Chapter Overview

Progressivism sprang from both liberal concerns for the poor and conservative impulses toward efficiency and order. The progressive desire to enlist an activist government to create a good society focused on urban problems.

The Roots of Progressive Reform

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

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

Progressive educators and social scientists sought to mold individuals by controlling their environment. Legal theorists looked to social experience rather than fixed principles. Investigative journalists ("muckrakers") furnished an agenda of reform and the public indignation necessary to implement it. At all levels, new governmental agencies and commissions staffed by impartial experts began to investigate and regulate society.

The Search for the Good Society

If progressivism ended in politics, it began with social reform, mostly of cities, where poverty and blight were evident. Progressive reformers defined poverty as the social consequence of deprivation, not the consequence of personal failure or immorality. Settlement houses helped to produce a new profession, social work, which applied scientific approaches to helping the poor and troubled.

Women moved into the forefront of social reform, extending the traditional woman's sphere of nurturance into society at large. Birth control, housing reform, child labor, consumer issues: All were promoted by women and other reformers as matters of social welfare and social justice. For many progressives, woman suffrage promised to help clean up society and, just as important, politics as well.

Controlling the Masses

The progressive vision sought to bring about the good society through controlling social environments. Urban society needed to be controlled, to stop it from being destroyed by immigrants and low-lifes. Some progressives pressed for immigration restriction, prohibition of alcohol, and an end to urban vice.

The Politics of Municipal and State Reform

Increasingly, politics seemed the only way to clean up society, but first politics itself had to be cleaned up. Progressives tried to make municipal government less corrupt and more efficient. Colorful reform mayors fought boss-dominated machines and monopolistic transit and utility companies.

In Wisconsin and elsewhere, governors injected democratic reforms and more experts into state government, shifting power from interest-dominated legislatures to executives and administrative agencies. Boss politics survived because machines promoted social welfare reforms that aided working-class constituents. Working-class "urban liberalism," the leading advocates of which were often women's associations, became a powerful instrument of reform.

Progressivism Goes to Washington

In the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, progressivism moved to Washington. Roosevelt accepted growth -- whether of business, labor, or capital -- as a natural development that promoted stability and order. He sought only to curb abuses with big government mediating among the various factions. Roosevelt established a dominant executive, enhanced the regulatory functions of the federal government, and laid the groundwork for a widening federal bureaucracy. When Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, took office, conservatives in Congress had begun to lash back. Taft's single term in office ended in frustration, divided the Republican Party, and allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency in 1912.

Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality

Under Wilson, national progressivism peaked. Wilson promised a "New Freedom" of regulated, orderly competition and strict limits on size, whether in business or government. The achievements of his first term included downward revision of the tariff, centralization of the banking system, a federal trade commission, and a new anti-trust law. These raised progressive reform to new heights and moved Wilson closer to the big government espoused by Roosevelt.

In the end, a decade and a half of progressivism had transformed American politics without overturning market capitalism. Progressives had established that government could and should regulate private corporations for the public good.