The Progressive Era

The Progressive Era

1. People could solve problems, and it was their right to do so. The state could enforce their reforms.

   • The number of professionals in law, medicine, and religion grew. They managed the urban-industrial society. These members of the middle class did not derive their status from birth or inherited wealth.
     • Professionals formed societies. They thought they could help their nation with their knowledge.
       • The AMA formed in 1901.
       • National Education Association
       • National Federation of Settlement (1911)
     • Alice Hamilton studied a disease outbreak in Chicago, and she researched many industrial diseases. Ultimately, Illinois passed a law providing compensation for industrial diseases.
   • Ministers and social workers joined in movement to impose laws on tenement houses and to protect women and children in the workplace.
     • They increasingly turned to government aid.
     • They pressured municipal agencies to fund parks and nurseries.
   • The Charity Organization Society of New York, in spring 1900, presented sociological data graphically in an exhibition, and connections between livelihoods and lifestyles were made.
     • Theodore Roosevelt, responding to the public outcry that resulted, appointed the New York State Tenement House Commission.
     • There were many subsequent studies of the condition of the poor, like The Standard of Living Among Working Men's Families (1909).
   • Social workers began to distinguish themselves as a field with the National Conference of Social Work in 1915.
   • The federal government should balance the need for bigness and the need for competition by restoring the economy to a more human scale.
     • Louis Brandeis asked the federal government to ensure that large combinations did not emerge.
     • Roosevelt, by trustbusting, championed moderate change, thus protecting America from radicalism.
       • He regulated trusts instead of destroying them, showing no commitment to reverse the trend towards economic concentration. Overall, Roosevelt's policy was to treat the government as an impartial regulatory mechanism that gave everyone a "square deal."
         • A strike by the United Mine Workers in 1902 endangered coal supplies, so Roosevelt coerced the mine owners into accepting federal arbitration, which awarded the strikers wage increases and a nine-hour workday.
         • The Hepburn Railroad Act of 1906 sought to return regulatory power to the ICC by giving it the power to oversee railroad rates.
           • The ICC had existed since 1887 under the Interstate Commerce Act, but the courts had limited its influence. 
         • The Pure Food and Drug Act restricted the sale of dangerous or ineffective medicines in 1906. After the publication of The Jungle, Roosevelt pushed for the Meat Inspection Act. Also, Roosevelt proposed an eight-hour workday, worker compensation, and inheritance taxes. Many of Roosevelt's reforms could not overcome the conservative opposition.
         • Roosevelt restricted private development on millions of acres of undeveloped government land, and when conservatives in congress retracted Roosevelt's authority over public lands in 1907, Gifford Pinchot and Roosevelt seized much of the land still on the public domain.
           • In 1902, the president backed the National Reclamation Act, which funded dams and reservoirs for irrigation.
           • Hetch Metchy dam controversy
       • He wanted to enable the government to publicize knowledge resulting from investigations of corporations.
       • He broke up a few combinations.
         • He ordered the Justice Department to invoke the Sherman Antitrust Act against Northern Securities Company, a railroad monopoly, in 1902.
   • Taft's progressivism did not measure up to Roosevelt's.
     • The government did not attempt to overcome opposition from the Old Guard, so his tariff-lowering bill diminished into the feeble Payne-Aldrich Tariff.
     • Gifford Pinchot exposed how Richard A. Ballinger, secretary of the interior, connived to turn over public coal lands in Alaska to a private syndicate for personal profit. When Taft neglected to remove him from office, progressives were alienated.
     • Roosevelt was furious with Taft. He delivered a speech in which he outlined the set of principles of "New Nationalism."
       • He supported progressive reforms like graduated income taxes.
       • Social justice was possible only through a strong federal government whose executive acted as the "steward of the public welfare."
       • Conservatives suffered defeats in 1910, indicating the spread of the progressive revolt, and Progressives won a majority in the house.
       • At first, Roosevelt only claimed to be pressuring Taft into promoting progressive policies.
       • Roosevelt founded the Progressive Party.
   • Woodrow Wilson clashed with Roosevelt's brand of Progressivism.
     • Reform sentiment had spread to the Democratic Party, Only a progressive could garner the Democratic nomination, and Wilson had passed progressive legislation in New Jersey.
     • He called his program "New Freedom," which, unlike Roosevelt's New Nationalism, would not accept economic concentration; it attacked bigness, which was unjust and inefficient and that warranted destruction by the government.
     • Wilson was forceful, exerting firm control over the cabinet, and he assembled a group of supporters, who voted for his program.
       • The Underwood-Simmons tariff introduced real competition that enervated trusts.
       • Congress instituted a graduated income tax.
       • The Federal Reserve Act of 1913
         • Federal Reserve notes were the basic medium of trade, backed by the government, that would be shifted to troubled areas in times of need.
         • There were twelve regional banks, which would hold a certain percentage of their assets in reserve and use their reserves to support loans.
     • The Federal Trade Commission Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act handled monopolies.
       • The Federal Trade Commission Act helped businesses determine whether their actions would be acceptable to the government and launched investigations and prosecutions.
     • Wilson refused to support suffrage and condoned the reimposition of segregation in the federal government, and he dismissed proposals for new reforms; as a result, Democrats suffered major losses in Congress.
       • Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis in January 1916 to the Supreme Court.
       • He provided farmers with credit, and he backed a measure of workers' compensation.
       • He supported the Keating-Owen Act of 1916, which prohibited the shipment of goods produced by underage children.
       • Smith-Lever Act of 1914

2. Progressive reforms followed evangelical protestantism and drew upon the sciences.

   • Human nature was adventitious.
   • Once people knew the truth, they would act on it.
   • Everything should be planned and efficient.
   • Problems were treated factually, and divine or natural laws lost favor to effective actions under William James's new doctrine of pragmatism.
     • Action determined truth, which individuals needed to assimilate.
     • John Dewey, who espoused the theory, applied pragmatism to education and came to oppose memorization and authoritarian teaching.
     • Law reflected the environment.
       • Benjamin Lindsey aimed to rehabilitate offenders.

3. Diversity of Efforts

   • Cleaning up the cities
   • Ending corruption
   • Gaining social justice in the form of women's and children's rights
   • Humanizing industry

4. Many people partook in the progressive craze, so there was disunity on which issues deserved the most attention. However, everyone's desire was to improve the wellbeing of society.

   • The Socialist party grew in strength over the Progressive era, attracting 1 million votes in 1912 for Eugene Debs. Socialists varied in radicalism; the IWW was a militant socialist group that sought the demise of capitalism.
   • Most were only desired reforms within the capitalist system.