminiscent of the Populist subtreasury plan, which
extended credit to farmers when they stored their crops in federally licensed warehouses.
The Expanding Role of Government
Some of Wilson’s policies seemed more in tune with Roosevelt’s New Nationalism than
the New Freedom of 1912. Wilson presided over the cre- ation of two powerful new
public agencies. In 1913, Congress created the Federal Reserve System, consisting of
twelve regional banks. They were overseen by a central board appointed by the president
and empowered to handle the issuance of currency, aid banks in danger of failing, and
influ- ence interest rates so as to promote economic growth.
A second expansion of national power occurred in 1914, when Congress established the
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate and prohibit “unfair” business activities
such as price-fixing and monopo- listic practices. Both the Federal Reserve and the FTC
were welcomed by many business leaders as a means of restoring order to the economic
marketplace and warding off more radical measures for curbing corporate power. But
they reflected the remarkable expansion of the federal role in the economy during the
Progressive era.
The Federal Reserve System
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS 571
By 1916, the social ferment and political mobilizations of the Progressive era had given
birth to a new American state. With new laws, administrative agencies, and independent
commissions, government at the local, state, and national levels had assumed the
authority to protect and advance “industrial freedom.” Government had established rules
for labor relations, business behavior, and financial policy, protected citi- zens from
market abuses, and acted as a broker among the groups whose conflicts threatened to
destroy social harmony. But a storm was already engulfing Europe that would test the
Progressive faith in empowered gov- ernment as the protector of American freedom.
572 Chapter 18 The Progressive Era
Chapter19
I
n 1902, W. T. Stead published a short volume with the arresting title The
Americanization of the World; or, the Trend of the Twentieth Century, in which he
predicted that the United States would soon emerge as “the greatest of world-powers.”
But what was most striking about his work was that Stead located the source of
American power less in the realm of military might or territorial acquisition than in
the country’s single-minded commitment to the “pursuit of wealth” and the relentless
international spread of American culture—art, music, journalism, even ideas about
religion and gender relations. He foresaw a future in which the United States
promoted its interests and values through an unending involvement in the affairs of
other nations. Stead proved to be an accurate prophet.
The Spanish-American War had established the United States as an international
empire. Despite the conquest of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, however, the
country’s overseas holdings remained tiny compared to those of Britain, France, and
Germany. And no more were added, except for a strip of land surrounding the
Panama Canal, acquired in 1903, and the Virgin Islands, purchased from Denmark in
1917. In 1900, Great Britain ruled over more than 300 million people in possessions
scattered across the globe, and France had nearly 50 million subjects in Asia and
Africa. Compared with these, the American presence in the world seemed very small.
As Stead suggested, America’s empire differed significantly from those of European
countries—it was economic, cul- tural, and intellectual, rather than territorial.
The world economy at the dawn of the twentieth century was already highly
globalized. An ever-increasing stream of goods, invest- ments, and people flowed
from country to country. Although Britain still dominated world banking and the
British pound remained the major currency of international trade, the United States
had become the leading industrial power. By 1914, it produced more than one-third of
the world’s manufactured goods. Spearheads of American culture like movies and
popular music were not far behind.
Europeans were fascinated by American ingenuity and mass- production techniques.
Many feared American products and culture would overwhelm their own. “What are
the chief new features of London life?” one British writer asked in 1901. “They are
the telephone, the por- table camera, the phonograph, the electric street car, the
automobile, the typewriter. . . . In every one of these the American maker is supreme.”
America’s growing connections with the outside world led to increasing military and
political involvement. In the two decades after 1900, many of the basic principles that
would guide American foreign policy for the rest of the century were formulated. The
“open door”—the free flow of trade, investment, information, and culture—emerged
as a key principle of American foreign relations.
Americans in the twentieth century often discussed foreign policy in the language of
freedom. A supreme faith in America’s historic destiny and in the righteousness of its
ideals enabled the country’s leaders to think of the United States simultaneously as an
emerging great power and as the worldwide embodiment of freedom.
More than any other individual, Woodrow Wilson articulated this vision of America’s
relationship to the rest of the world. His foreign policy, called by historians “liberal
internationalism,” rested on the conviction that economic and political progress went
hand in hand. Thus, greater worldwide freedom would follow inevitably from
increased American investment and trade abroad. Frequently during the twentieth
century, this conviction would serve as a mask for American power and self- interest.
It would also inspire sincere efforts to bring freedom to other peoples. In either case,
liberal internationalism represented a shift from the nineteenth-century tradition of
promoting freedom primarily by example to active intervention to remake the world
in the American image.
AN ERA OF INTERVENTION
Just as they expanded the powers of the federal government in domestic affairs, the
Progressive presidents were not reluctant to project American power outside the
country’s borders. At first, their interventions were confined to the Western
Hemisphere, whose affairs the United States had claimed a special right to oversee
ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. Between 1901 and 1920, U.S. marines
landed in Caribbean countries more than twenty times. Usually, they were dispatched
to create a welcoming economic environment for American companies that wanted
stable access to raw materials like bananas and sugar, and for bankers nervous that
their loans to local governments might not be repaid.
“I Took the Canal Zone”
Theodore Roosevelt became far more active in international diplomacy than most of
his predecessors, helping, for example, to negotiate a settle- ment of the RussoJapanese War of 1905, a feat for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Closer
to home, his policies were more aggressive. “I have always been fond of the West
African proverb,” he wrote, “‘ Speak softly and carry a big stick.’”
The idea of a canal across the fifty-one-mile-wide Isthmus of Panama had a long
history. A long-time proponent of American naval develop- ment, Roosevelt was
convinced that a canal would facilitate the move- ment of naval and commercial
vessels between the two oceans. In 1903, when Colombia, of which Panama was a
part, refused to cede land for the project, Roosevelt helped set in motion an uprising
by Panamanian conspirators. An American gunboat prevented the Colombian army
from suppressing the rebellion.
On establishing its independence, Panama signed a treaty giving the United States
both the right to construct and operate a canal and sovereignty over the Canal Zone, a
ten-mile-wide strip of land through
Between 1898 and 1941, the United States intervened militarily numerous times in Caribbean countries,
generally to protect the economic interests of American banks and investors.
which the route would run. A remarkable feat of engineering, the canal was the
largest construction project in history to that date. Like the build- ing of the
transcontinental railroad in the 1860s and much construction work today, it involved
the widespread use of immigrant labor. Most of the 60,000 workers came from the
Caribbean islands of Barbados and Jamaica, but others hailed from Europe, Asia, and
the United States. When completed in 1914, the canal reduced the sea voyage
between the East and West Coasts of the United States by 8,000 miles. “I took the
Canal Zone,” Roosevelt exulted. But the manner in which the canal had been initiated,
and the continued American rule over the Canal Zone, would long remain a source of
tension. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter negotiated treaties that led to turning over
the canal’s operation and control of the Canal Zone to Panama in the year 2000 (see
Chapter 26).
The Roosevelt Corollary
Roosevelt’s actions in Panama reflected a principle that came to be called the
Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. This held that the United States had the
right to exercise “an international police power” in the Western Hemisphere—a
significant expansion of James Monroe’s pledge to defend the hemisphere against
European intervention. In 1904, Roosevelt ordered American forces to seize the
customs houses of the Dominican Republic to ensure payment of its debts to
European and American investors. In 1906, he dispatched troops to Cuba to oversee a
disputed election; they remained in the country until 1909.
Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, landed marines in Nicaragua to protect
a government friendly to American economic inter- ests. In general, however, Taft
emphasized economic investment and loans from American banks, rather than direct
military intervention, as the best way to spread American influence. As a result, his
foreign policy became known as Dollar Diplomacy.
Moral Imperialism
The son of a Presbyterian minister, Woodrow Wilson brought to the presidency a
missionary zeal and a sense of his own and the nation’s moral righteousness. He
appointed as secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, a strong anti-imperialist.
Wilson promised a new foreign policy that would respect Latin America’s
independence and free it from foreign economic domination. But Wilson could not
abandon the conviction that the United States had a responsibility to teach other
peoples the lessons of democracy.
Wilson’s “moral imperialism” produced more military interventions in Latin America
than any president before or since. In 1915, he sent marines to occupy Haiti after the
government refused to allow American banks to oversee its financial dealings. In
1916, he established a military govern- ment in the Dominican Republic, with the
United States controlling the country’s customs collections and paying its debts.
American soldiers remained in the Dominican Republic until 1924 and in Haiti until
1934. Wilson’s foreign policy underscored a paradox of modern American history:
the presidents who spoke the most about freedom were likely to intervene most
frequently in the affairs of other countries.
Wilson and Mexico
Wilson’s major preoccupation in Latin America was Mexico, where in 1911 a
revolution led by Francisco Madero overthrew the government of dictator Porfirio
Díaz. Two years later, without Wilson’s knowledge but with the backing of the U.S.
ambassador and of American companies that controlled Mexico’s oil and mining
industries, military commander Victoriano Huerta assassinated Madero and seized
power.
Wilson was appalled. He would “teach” Latin Americans, he added, “to elect good
men.” When civil war broke out in Mexico, Wilson ordered American troops to land
at Vera Cruz to prevent the arrival of weapons meant for Huerta’s forces. But to
Wilson’s surprise, Mexicans greeted the marines as invaders rather than liberators.
In 1916, the war spilled over into the United States when “Pancho” Villa, the leader
of one faction, attacked Columbus, New Mexico, where he killed seventeen
Americans. Wilson ordered 10,000 troops into northern Mexico on an expedition that
unsuccessfully sought to arrest Villa. Mexico was a warning that it might be difficult
to use American might to reorder the internal affairs of other nations.
AMERICA AND THE GREAT WAR
In June 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the
throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. This deed set in motion a
chain of events that plunged Europe into the most devastating war the world had ever
seen. In the years before 1914, European nations had engaged in a scramble to obtain
colonial possessions overseas and had constructed a shifting series of alliances
seeking military domination within Europe. Within a little more than a month,
because of the European powers’ interlocking military alliances, Britain, France,
Russia, and Japan (the Allies) found themselves at war with the Central Powers—
Germany, Austria- Hungary, and the Ottoman empire, whose holdings included
modern-day Turkey and much of the Middle East.
German forces quickly overran Belgium and part of northern France. The war then
settled into a prolonged stalemate, with bloody, indecisive battles succeeding one
another. New military technologies—submarines, airplanes, machine guns, tanks, and
poison gas—produced unprecedented slaughter. In one five-month battle at Verdun,
in 1916, 600,000 French and German soldiers perished—nearly as many combatants
as in the entire American Civil War. By the time the war ended, an estimated 10
million soldiers, and uncounted millions of civilians, had perished. And the war was
followed by widespread famine and a worldwide epidemic of influenza that killed an
estimated 21 million people more.
The Great War, or World War I as it came to be called, dealt a severe blow to the
optimism and self-confidence of Western civilization. For decades, philosophers,
reformers, and politicians had hailed the triumph of reason and human progress, an
outlook hard to reconcile with the mass slaughter of World War I. The conflict was
also a shock to European socialist and labor movements. Karl Marx had called on the
“workers of the world” to unite against their oppressors. Instead, they marched off to
kill each other.
Neutrality and Preparedness
As war engulfed Europe, Americans found themselves sharply divided. BritishAmericans sided with their nation of origin, as did many other Americans who
associated Great Britain with liberty and democracy and Germany with repressive
government. On the other hand, German- Americans identified with Germany, and
Irish-Americans bitterly opposed any aid to the British. Immigrants from the Russian
empire, especially Jews, had no desire to see the United States aid the czar’s regime.
When war broke out in 1914, President Wilson proclaimed American neutrality. But
naval warfare in Europe reverberated in the United States. Britain declared a naval
blockade of Germany and began to stop American merchant vessels. Germany
launched submarine warfare against ships entering and leaving British ports. In May
1915, a German submarine sank the British liner Lusitania (which was
carrying a large cache of arms) off the coast of Ireland, causing the death of 1,198
pas- sengers, including 124 Americans. Wilson composed a note of protest so strong
that Bryan resigned as secretary of state, fearing that the president was laying the
founda- tion for military intervention.
The sinking of the Lusitania outraged American public opinion and strength- ened the
hand of those who believed that the United States must prepare for pos- sible entry
into the war. Wilson himself had strong pro-British sympathies and viewed Germany
as “the natu- ral foe of liberty.” By the end of 1915, he had embarked on a policy of
“preparedness”—a crash program to expand the American army and navy.
The Road to War
In May 1916, Germany announced the suspension of submarine war- fare against
noncombatants. Wilson’s preparedness program seemed to have succeeded in
securing the right of Americans to travel freely on the high seas. “He kept us out of
war” became the slogan of his campaign for reelection. With the Republican Party
reunited after its split in 1912, the election proved to be one of the closest in
American history. Wilson defeated Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes by
only twenty- three electoral votes and about 600,000 popular votes out of more than
18 million cast. Partly because he seemed to promise not to send American soldiers to
Europe, Wilson carried ten of the twelve states that had adopted woman suffrage.
Without the votes of women, Wilson would not have been reelected.
Almost immediately, however, Germany announced its intention to resume submarine
warfare against ships sailing to or from the British Isles, and several American
merchant vessels were sunk. In March 1917, British spies intercepted and made
public the Zimmerman Telegram, a message by German foreign secretary Arthur
Zimmerman calling on Mexico to join in a coming war against the United States and
promis- ing to help it recover territory lost in the Mexican War of 1846–1848. On
April 2, Wilson went before Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany.
“The world,” he proclaimed, “must be made safe for
democracy.” The war resolution passed the Senate 82–6 and the House 373–50.
The Fourteen Points
Not until the spring of 1918 did American forces arrive in Europe in large numbers.
By then, the world situation had taken a dramatic turn. In November 1917, a communist revolution headed by Vladimir Lenin overthrew the Russian government. Shortly
thereafter, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war and published the secret treaties by
which the Allies had agreed to divide up conquered territory after the war—an
embarrassment for Wilson, who had promised a just peace.
Partly to assure the country that the war was being fought for a moral cause, Wilson
in January 1918 issued the Fourteen Points, the clear- est statement of American war
aims and of his vision of a new international order. Among the key principles were
self-determination for all nations, freedom of the seas, free trade, open diplomacy (an
end to secret treaties), the readjustment of colonial claims with colonized people
given “equal weight” in deciding their futures, and the creation of a “general
association of nations” to preserve the peace. Wilson envisioned this last provision,
which led to the establishment after the war of the League of Nations, as a kind of
global counterpart to the regulatory commissions Progressives had created at home to
maintain social harmony. The Fourteen Points established the agenda for the peace
conference that followed the war.
The United States threw its economic resources and manpower into the war. When
American troops finally arrived in Europe, they turned the tide of battle. In the spring
of 1918, they helped repulse a German advance near Paris and by July were
participating in a major Allied counteroffensive. In September, in the Meuse-Argonne
campaign, more than 1 million American soldiers under General John J. Pershing
helped push back the outnumbered and exhausted German army. With his forces in
full retreat, the German kaiser abdicated on November 9. Two days later, Germany
sued for peace. Over 100,000 Americans had died, a substantial number, but they
were only 1 percent of the 10 million soldiers killed in the Great War.
THE WAR AT HOME
The Progressives’ War
For most Progressives, the war offered the possibility of reforming American society
along scientific lines, instilling a sense of national unity and self-sacrifice, and
expanding social justice. That American power could now disseminate Progressive
values around the globe heightened the war’s appeal.
Almost without exception, Progressive intellectuals and reformers, joined by
prominent labor leaders and native-born socialists, rallied to Wilson’s support. The
roster included intellectuals like John Dewey, AFL head Samuel Gompers, socialist
writers like Upton Sinclair, and promi- nent reformers including Florence Kelley and
Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
The Wartime State
Like the Civil War, World War I created, albeit temporarily, a national state with
unprecedented powers and a sharply increased presence in Americans’ everyday lives.
Under the Selective Service Act of May 1917, 24 million men were required to
register with the draft. New federal agencies moved to regulate industry,
transportation, labor relations, and agriculture. Headed by Wall Street financier
Bernard Baruch, the War Industries Board presided over all elements of war
production from the distribution of raw materials to the prices of manufactured goods.
To spur efficiency, it established standardized specifications for everything from
automobile tires to shoe colors (three were permitted—black, brown, and white). The
Railroad Administration took control of the nation’s trans- portation system, and the
Fuel Agency rationed coal and oil. The Food Administration instructed farmers on
modern methods of cultivation and promoted the more efficient preparation of meals.
The War Labor Board, which included representatives of govern- ment, industry, and
the American Federation of Labor, pressed for the establishment of a minimum wage,
an eight-hour workday, and the right to form unions. During the war, wages rose
substantially, working condi- tions in many industries improved, and union
membership doubled. To finance the war, corporate and individual income taxes rose
enormously. By 1918, the wealthiest Americans were paying 60 percent of their
income in taxes. Tens of millions of Americans answered the call to demonstrate their
patriotism by purchasing Liberty bonds.
The Propaganda War
During the Civil War, it had been left to private agencies—Union Leagues, the Loyal
Publication Society, and others—to mobilize prowar public opin- ion. But the Wilson
administration decided that patriotism was too impor- tant to leave to the private
sector. Many Americans opposed American participation, notably the Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW) and the bulk of the Socialist Party, which in 1917
condemned the declaration of war as “a crime against the people of the United States”
and called on “the workers of all countries” to refuse to fight.
In April 1917, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public
Information (CPI) to explain to Americans and the world, as its director, George Creel,
put it, “the cause that compelled America to take arms in defense of its liberties and
free institutions.” The CPI flooded the country with prowar propaganda, using every
available medium from pamphlets (of which it issued 75 million) to posters,
newspaper advertise- ments, and motion pictures.
The CPI couched its appeal in the Progressive language of social coop- eration and
expanded democracy. Abroad, this meant a peace based on the principle of national
self-determination. At home, it meant improving “industrial democracy.” The CPI
distributed pamphlets foreseeing a postwar society complete with a “universal eighthour day” and a living wage for all.
Although “democracy” served as the key term of wartime mobiliza- tion, “freedom”
also took on new significance. The war, a CPI advertise- ment proclaimed, was being
fought in “the great cause of freedom.” The most common visual image in wartime
propaganda was the Statue of Liberty, employed especially to rally support among
immigrants. Buying
All combatants raised money by selling war bonds. In the German poster, the text reads: “The war loan is the
way to peace. The enemies want it this way [referring to the mailed fist]. So subscribe.” The
fist conveys sheer power—it offers an image rather different from the representation of liberty on the
American war poster.
Liberty bonds became a demonstration of patriotism. Wilson’s speeches cast the
United States as a land of liberty fighting alongside a “concert of free people” to
secure self-determination for the oppressed peoples of the world. Government
propaganda whipped up hatred of the wartime foe by portraying Germany as a nation
of barbaric Huns.
The Coming of Woman Suffrage
The enlistment of “democracy” and “freedom” as ideological war weapons inevitably
inspired demands for their expansion at home. In 1916, Wilson had cautiously
endorsed votes for women. America’s entry into the war threatened to tear the
suffrage movement apart, because many advocates had been associated with
opposition to American involvement. Indeed, among those who voted against the
declaration of war was the first woman member of Congress, the staunch pacifist
Jeannette Rankin of Montana. Although defeated in her reelection bid in 1918,
Rankin would return to Congress in 1940. She became the only member to oppose the
declaration of war against Japan in 1941, which ended her political career. In 1968, at
the age of eighty-five, Rankin took part in a giant march on Washington to protest the
war in Vietnam.
As during the Civil War, however, most leaders of woman suffrage organizations
enthusiastically enlisted in the effort. Women sold war bonds, organized patriotic
rallies, and went to work in war production jobs. Some 22,000 served as clerical
workers and nurses with American forces in Europe.
At the same time, a new generation of college-educated activists, orga- nized in the
National Women’s Party, pressed for the right to vote with mili- tant tactics many
older suffrage advocates found scandalous. The party’s leader, Alice Paul, had studied
in England between 1907 and 1910, when the British suffrage movement adopted a
strategy that included arrests, impris- onments, and vigorous denunciations of a maledominated political system. Paul compared Wilson to the kaiser, and a group of her
followers chained themselves to the White House fence, resulting in a seven-month
prison sentence. When they began a hunger strike, the prisoners were force-fed.
The combination of women’s patriotic service and widespread outrage over the
treatment of Paul and her fellow prisoners pushed the adminis- tration toward fullfledged support of woman suffrage. In 1920, the long struggle ended with the
ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which barred states from using sex as a
qualification for the suffrage. The United States became the twenty-seventh country
to allow women to vote.
Prohibition
The war gave a powerful impulse to other campaigns that had engaged the energies of
many women in the Progressive era. Prohibition, a move- ment inherited from the
nineteenth century that had gained new strength and militancy in Progressive America,
finally achieved national success during the war. Employers hoped it would create a
more disciplined labor force. Urban reformers believed that it would promote a more
orderly city environment and undermine urban political machines, which used saloons
as places to organize. Women reformers hoped Prohibition would protect wives and
children from husbands who engaged in domestic violence when drunk or who
squandered their wages at saloons. Many native-born Protestants saw Prohibition as a
way of imposing “American” values on immigrants.
After some success at the state level, Prohibitionists came to see national legislation
as their best strategy. The war gave them added ammunition. Many prominent
breweries were owned by German-Americans, making beer seem unpatriotic. The
Food Administration insisted that grain must be used to produce food, not brewed into
beer or distilled into liquor. In December 1917, Congress passed the Eighteenth
Amendment, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquor. It was
ratified by the states in 1919 and went into effect at the beginning of 1920.
Liberty in Wartime
World War I raised questions already glimpsed during the Civil War that would
trouble the nation again during the McCarthy era and in the aftermath of the terrorist
attacks of 2001: What is the balance between security and freedom? Does the
Constitution protect citizens’ rights during wartime? Should dissent be equated with
lack of patriotism?
Despite the administration’s idealistic language of democracy and freedom, the war
inaugurated the most intense repression of civil liberties the nation has ever known.
“It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,” Wilson remarked in
his speech asking Congress to bring America into the conflict. Even he could not have
predicted how significant an impact the war would have on American freedom.
The Espionage Act
For the first time since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the federal government
enacted laws to restrict freedom of speech. The Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited not
only spying and interfering with the draft but also “false statements” that might
impede military success. The postmaster general barred from the mails numerous
newspapers and magazines criti- cal of the administration. In 1918, the Sedition Act
made it a crime to make spoken or printed statements that intended to cast “contempt,
scorn, or dis- repute” on the “form of government,” or that advocated interference
with the war effort. The government charged more than 2,000 persons with vio- lating
these laws. Over half were convicted. A court sentenced Ohio farmer John White to
twenty-one months in prison for saying that the murder of innocent women and
children by German soldiers was no worse than what the United States had done in
the Philippines in the war of 1899–1903.
The most prominent victim was Eugene V. Debs, convicted in 1918 under the
Espionage Act for delivering an antiwar speech. Germany sent a socialist leader to
prison for four years for opposing the war; in the United States, Debs’s sentence was
ten years. After the war’s end, Wilson rejected the advice of his attorney general that
he commute Debs’s sentence. Debs
ran for president while still in prison in 1920 and received 900,000 votes. It was left
to Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, to release Debs from prison in 1921.
Coercive Patriotism
Even more extreme repression took place at the hands of state governments and
private groups. During the war, thirty-three states outlawed the possession or display
of red or black flags (symbols, respectively, of communism and anarchism), and
twenty-three outlawed a newly created offense, “criminal syndicalism,” the advocacy
of unlawful acts to accomplish political change or “a change in industrial ownership.”
“Who is the real patriot?” Emma Goldman asked when the United States entered the
war. She answered, those who “love America with open eyes,” who were not blind to
“the wrongs committed in the name of patriotism.” But from the federal government
to local authorities and private groups, patriotism came to be equated with support for
the gov- ernment, the war, and the American economic system. Throughout the
country, schools revised their course offerings to ensure their patriotism and required
teachers to sign loyalty oaths.
The 250,000 members of the newly formed American Protective League (APL)
helped the Justice Department identify radicals and critics of the war by spying on
their neighbors and carrying out “slacker raids” in which thousands of men were
stopped on the streets of major cities and required to produce draft registration cards.
Employers cooperated with the government in crushing the Industrial Workers of the
World (IWW), a move long demanded by business interests. In September 1917,
operating under one of the broadest warrants in American history, federal agents
swooped down on IWW offices throughout the country, arresting hundreds of leaders
and seizing files and publications.
Although some Progressives protested individual excesses, most failed to speak out
against the broad suppression of freedom of expres- sion. Civil liberties, by and large,
had never been a major concern of Progressives, who had always viewed the national
state as the embodi- ment of democratic purpose and insisted that freedom flowed
from partici- pating in the life of society, not standing in opposition. Strong believers
in the use of national power to improve social conditions, Progressives found
themselves ill prepared to develop a defense of minority rights against majority or
governmental tyranny.
WHO IS AN AMERICAN?
The “Race Problem”
Even before American participation in World War I, what contemporaries called the
“race problem”—the tensions that arose from the country’s increasing ethnic
diversity—had become a major subject of public concern. “Race” referred to far more
than black-white relations. The Dictionary of Races of Peoples, published in 1911 by
the U.S. Immigration Commission, listed no fewer than forty-five immigrant “races,”
each supposedly with its own inborn characteristics. They ranged from Anglo-Saxons
at the top down to Hebrews, Northern Italians, and, lowest of all, Southern Italians—
supposedly violent, undisciplined, and incapable of assimila- tion. The new science of
eugenics, which studied the alleged mental characteristics of different races, gave
anti-immigrant sentiment an air of professional expertise.
Somehow, the very nationalization of politics and economic life served to heighten
awareness of ethnic and racial difference and spurred demands for
“Americanization”—the creation of a more homogeneous national culture. A 1908
play by the Jewish immigrant writer Israel Zangwill, The Melting Pot, gave a popular
name to the process by which newcomers were supposed to merge their identity into
existing American nationality. Public and private groups of all kinds—including
educators, employers, labor leaders, social reformers, and public officials—took up
the task of Americanizing new immigrants. Fearful that adult newcomers remained
too stuck in their Old World ways, public schools paid great attention to
Americanizing immigrants’ children. Moreover, the fe...
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