Chapter Twenty-One: The Rise of Progressivism

Where Historians Disagree - Progressive Reform

Until the early 1950s, most historians seemed to agree on the central characteristics of early-twentieth-century progressivism. It was just what many progressives themselves had said it was: a movement by the "people" to curb the power of "special interests." More specifically, it was a protest by an aroused citizenry against the excessive power of urban bosses, corporate moguls, and corrupt elected officials.

In 1951, George Mowry began the process of challenging these assumptions by examining progressives in California and describing them as a small, privileged elite of business and professional figures: people who considered themselves the natural leaders of society and who were trying to recover their fading influence from the new capitalist institutions that had displaced them. Progressivism was not, in other words, a popular, democratic movement; it was the effort of a displaced elite to restore its authority. Richard Hofstadter expanded on this idea in The Age of Reform (1955) by describing reformers as people afflicted by "status anxiety," fading elites suffering not from economic but from psychological discontent.

The Mowry-Hofstadter argument soon encountered a range of challenges. In 1963, Gabriel Kolko published his influential study The Triumph of Conservatism, in which he rejected both the older "democratic" view of progressivism and the newer "status-anxiety" view. Progressive reform, he argued, was not an effort to protect the people from the corporations; it was, rather, a vehicle through which corporate leaders used the government to protect themselves from competition.

A more moderate reinterpretation came from historians embracing what would later be called the "organizational" approach to twentieth-century American history. First Samuel Hays, in The Response to Industrialism (1957), and then Robert Wiebe, in The Search for Order (1967), portrayed progressivism as a broad effort by businessmen, professionals, and other middle-class people to bring order and efficiency to political and economic life. In the new industrial society, economic power was increasingly concentrated in large, national organizations, while social and political life remained centered primarily in local communities. Progressivism, Wiebe argued, was the effort of a "new middle class"--a class tied to the emerging national economy--to stabilize and enhance its position in society by bringing those two worlds together.

In the 1970s and 1980s, scholarship on progressivism moved in so many different directions that some historians came to despair of finding any consistent meaning in the term. Much of the new scholarship focused on discovering new groups among whom "progressive" ideas and efforts flourished. Historians found evidence of progressivism in the rising movement by consumers to define their interests; in the growth of reform movements among African Americans; in the changing nature of urban political machines; and in the political activism of working people and labor organizations.

Other scholars attempted to identify progressivism with broad changes in the structure and culture of politics. Richard McCormick, writing in 1981, argued that the crucial change in the "progressive era" was the decline of political parties and the corresponding rise of interest groups working for particular social and economic goals.

At the same time, many historians have focused on the role of women (and the vast network of voluntary associations they created in shaping and promoting progressive reform). Some progressive battles, such historians as Kathryn Sklar, Ruth Rosen, Elaine Tyler May, and Linda Gordon have argued, were part of an effort by women to protect their interests within the domestic sphere in the face of jarring challenges from the new industrial world. This protective urge drew women reformers to such issues as temperance, divorce, prostitution, and the regulation of female and child labor. Other women worked to expand their own roles in the public world, particularly through their support of suffrage. The gendered interests of women reformers are, many historians insist, critical to an understanding of progressivism.

The search for the "essence" of progressivism will undoubtedly continue. But the scholarship of recent decades suggests that the real answer to the nature of progressive reform may be a recognition of its enormous diversity.

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~shgape/bibs/prog.html - James J. Connolly, "Progressivism"

http://www.oah.org/pubs/magazine/progressive/perry.html - Elisabeth Israels Perry, "The Changing Meaning of the Progressive Era"

1			Read the two essays above. How, according to these two authors, did progressivism become - and why does it continue to be -- such a contested term in American historiography? What conclusions do they draw about the meaning of the term "progressivism"? Do they find it a useful rubric? Do you agree?

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~shgape/bibs/women.html - Kathleen R. Parker, "Women, Sexuality, and Morality in the U.S. in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era"

http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~shgape/bibs/consumer.html - David Blanke, "Consumer Culture during the Gilded and Progressive Eras"

http://www.geocities.com/MadisonAvenue/Boardroom/4278/eugenics.htm - Ted L. DeCorte, Jr., "Menace of Undesirables: The Eugenics Movement during the Progressive Era"

2			Choose one of the three bibliographic essays above and evaluate it in light of the continuing changes in progressive historiography. Which interpretations of progressivism seem to be most prevalent in that essay? Do the conclusions drawn lend credence to one school or another?

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/RODATL.html - Main Book Page, Atlantic Crossings

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/RODATL_R.html - Reviews, Atlantic Crossings

http://www.kevincmurphy.com/rodgers.html - Summary, Atlantic Crossings

3			A new and novel interpretation of the Progressive Era was recently made in Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings. Using the articles and reviews above, summarize Rodgers argument. Do you see any precedents or parallels to Rodgers' thesis in earlier interpretations of Progressivism?