What cultural conflicts emerged in the 1990s?
★
CHAPTER 18
★
THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
1900–1916
FOCUS QUESTIONS
• Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
• How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century
meanings of American freedom?
• In what ways did Progressivism include both democratic and anti-democratic
impulses?
• How did the Progressive presidents foster the rise of the nation-state?
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 tenstory 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 owners’ 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. As the fire raged, onlookers watched
in horror as girls leapt 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.
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The Triangle Shirtwaist Company was typical of manufacturing in the
nation’s largest city, a beehive of industrial production in small, crowded factories. New York was home to 30,000 manufacturing establishments with more
than 600,000 employees—more industrial workers than in the entire state of
Massachusetts. Triangle had already played a key role in the era’s labor history.
When 200 of its workers tried to join the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), the owners responded by firing them. This incident helped
to spark a general walkout of female garment workers in 1909—the Uprising of
the 20,000. Among the strikers’ demands was better safety in clothing factories.
The impoverished immigrants forged an alliance with middle- and upper-class
female supporters, including members of the Women’s Trade Union League,
which had been founded in 1903 to help bring women workers into unions.
Alva Belmont, the ex-wife of railroad magnate William Vanderbilt, contributed
several of her cars to a parade in support of the striking workers. By the time the
walkout ended early in 1911, the ILGWU had won union contracts with more
than 300 firms. But the Triangle Shirtwaist Company was not among them.
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. More than twenty years later, Franklin D. Roosevelt would refer to it
in a press conference as an example of why the government needed to regulate
industry. In its wake, efforts to organize the city’s workers accelerated, and the
state legislature passed new factory inspection 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
it. The fire and its aftermath also highlighted how traditional gender roles were
changing as women took on new responsibilities in the workplace and in the
making of public policy.
The word “Progressive” came into common use around 1910 as a way of
describing a broad, loosely defined political movement of individuals 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
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hoped to protect women and children from
exploitation, social scientists who believed
that academic 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.
Everywhere in early-twentieth-century
America the signs of economic and political
consolidation were apparent—in the power
of a small directorate of Wall Street bankers
and corporate executives, the manipulation
of democracy by corrupt political machines,
and the rise of new systems of managerial control in workplaces. In these circumstances,
wrote Benjamin P. DeWitt, in his 1915 book
The Progressive Movement, “the individual
could not hope to compete. . . . Slowly, Americans realized that they were not free.”
As this and the following chapter will
discuss, Progressive reformers responded
to the perception of declining 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 political 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—the ability to participate fully in the ever-expanding
consumer marketplace and, especially for
women, to enjoy economic and sexual freedoms long considered the province of men. At
the same time, many Progressives supported
efforts to limit the full enjoyment of freedom
to those deemed fit to exercise it properly.
The new system of white supremacy born
in the 1890s became fully consolidated in
• CHRONOLOGY •
1889
Hull House founded
1898
Charlotte Perkins
Gilman’s Women and
Economics
1901
Socialist Party founded in
United States
President McKinley
assassinated
1902
President Theodore
Roosevelt assists in coal
strike
1903
Women’s Trade Union
League founded
Ford Motor Company
established
1904
Northern Securities
dissolved
1905
Industrial Workers of the
World established
1906
Upton Sinclair’s The
Jungle
Meat Inspection Act
Pure Food and
Drug Act
Hepburn Act
1908
Muller v. Oregon
1909
Uprising of the 20,000
1911
Triangle Shirtwaist
Company fire
Society of American
Indians founded
1912
Children’s Bureau
established
Theodore Roosevelt
organizes the Progressive
Party
1913
Sixteenth Amendment
Seventeenth Amendment
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Federal Reserve
established
1914
Ludlow Massacre
Federal Trade Commission
established
Clayton Act
•
•
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.
The idea of freedom remained as contested as
ever 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 percent. For the
last time in American history, farms and cities grew together. As farm prices
recovered from their low point during the depression of the 1890s, American
agriculture entered what would later be remembered as its “golden age.” The
expansion of urban areas stimulated demand for farm goods. 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. Between 1900 and 1910, the combined population of Texas and Oklahoma rose by nearly 2 million people, and Kansas,
Nebraska, and the Dakotas added 800,000. Irrigation transformed 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
mass-consumer society. The United States counted twenty-one cities whose
population exceeded 100,000 in 1910, the largest of them 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.
Fully a quarter of them inhabited the Lower East Side, an immigrant neighborhood more densely populated than Bombay or Calcutta in India.
The stark urban inequalities of the 1890s continued into the Progressive
era. Immigrant families in New York’s downtown 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 estimate, J. P. Morgan’s
financial firm directly or indirectly controlled 40 percent of all financial and
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Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
industrial capital in the United
States. Alongside such wealth,
reported the Commission on Industrial Relations, established by Congress in 1912, more than one-third
of the country’s mining and manufacturing workers lived in “actual
poverty.”
The city captured the imagination of artists, writers, and reformers.
The glories of the American landscape had been the focal point of
nineteenth-century painters (exemplified by the Hudson River school,
A colored photograph from around 1900 shows
which produced canvases celebrat- the teeming street life of Mulberry Street, on
ing the wonders of nature). The New York City’s densely populated Lower East
city and its daily life now became Side. The massive immigration of the early twentheir preoccupation. Painters like tieth century transformed the life of urban centers
throughout the country and helped to spark the
George W. Bellows and John Sloan Progressive movement.
and photographers such as Alfred
Stieglitz and Edward Steichen captured the electric lights, crowded bars and theaters, and soaring skyscrapers of
the urban landscape. With its youthful, exuberant energies, the city seemed an
expression of modernity itself.
The Muckrakers
Others 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 by Lincoln Steffens (published as a series
in McClure’s Magazine in 1901–1902 and in book form in 1904) showed how
party bosses and business leaders profited from political corruption. McClure’s
also hired Ida Tarbell to expose the arrogance and economic machinations of
John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company. Published in two volumes in 1904,
her History of the Standard Oil Company was the most substantial product of
what Theodore Roosevelt disparaged as muckraking—the use of journalistic
skills to expose the underside of American life.
Major novelists of the era took a similar unsparing approach to social
ills. Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) traced a young woman’s moral
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corruption in Chicago’s harsh urban
environment. 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 earlytwentieth-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
A photograph by Lewis Hine, who used his cam1901 and the outbreak of World War I
era to chronicle the plight of child laborers shown
in Europe in 1914, some 13 million
here: a young spinner in a Vermont cotton factory.
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. Poles emigrated not only to Pittsburgh and Chicago but to work in German factories and Scottish mines. Italians sought jobs in Belgium, France, and Argentina as well as the United States.
As many as 750,000 Chinese migrated to other countries each year.
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. This population flow formed one
part of a massive shifting of peoples throughout the world.
Numerous causes inspired this 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. Not all of these immigrants could be classified as “free
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Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
laborers,” however. Large numbers of Chinese, Mexican, and Italian migrants,
including many who came to the United States, were bound to long-term labor
contracts. These contracts were signed with labor agents, who then provided
the workers to American employers. But all the areas attracting immigrants
were frontiers of one kind or another—agricultural, mining, or industrial—
with expanding job opportunities.
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 an immigrant who passed through Ellis Island. The less fortunate,
who failed a medical examination or were judged to be anarchists, prostitutes,
or in other ways undesirable, were sent home.
At the same time, an influx of Asian and Mexican newcomers was taking
place in the West. After the exclusion of immigrants from China in the late
nineteenth century, a small number of Japanese arrived, primarily to work as
agricultural laborers in California’s fruit and vegetable fields and on Hawaii’s
sugar plantations. By 1910, the population of Japanese origin had grown
to 72,000. 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 population)
entered the United States—a number exceeded by only a few European
countries. Mexicans generally entered
through El Paso, Texas, the main southern gateway into the United States.
Many ended up in the San Gabriel Valley of California, where citrus growers searching for cheap labor had
earlier experimented with Native American, South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino
migrant workers.
By 1910, one-seventh of the American population was foreign-born,
the highest percentage in the counAn illustration in the 1912 publication The New
try’s history. More than 40 percent of Immigration depicts the various “types” entering
New York City’s population had been the United States.
born abroad. In Chicago and smaller
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Table 18.1 Immigrants and Their
Children as Percentage
of Population, Ten Major
Cities, 1920
City
Percentage
New York City
76%
Cleveland
72
Boston
72
Chicago
71
Detroit
65
industrial cities like Providence, Milwaukee, and San Francisco, the figure
exceeded 30 percent. Although many
newcomers moved west to take part in
the expansion of farming, most clustered in industrial centers. By 1910,
nearly three-fifths of the workers in
the twenty leading manufacturing and
mining industries were foreign-born.
The Immigrant Quest for
Freedom
Like their nineteenth-century predecessors, the new immigrants arrived
Minneapolis
63
imagining the United States as a land
Pittsburgh
59
of freedom, where all persons enjoyed
equality before the law, could worship
Seattle
55
as they pleased, enjoyed economic
opportunity, and had been emanciLos Angeles
45
pated 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.” Freedom, they added, was
largely an economic ambition—a desire to escape from “hopeless poverty” and
achieve a standard of living impossible at home. While some of the new immigrants, especially 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. In 1908, a year of economic downturn in the United
States, more Italians left the country than entered.
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. As early as 1900, more than 1,000
foreign-language newspapers were published in the United States. Churches
were pillars of these immigrant communities. In New York’s East Harlem,
even anti-clerical Italian immigrants, who resented the close alliance in Italy
San Francisco
64
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Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
between the Catholic Church and the oppressive state, participated eagerly
in the annual festival of the Madonna of Mt. Carmel. After Italian-Americans
scattered to the suburbs, they continued to return each year to reenact the
festival.
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, while 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. There was, of course, nothing
unusual in the idea that the promise of American life lay, in part, in the enjoyment by the masses of citizens of goods available in other countries only to the
well-to-do. Not until the Progressive era, however, did the advent of large downtown department stores, chain stores in urban neighborhoods, and retail mailorder houses for farmers and small-town residents make 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 sewing machines, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and record players.
Low wages, the unequal distribution of income, and the South’s persistent poverty limited the consumer economy, which would not fully come into its own
until after World War II. But it was in Progressive America that the promise of
mass consumption became the foundation for a new understanding of freedom
as access to the cornucopia of goods made available by modern capitalism.
Leisure activities also took on the characteristics of mass consumption.
Amusement parks, dance halls, and theaters attracted large crowds of city
dwellers. The most popular form of mass entertainment at the turn of the century was vaudeville, a live theatrical entertainment consisting of numerous
short acts typically including song and dance, comedy, acrobats, magicians, and
trained animals. In the 1890s, brief motion pictures were already being introduced into vaudeville shows. As the movies became longer and involved more
sophisticated plot narratives, separate theaters developed. 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 at vaudeville shows.
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The Working Woman
Table 18.2 Percentage of Women
The new visibility of women in urban
public places—at work, as shoppers,
and in places of entertainment like
Occupation
1900
1920
cinemas and dance halls—indicated
that traditional gender roles were
Professional,
8.2%
11.7%
technical
changing dramatically in Progressive
America. As the Triangle fire revealed,
Clerical
4.0
18.7
more and more women were working
Sales workers
4.3
6.2
for wages. Black women still worked
Unskilled and
primarily as domestics or in southern
semiskilled
cotton fields. Immigrant women were
manufacturing
23.7
20.2
largely confined to low-paying factory
Household
28.7
15.7
employment. But for native-born white
workers
women, the kinds of jobs available
expanded enormously. By 1920, around
25 percent of employed women were office workers or telephone operators,
and only 15 percent worked in domestic service, the largest female job category of the nineteenth century. Female work was no longer confined 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. Women faced special
limitations on their economic freedom, including wage discrimination and
exclusion from many jobs. Yet almost in spite of themselves, union leader Abraham Bisno remarked, young immigrant working women developed a sense of
independence: “They acquired the right to a personality,” something alien to the
highly patriarchal family structures of the old country. “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 growing number of younger women who desired a lifelong career,
wrote Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her influential book Women and Economics (1898), offered evidence of a “spirit of personal independence” that
pointed to a coming transformation of both economic and family life. Gilman’s writings reinforced the claim that the road to woman’s freedom lay
through the workplace. In the home, she argued, women experienced not
fulfillment but oppression, and the housewife was an unproductive parasite,
little more than a servant to her husband and children. By condemning women
to a life of domestic drudgery, prevailing gender norms made them incapable
of contributing to society or enjoying freedom in any meaningful sense of
the word.
Workers in Various
Occupations, 1900–1920
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Why was the city such a central element in Progressive America?
The desire to participate in the consumer society produced remarkably
similar battles within immigrant families of all nationalities between parents
and their self-consciously “free” children, especially daughters. 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.” Immigrant parents found it very difficult to adapt to what one Mexican mother
called “this terrible freedom in this United States.” “The Mexican girls,” she told
a sociologist studying immigrant life in Los Angeles, “seeing American girls
with freedom, they want it too.”
The Rise of Fordism
If any individual exemplified the new consumer society, it was Henry Ford. The
son of an immigrant Irish farmer, Ford had worked as an apprentice in Michigan machine shops and later as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. 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,
The assembly line at the Ford Motor Company factory in Highland Park, Michigan, around
1914.
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he introduced the Model T, a simple, light vehicle sturdy enough to navigate
the country’s poorly maintained roads. While early European models like the
Mercedes aimed at an elite market and were superior in craftsmanship, Ford
concentrated on standardizing output and lowering prices.
In 1913, Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, adopted the 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. Labor conditions in the Ford plant were not as appealing
as the wages, however: assembly-line work was monotonous (the worker repeated
the same basic motions for the entire day), and Ford used spies and armed detectives to prevent unionization. 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 equipment,
etc.) to consumer products, the new advertising industry perfected ways of
increasing sales, often by linking goods with the idea of freedom. Numerous
products took “liberty” as a brand name or used an image of the Statue of Liberty
as a sales device. The department-store magnate Edward Filene called consumerism a “school of freedom,” since shoppers made individual choices on basic
questions of living. Economic abundance would eventually come to define the
“American way of life,” in which personal fulfillment was to be found through
acquiring material goods.
The promise of abundance shifted the quest for freedom to the realm of
private life, but it also inspired political activism. Exclusion from the world
of mass consumption would come to seem almost as great a denial of the
rights of citizenship as being barred from voting once had been. The desire for
consumer goods led many workers to join unions and fight for higher wages.
The argument that monopolistic corporations artificially raised prices at the
expense of consumers became a weapon against the trusts. “Consumers’ consciousness,” wrote Walter Lippmann, who emerged in these years as one of the
nation’s most influential social commentators, was growing rapidly, with the
“high cost of living” as its rallying cry.
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How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth-century
meanings of American freedom?
An American Standard of Living
The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts—a “living
wage” and an “American standard of living”—that offered a new language
for criticizing 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. Ryan had grown up
in Minnesota in a family sympathetic to Henry George, the Knights of Labor,
and the Populists. 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 individualism in favor of a more
cooperative vision of the good society. Ryan’s insistence that economic relationships should be governed by moral standards had a powerful influence on
social thought among American Catholics.
The popularity of the idea of an American standard of living reflected, in
part, the emergence of a mass-consumption society during the Progressive era.
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. In the Gilded
Age, social theorists like Henry George had wondered why economic progress
produced both increased wealth and abject misery. The Progressive generation
was strongly influenced by the more optimistic writings of Simon W. Patten, a
prophet of prosperity. Patten announced the end of the “reign of want” and the
advent of a society of abundance and leisure. In the dawning “new civilization,”
he proclaimed, Americans would enjoy economic equality in a world in which
“every one is independent and free.”
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM
For most Americans, however, Patten’s “new civilization” lay far in the future.
The more immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize industrial 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 corporation and looked
to the government to reverse the growing concentration 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
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with new meaning to deal with the economic and social conditions of the early
twentieth century. The “old democracy,” wrote Walter Weyl, associate editor
of The New Republic, a weekly magazine that became the “bible” of Progressive intellectuals, provided no answer to the problems of a world in which the
“chief restrictions upon liberty” were economic, not political.
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—a program that sought to
streamline production and boost profits by systematically controlling costs
and work practices. Through scientific study, 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. “Men and women,” complained Samuel Gompers, whose American Federation of Labor (AFL) represented such skilled workers, “cannot live
during working hours under autocratic conditions, and instantly become sons
and daughters of freedom as they step outside the shop gates.”
The great increase in the number of white-collar workers—the army of
salespeople, bookkeepers, salaried professionals, and corporate managers that
sprang up with the new system of management—also undermined the experience of personal autonomy. For although they enjoyed far higher social status
and incomes than manual workers, many, wrote one commentator, were the
kind of individuals who “under former conditions, would have been . . . managing their own businesses,” not working for someone else.
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 muchdiscussed “labor problem.” Since in an industrial age the prospect of managing
one’s own business seemed increasingly remote, 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 essential
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. Workers deserved a voice not only in
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establishing wages and working conditions but also in making such managerial
decisions as the relocation of factories, layoffs, and the distribution of profits.
The Socialist Presence
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 brought together surviving late-nineteenth-century radicals such as Populists and followers of Edward Bellamy, with a portion of the labor movement.
The party called for immediate reforms such as free college education, legislation to improve the condition of laborers, and, as an ultimate goal, democratic
control over the economy through public ownership of railroads and factories.
It was the task of socialism, said western labor leader John O’Neill, to “gather
together the shards of liberty”—the fragments of the American heritage of
freedom—scattered by a government controlled by capitalist millionaires.
By 1912, the Socialist Party claimed 150,000 dues-paying members, published hundreds of newspapers, enjoyed substantial support in the American
SOCIALIST TOWNS AND CITIES, 1900–1920
Burlington
Edmonds
Tukwila
Hillyard
Coeur d'Alene Beatrice
Camas WA
Missoula
(2 Commissioners)
Butte
Coquille
Minden MT
Rugby
CANADA
Hilaire
Duluth
Crookston St.Tenstrike
ME
Minot
(Commissioner)
(Commissioner) Laporte
Cloquet
ND
Pillager Brainerd
Barre
Harbor Springs
OR
Sisseton
Eagle Bend WI Traverse City Gustin
VT NH
ID
Minneapolis
Dawson
Schenectady
MN
Manitowoc S. Frankfort
MA
SD
Eureka
Buffalo
NY
Wilson W Salem Sheboygan
Naugatuck
WY
Milwaukee West Allis
Haledon
MI
IA
Davis
Murray
Rockaway CT
PA
Davenport Torino
Stockton Eureka
NE
Madrid Phelps Silvis
NV Mammoth
Berkeley
NJ
Longmont
IN
Canton
OH
UT
MD
Daly City
Nederland Lafayette Red Cloud Wymore
Riverton Lincoln Clinton
DE
Edgewater
Grand Junction
Thayer IL
MOGrafton
Hymera
WV
Jerseyville
Buena Vista
KS
Victor
CA
Cedar City
Granite City O'Fallon
VA
Hillsboro Arma
Mascoutah
CO
Brookneal
Curranville Liberal Buckner Dorrisville KY
Girard
Buffalo
AZ
NM
Watts
Frontenac Mindenmines Gibson
NC
Cardwell TN
Lackawanna
OK Hartford Winslow
Greenville Flint
Chant
SC
NY
Osnaburg
Antlers
GA
AL
AR
Amsterdam
Ashtabula
MI
Birmingham
Conneaut
Roulette
MS
Union
City
(Commissioner)
Kalamazoo
Mineral Ridge
Winnfield
Wheatland PA Williamsport
Cleveland
(Commissioner) TX
Lorain Salem
New Castle
McKeesport
Hazeldell
Massillon
LA
FL
Shelby
(Controller)
Fostoria
Mineral City
Pitcairn
Broad
Jenera St. Mary's
Toronto
Canal Dover
Top Twp.
Gulfport
Mt. Vernon
Martins Ferry Garrett
Gas City
Lima Linden
Lake Worth
Byesville
Star City
Heights Barnhill
Elwood
Sugar
Grove
Piqua
Hendricks
Coshocton
Adamston
Hamilton
IN
OH
KY
WV
Miami
Des Lacs
VA
0
0
250
250
RI
500 miles
500 kilometers
Socialist mayor
Major municipal officer
other than mayor
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.
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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 exploitation 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 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 that elected Emil
Seidel mayor in 1910. Seidel’s administration provided aid to the unemployed,
forced the police to recognize the rights of strikers, and won the respect of
middle-class residents for its honesty and freedom from machine domination.
Socialism also made inroads among tenant farmers in old Populist areas like
Oklahoma, and in the mining regions of Idaho and Montana.
The Gospel of Debs
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 criss-crossed the country preaching that control of the economy by a democratic government held out the hope
of uniting “political equality and economic freedom.” As a champion of the
downtrodden, Debs managed to bridge the cultural divide between New York’s
Jewish immigrants, prairie socialists of the West, and native-born intellectuals
attracted to the socialist ideal. “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, socialism
was a rising presence. Debs would receive more than 900,000 votes for 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, and socialist Max Hayes polled one-third of
the vote when he challenged Samuel Gompers for the presidency of the AFL. In
western Europe, socialism experienced even more pronounced growth. In the
last elections before the outbreak of World War I in 1914, socialists in France,
Germany, and Scandinavia won between one-sixth and one-third of the vote.
“Socialism is coming,” declared the Appeal to Reason. “It is coming like a prairie
fire and nothing can stop it.”
AFL and IWW
Socialism was only one example of widespread discontent in Progressive
America. The labor strife of the Gilded Age continued into the early twentieth
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century. 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, it sought to forge closer ties with forward-looking corporate leaders
willing to deal with unions as a way to stabilize employee relations. AFL president Gompers joined with George Perkins of the J. P. Morgan financial empire
and Mark Hanna, who had engineered McKinley’s election in 1896, in the
National Civic Federation, which accepted the right of collective bargaining
for “responsible” unions. It helped to settle hundreds of industrial disputes and
encouraged improvements in factory safety and the establishment of pension
plans for long-term workers. 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 nativeborn. In 1905, a group of unionists who rejected the AFL’s exclusionary 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, extending
“a fraternal hand to every wage-worker, no matter what his religion, fatherland,
or trade.” 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 IWW’s
most prominent leader was William “Big Bill” Haywood, who had worked in
western mines as a youth. Dubbed by critics “the most dangerous man in America,” Haywood became a national figure in 1906 when he was kidnapped and
spirited off to Idaho, accused of instigating the murder of a former anti-union
governor. Defended by labor lawyer Clarence Darrow, Haywood was found not
guilty.
The New Immigrants on Strike
The Uprising of the 20,000 in New York’s garment industry, mentioned earlier, was one of a series of mass strikes among immigrant workers that placed
labor’s demand for the right to bargain collectively at the forefront of the
reform agenda. These strikes demonstrated that while ethnic divisions among
workers impeded labor solidarity, ethnic cohesiveness could also be a basis of
unity, so long as strikes were organized on a democratic basis. IWW organizers printed leaflets, posters, 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.
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The labor conflict that had the greatest impact on public consciousness
took place in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
The city’s huge woolen mills employed
32,000 men, women, and children representing twenty-five nationalities. They
worked six days per week and earned
an average of sixteen cents per hour.
When the state legislature in January 1912 enacted a fifty-four-hour limit
to the workweek, employers reduced
the weekly take-home pay of those who
Striking New York City garment workers carrying
had been laboring longer hours. Worksigns in multiple languages, 1913.
ers spontaneously went on strike, and
called on the IWW for assistance.
In February, Haywood and a group of women strikers devised the idea of
sending strikers’ children out of the city for the duration of the walkout. Socialist families 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. “I have worked in
the slums of New York,” wrote one observer, “but I have never found children
who were so uniformly ill-nourished, ill-fed, and ill-clothed.” A few days later,
city officials ordered that no more youngsters could leave Lawrence. When a
group of mothers and children gathered at the railroad station in defiance of
the order, club-wielding police drove them away, producing outraged headlines around the world. The governor 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.
Another highly publicized labor uprising took place in New Orleans, where
a 1907 strike of 10,000 black and white dockworkers prevented employers’
efforts to eliminate their unions and reduce their wages. This was a remarkable
expression of interracial solidarity at a time when segregation had become the
norm throughout the South. Other strikes proved less successful. A six-month
walkout of 25,000 silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913 failed despite
publicity generated by the Paterson pageant, in which the strikers reenacted
highlights of their struggle before a sympathetic audience at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
A strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company
was also unsuccessful. Mostly recent immigrants from Europe and Mexico, the
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strikers demanded recognition of the United Mine Workers of America, wage
increases, an eight-hour workday, and the right to shop and live in places not
owned by the company. When the walkout began, in September 1913, the mine
owners evicted 11,000 strikers and their families from company housing. They
moved into tent colonies, which armed militia units soon surrounded. On
April 20, 1914, the militia attacked the largest tent city, at Ludlow, and burned it
to the ground, killing an estimated twenty to thirty men, women, and children.
Seven months after the Ludlow Massacre, the strike was called off.
Labor and Civil Liberties
The fiery organizer Mary “Mother” Jones, who at the age of eighty-three had
been jailed after addressing the Colorado strikers, 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.
State courts in the Progressive era regularly issued injunctions prohibiting
strikers from speaking, picketing, or distributing literature during labor disputes. Like the abolitionists before them, the labor movement, in the name of
freedom, demanded the right to assemble, organize, and spread their views. The
investigations of the Commission on Industrial Relations revealed the absence
of free speech in many factory communities, with labor organizers prohibited
from speaking freely under threat of either violence from private police or suppression by local authorities. “I don’t think we live in a free country or enjoy
civil liberties,” Clarence Darrow told the commission.
The IWW’s battle for civil liberties breathed new meaning into the idea of
freedom of expression. Lacking union halls, its organizers relied on songs, street
theater, impromptu organizing 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. Sometimes, prisoners were
brutally treated, as in Spokane, where three died and hundreds were hospitalized
after being jailed for violating a local law requiring prior approval of the content
of public speeches. In nearly all the free-speech 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.”
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VOICES OF FREEDOM
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 houseservant, 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.
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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
QU E ST IONS
grounds that they invaded the liberty of
the working people. . . . Is it not natural
1. What does Gilman see as the main
that the workingmen should feel that they
obstacles to freedom for women?
are being guaranteed the liberties they do
2. What does Mitchell believe will be necesnot want and denied the liberty that is of
sary to establish “industrial liberty”?
real value to them? May they not exclaim,
with Madame Roland [of the French Rev3. How do the authors differ in their view of
olution], “O Liberty! Liberty! How many
the relationship of the family to individual
crimes are committed in thy name!”
freedom?
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The New Feminism
During the Progressive era, the word “feminism” first entered the political
vocabulary. Inspired by the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Feminist
Alliance, a small organization of New York professional women, developed
plans to build apartment houses with communal kitchens, cafeterias, and daycare centers, to free women from the constraints of the home. However, because
they were unable to obtain a mortgage, the buildings were never constructed.
In 1914, a mass meeting at New York’s Cooper Union debated the question
“What is Feminism?” The meeting was sponsored by Heterodoxy, a women’s
club located in Greenwich Village that brought together female professionals,
academics, and reformers. Feminism, said one speaker, meant woman’s emancipation “both as a human being and a sex-being.” New feminism’s forthright
attack on traditional rules of sexual behavior added a new dimension to the
idea of personal freedom.
Heterodoxy was part of a new radical “bohemia” (a social circle of artists,
writers, and others who reject conventional rules and practices). Its definition
of feminism merged issues like the vote and greater economic opportunities
with open discussion of sexuality. In New York’s Greenwich Village and counterparts in Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities, a “lyrical left” came into
being in the prewar years. Its members formed discussion clubs, attended
experimental theaters, and published magazines. They confidently expected to
preside over the emancipation of the human spirit from the prejudices of the
nineteenth century.
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.” Another sign of artistic revolution was the Armory Show of 1913, an
exhibition that exposed New Yorkers to new cubist paintings from Europe by
artists previously unknown in the United States, like Pablo Picasso.
The lyrical left made freedom the key to its vision of society. At the famed
salon in heiress Mabel Dodge’s New York living room, a remarkable array of
talented radicals gathered to discuss with equal passion labor unrest, modern trends in the arts, and sexual liberation. “What [women] are really after,”
explained Crystal Eastman, is “freedom.” A graduate of New York University
Law School, Eastman had taken a leading role both in the suffrage movement
and in investigating industrial accidents. But her definition of freedom went
beyond the vote, beyond “industrial democracy,” to encompass emotional and
sexual self-determination.
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The Rise of Personal Freedom
During the Progressive era, as journalist William M. Reedy jested, it struck “sex
o’clock” in America. The founder of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, lectured at
Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909, and discovered that his
writings on infantile sexuality, repression, and the irrational sources of human
behavior were widely known “even in prudish America.” Issues of intimate personal relations previously 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. Greenwich
Village became a center of sexual experimentation. The aura of tolerance
attracted many homosexuals to the area, and although organized demands
for gay rights lay far in the future, the gay community became an important
element of the Village’s lifestyle. But new sexual attitudes spread far beyond
bohemia; they flourished among the young, unmarried, self-supporting
women who made sexual freedom a hallmark of their oft-proclaimed personal
independence.
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 changing sexual behavior. In the nineteenth century, the right to “control one’s body” generally meant the ability to refuse sexual advances, including those of a woman’s
husband. Now, it suggested the ability to enjoy an active sexual life without necessarily bearing children. 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. “I demand freedom for both sexes,” she proclaimed, “freedom of action,
freedom in love and freedom in motherhood.” Goldman constantly ran afoul of
the law. By one count, she was arrested more than forty times for dangerous or
“obscene” statements or simply to keep her from speaking.
By forthrightly challenging the laws banning contraceptive information
and devices, Margaret Sanger, one of eleven children of an Irish-American
working-class family, placed the birth control movement 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 newspaper. Postal officials
barred one issue, containing a column on venereal disease, from the mails. The
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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.”
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
Mothers with baby carriages wait outside
Margaret Sanger’s birth-control clinic in
be a mother.” In 1916, Sanger opened a
Brownsville, Brooklyn, 1916.
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. Few Progressives rallied to her defense.
But for a time, the birth-control issue became a crossroads where the paths of
labor radicals, cultural modernists, and feminists intersected. The IWW and
Socialist Party distributed Sanger’s writings. Like the IWW free-speech fights
and Goldman’s persistent battle for the right to lecture, Sanger’s travail was part
of a rich history of dissent in the Progressive era that helped to focus enlightened opinion on the ways local authorities and national obscenity legislation
set rigid limits to Americans’ freedom of expression. Slowly, laws banning birth
control began to change. But since access was determined by individual states,
even when some liberalized their laws, birth control remained unavailable in
many others.
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. Because many of the society’s leaders had
been educated at government-sponsored boarding schools, the society united
Indians of many tribal backgrounds. It created a pan-Indian 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
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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
eventually obtained a medical degree.
In 1916, Montezuma established a newsletter, Wassaja (meaning “signaling”), that condemned federal paternalism toward the Indians and 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: “We must
free ourselves. . . . We must be independent.” But he also demanded that Indians be granted full citizenship and all the constitutional rights of other Americans. Montezuma’s writings had little influence at the time on government
policy, but 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. In 1850, London and Paris were the
only cities whose population exceeded 1 million. By 1900, there were twelve—
New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the United States, and others in Europe,
Latin America, and Asia. Facing similar social problems, reformers across the
globe exchanged ideas and envisioned new social policies. Sun Yat-Sen, the
Chinese leader, was influenced by the writings of Henry George and Edward
Bellamy.
As governments in Britain, France, and Germany instituted old age pensions,
minimum wage laws, unemployment insurance, and the regulation 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.
Progressives believed that the modern era required a fundamental rethinking of the functions of political authority, whether the aim was to combat the
power of the giant corporations, protect consumers, civilize the marketplace,
or guarantee industrial freedom at the workplace. 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.
Even in South Carolina, with its strong tradition of belief in local autonomy,
Governor Richard I. Manning urged his constituents to modify their view of
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A photograph from 1910 depicts needy constituents of New York political boss Timothy “Big
Tim” Sullivan receiving free pairs of shoes. Each
year, Sullivan distributed two thousand pairs on
his mother’s birthday. Such largesse endeared
political bosses to many voters, to the annoyance
of municipal reformers.
government as “a threat to individual
liberty,” to see it instead as “a means for
solving the ills of the body politic.”
Progressives could reject the traditional assumption that powerful government posed a threat to freedom, because
their understanding of freedom was itself
in flux. “Effective freedom,” wrote the
philosopher John Dewey, was a positive,
not a negative, concept—the “power to
do specific things.” As such, it depended
on “the distribution of powers that exists
at a given time.” Thus, freedom inevitably became a political question.
State and Local Reforms
Throughout the Western world, social legislation proliferated in the early
twentieth century. 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 government to reduce the power of political bosses, establish public
control of “natural monopolies” like gas and water works, and improve public
transportation. They raised property taxes in order to spend more money on
schools, parks, and other public facilities.
Gilded Age mayors Hazen Pingree and Samuel “Golden Rule” Jones pioneered urban Progressivism. A former factory worker who became a successful shoe manufacturer, Pingree served as mayor of Detroit from 1889 to 1897.
He battled the business interests that had dominated city government, forcing
gas and telephone companies to lower their rates, and established a municipal
power plant. Jones had instituted an eight-hour day and paid vacations at his factory that produced oil drilling equipment. As mayor of Toledo, Ohio, from 1897
to 1905, he founded night schools and free kindergartens, built new parks, and
supported the right of workers to unionize. Since state legislatures defined the
powers of city government, urban Progressives often carried their campaigns to
the state level. Pingree became governor of Michigan in 1896, in which post he
continued his battle against railroads and other corporate interests.
Progressivism in the West
Although often associated with eastern cities, Progressivism was also a major
presence in the West. Former Populists and those who believed in the moral
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power of the frontier gravitated to Progressive programs to regulate the railroads and other large corporations, and to the idea that direct democracy could
revitalize corrupt politics. Important Progressive leaders worked for reform in
western states and municipalities, including Hiram Johnson of California and
Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.
Oregon stood at the forefront of Progressive reform. The leading figure
in that state was William U’Ren, a lawyer who had entered politics as a supporter of Henry George’s single-tax program. U’Ren concluded that without
changes to the political system, entrenched interests would always be able
to block reforms such as George’s. He was the founder of the Oregon System,
which included such measures as the initiative and referendum (also known
as direct legislature, which enabled voters to propose and vote on laws), direct
primaries to choose candidates for office (an effort to weaken the power of
political bosses), and the recall (by which officials could be removed from office
by popular vote). Using the initiative, Progressives won the vote for women
in the state. The Oregon system, studied and emulated in many other states,
came into being via an alliance of the urban middle class with reform-minded
farmers and workers. But fault lines appeared when labor-oriented Progressives
tried to use the initiative and referendum to increase taxes on the well-to-do
and require the state to provide jobs for the unemployed. Both measures failed.
Moreover, the initiative system quickly became out of control. In the 1912
election, voters in Portland were asked to evaluate forty measures seeking to
become law. Nonetheless, between 1910 and 1912, Oregon’s West Coast neighbors, Washington and California, also adopted the initiative and referendum
and approved woman suffrage.
In California, where a Republican machine closely tied to the Southern
Pacific Railroad had dominated politics for decades, Progressives took power
under Governor Hiram Johnson, who held office from 1911 to 1917. As public
prosecutor, Johnson had secured the conviction for bribery of San Francisco
political boss Abraham Ruef. 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 measures, 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 companies 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. Other measures created a
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statewide system of insurance against illness, death, and accident, barred the
sale to private companies of land, mineral rights, and other natural resources
owned by the state, required safety devices on various forms of machinery, and
prohibited child labor. To staff his administration, he drew on nonpartisan faculty members from the University of Wisconsin. Wisconsin offered the most
striking merger of the social and political impulses that went under the name
of Progressivism.
Progressive Democracy
“We are far from free,” wrote Randolph Bourne in 1913, “but the new spirit of
democracy is the angel that will free us.” 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 corporations, 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
important to identify who was entitled to political participation and who was not.
The Progressive era saw a host of changes implemented in the political
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—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. The era culminated with a constitutional amendment enfranchising women—the largest expansion of democracy in American history.
But the Progressive era also witnessed numerous restrictions on democratic participation, most strikingly the disenfranchisement of blacks in the
South, a process, as noted in Chapter 17, supported by many white southern
Progressives as a way of ending election fraud. To make city government more
honest and efficient, many localities replaced elected mayors with appointed
nonpartisan 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. Taken as a whole, the
electoral changes of the Progressive era represented a significant reversal of the
idea that voting was an inherent right of American citizenship. In the eyes of
many Progressives, the “fitness” of voters, not their absolute numbers, defined
a functioning democracy.
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Government by Expert
“He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.” The writer
H. L. Mencken’s quip about Theodore Roosevelt came uncomfortably close to
the mark for many Progressive advocates of an empowered state. 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 exercise intelligent control over society through a
democracy run by impartial experts who were in many respects unaccountable
to the citizenry.
This impulse toward order, efficiency, and centralized management—all
in the name of social justice—was an important theme of Progressive reform.
The title of Walter Lippmann’s influential 1914 work of social commentary,
Drift and Mastery, posed the stark alternatives facing the nation. “Drift” meant
continuing to operate according to the outmoded belief in individual autonomy. “Mastery” required applying scientific inquiry to modern social problems.
The new generation of educated professionals, Lippmann believed, could be
trusted more fully than ordinary citizens to solve America’s deep social problems. 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 democratic 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 nonetheless became
central to the political history of the Progressive era. Women challenged the
barriers that excluded them from formal political participation and developed
a democratic, grassroots vision of Progressive government. In so doing, they
placed on the political agenda new understandings of female freedom. 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. After graduating from
college, Addams, who never married, resented the prevailing expectation that
a woman’s life should be governed by what she called the “family claim”—the
obligation to devote herself to parents, husband, and children. In 1889, she
founded Hull House in Chicago, a settlement house devoted to improving
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the lives of the immigrant poor. Hull House was modeled on Toynbee Hall,
which Addams had visited after its establishment in a working-class neighborhood of London in 1884. Unlike previous reformers, who had aided the poor
from afar, settlement-house workers moved into poor neighborhoods. 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 settlement houses had been
established in cities throughout the country.
“Spearheads for Reform”
Addams was typical of the Progressive era’s “new woman.” By 1900, there were
more than 80,000 college-educated women in the United 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 building and sanitation codes, shorter working hours and
safer labor conditions, and the right of labor to organize.
Female activism spread throughout the country. Ironically, the exclusion
of blacks from jobs in southern textile mills strengthened the region’s movement against child labor. Reformers portrayed child labor as a menace to white
supremacy, depriving white children of educations they would need as adult
members of the dominant race. These reformers devoted little attention to the
condition of black children. Women’s groups in Alabama were instrumental
in the passage of a 1903 state law restricting child labor. By 1915, every southern state had followed suit. But with textile mill owners determined to employ
children and many poor families dependent on their earnings, these laws were
enforced only sporadically.
The settlement houses have been called “spearheads for reform.” They
produced prominent Progressive figures like Julia Lathrop, the first woman
to head a federal agency (the Children’s Bureau, established in 1912 to investigate the conditions of mothers and children and advocate their interests). Florence Kelley, the daughter of Civil War–era Radical Republican congressman
William D. Kelley and a veteran of Hull House, went on to mobilize women’s
power as consumers as a force for social change. In the Gilded Age, the writer
Helen Campbell had brilliantly exposed the contradiction of a market economy in which fashionable women wore clothing produced by poor women in
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Mayor Mary W. Howard (center) and the town council of Kanab, Utah. They served from 1912
to 1914, the first all-female municipal government in American history.
wretched sweatshops. “Emancipation on the one side,” she pointedly observed,
“has meant no corresponding emancipation for the other.” A generation later,
under Kelley’s leadership, the National Consumers’ League became the nation’s
leading advocate of laws governing the working conditions of women and children. Freedom of choice in the marketplace, Kelley insisted, enabled socially
conscious consumers to “unite with wage earners” by refusing to purchase
goods produced under exploitative conditions.
The Campaign for Woman Suffrage
After 1900, the campaign for woman suffrage moved beyond the mostly elite
membership of the 1890s to engage a broad coalition ranging from middleclass 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. The group campaigned throughout the country
for the right to vote and began to enjoy some success. By 1900, more than half
the states allowed women to vote in local elections dealing with school issues,
and Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah had adopted full woman suffrage.
The West also led the way in women holding public office. The first women
to become mayors of major cities, governors, and members of Congress hailed
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from the West—Mayor Bertha Landes in Seattle (1926–1928), Congresswoman
Jeanette Rankin of Montana (elected 1916 and 1940), and, in the 1920s, governors Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas and Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming.
Cynics charged that Wyoming legislators used suffrage to attract more
female migrants to their predominantly male state, while Utah hoped to
enhance the political power of husbands in polygamous marriages banned by
law but still practiced by some Mormons. In Colorado and Idaho, however, the
success of referendums in the 1890s reflected the power of the Populist Party,
a strong supporter of votes for women. 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 entertainment characteristic of
modern consumer society. California’s successful 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 constitutional 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. Many of the era’s experiments in
public policy arose from the conviction that the state had an obligation to protect women and children. Female reformers helped to launch a mass movement
for direct government action to improve the living standards of poor mothers
and children. Laws providing for mothers’ pensions (state aid to mothers of
young children who lacked male support) spread rapidly after 1910. The pensions tended to be less than generous, and local eligibility requirements opened
the door to unequal treatment (white widows benefited the most, single mothers were widely discriminated against, and black women were almost entirely
excluded). Maternalist reforms like mothers’ pensions 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 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
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According to this cartoon, giving women the right to vote will clean up political corruption and
misgovernment.
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 brief citing scientific and sociological studies to demonstrate that because women 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 unanimously 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 unprecedented 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.
Many women derived great benefit from these laws; others saw them as an
infringement on their freedom.
While the maternalist agenda built gender inequality into the early foundations of the welfare state, the very use of government to regulate working
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conditions called into question basic assumptions concerning liberty of contract. Although not all reformers were willing to take the step, it was easy to
extend the idea of protecting women and children to demand that government better the living and working conditions of men as well, by insuring
them against the impact of unemployment, old age, ill health, and disability.
Brandeis himself insisted that government should concern itself with the
health, income, and future prospects of all its citizens.
The Idea of Economic Citizenship
Brandeis envisioned a different welfare state from that of the maternalist
reformers, one rooted less in the idea of healthy motherhood than in the notion
of universal economic entitlements, including the right to a decent income and
protection against unemployment and work-related accidents. For him, the
right to assistance derived from citizenship itself, not some special service to
the nation (as in the case of mothers) or upstanding character (which had long
differentiated the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor).
This vision, too, enjoyed considerable support in the Progressive era. By
1913, twenty-two 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. To avoid
the stigma of depending on governmental assistance, contributions from workers’ own wages funded these programs in part, thus distinguishing them from
charity dispensed by local authorities to the poor. 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, male or female, should be allowed to fall would await the coming
of the New Deal.
THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS
Despite the ferment of Progressivism on the city and state levels, the most
striking political development of the early twentieth century was the rise of
the national state. The process of nationalization was occurring throughout
American life. National corporations dominated the economy; national organizations like the American Medical Association came into being to raise the
incomes and respect of professions. The process was even reflected in the consolidation of local baseball teams into the American and National Leagues and
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the advent in 1903 of the World Series. Only energetic national government,
Progressives believed, could create the social conditions of freedom.
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 interests 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 freedom, 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. Roosevelt was an impetuous, energetic individual with a penchant for what he called the “strenuous
life” of manly adventure. In many ways, he became the model for the twentiethcentury president, an official actively and continuously engaged in domestic
and foreign affairs. (The foreign policies of the Progressive presidents will be
discussed in the next chapter.) Roosevelt regarded the president as “the steward
of the public welfare.” He moved aggressively to set the political agenda.
Roosevelt’s 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,
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.
Morgan was outraged. “Wall Street is paralyzed,” quipped one newspaper, “at
the thought that a President of the United States should sink to enforce the
law.” In 1904, the Supreme Court ordered Northern Securities dissolved, a
major victory for the antitrust movement.
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Roosevelt and Economic
Regulation
Roosevelt also believed that the president should be an honest broker in
labor disputes, rather than automatically siding with employers as his predecessors had usually done. When a
strike paralyzed the West Virginia and
Pennsylvania coalfields in 1902, he
summoned union and management
leaders to the White House. By threatening a federal takeover of the mines,
he persuaded the owners to allow the
dispute to be settled by a commission
he himself would appoint.
Reelected in 1904, Roosevelt pushed
for more direct federal regulation of
President Theodore Roosevelt addressing a
the economy. Appealing to the public
crowd in 1902.
for support, he condemned the misuse
of the “vast power conferred by vast
wealth.” 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 development of federal intervention in the corporate economy. That
year, as has been noted, also saw the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act,
which established a federal agency to police the quality and labeling of food
and drugs, and the Meat Inspection Act. Many businessmen supported these
measures, recognizing that they would benefit from greater public confidence
in the quality and safety of their products. But even 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 by Congress in 1872, partly to preserve
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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 appreciate God’s
creation. He called forests “God’s first temples.” In nature, he believed, men
could experience directly the presence of God. Muir’s outlook blended evangelical Protestantism with a romantic view of nature 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 the Transcendentalists, 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.
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 that the conservation movement became a concerted federal policy. A dedicated outdoorsman
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. The creation of parks like Yellowstone, Yosemite, and Glacier required the removal of Indians who hunted and fished there as
well as the reintroduction of animals that had previously disappeared. City dwellers who visited the national parks did not realize that these were to a considerable
extent artificially created and managed environments, not primordial nature.
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
utilization 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 conservati...
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