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National Politics 1895-1920s
During this time (1880s to 1921) a different political discussion –
Progressivism
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The closing of the frontier (opportunity); Roosevelt and the Presidency;
Immigration, and an overall sense that America was now different from its
frontier past; the Civil War had created a new future
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Dominant political movement between 1890s and 1920; redefined by
the New Deal as liberalism (same ends)
Based upon the hopes and ambitions of the “new” middle class
(economic and political)
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Optimistic
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Application of science
Could predict the future
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Assumed a higher morality
Knowledge is power
Reason and peace were normal
Progressivism: begins with the business community, but also defined by
new religious, social and political ideas
The search for order in a new business climate
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Larger organizations
Labor issues (industrial unions)
Needed financial stability
Apply the principles of the administrative revolution
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Led by businessmen
Apply to the public’s business
Order and predictability
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The unexpected
Even-handed and merit
From one to a variety of objectives
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End conflict
Promote community and opportunity
Needed predictability from government (reforms)
California: markets and the railroads (rates)
Entrepreneurs: political (regulation and deal making) and private
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Stressed
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Experts
Efficiency
Audits (where is the money going)
Better control
Reforms
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Draft budgets
Shorter ballot
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Secret ballot
Central purchasing
Research bureaus
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Broader executive authority (the Mayor)
Decision making power
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Functional (Departments)
City manager structure
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The idea of Progressivism
Always moving forward in a positive direction
Knew the direction of history
Bred intolerance and a culture of the “better people”
The social sciences
Two primary influences
Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834)
Desired a utopia but thought society was not improving
1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population
Population increase made a good society impossible as famine and disease
would always follow
Focused attention on birth and marriage rates (how to limit)
More optimistic toward the end of his life; encouraged domestic production;
but … the concerns remained
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
1859: The Origin of Species
1871:The Descent of Man
Science and Scientism
Evolution supplied a new theory of the state
Evolutionary adaptation now was associated with “experimentation” by the
government; provided an argument for state expansion
Wilson: “… Government does now whatever experience permits or the times
demand.”
Herbert Spencer
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Survival of the Fittest – Social Darwinism
Was the social equivalent of natural selection
Has been argued that the idea was used as a justification for the fortunes of
Carnegie, Rockefeller and JP Morgan.
The myth of the “Robber Barons”
The idea was never used as an explanation
1883:Eugenics (Francis Galton)
Brought together Malthus’ pessimism and Darwin’s science
Applied to human society
“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the
civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace
throughout the world the savage races.”
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Materialism was the explanation (Marx as well)
The natural process set moral standards and not “a special God implanted
conscience”
Helped set the stage for Nazi race theory
Eugenics was advocated by the leading reformers
Purpose was to ban the reproduction of the “unfit”
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Margaret Sanger (1879-1966)
American Birth Control League (1921)
 The Pivot of Civilization (1922): “We want fewer and better children … we
cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make
… with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on
us”
 (1934) “ … no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit
… no permit shall be valid for more than one child.”
 (1957) Interview with Mike Wallace: I think the greatest sin in the world is
bringing children into the world … that have disease from their parents, that
have no chance in the world to be a human being practically …
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Impressed for example, by events in Russia and Italy
Mussolini and Stalin seemed to be prophets of the future
Russia was a giant “laboratory school”
Jane Addams called it “the greatest social experiment in history”
 At first, defined in religious terms
 Wilson (an agent of God’s will)
 The Social Gospel Movement
– Walter Rauschenbusch (1861-1918)
» Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907)
» Theology for the Social Gospel (1917)
 Less about faith and salvation than creating the Kingdom of God on earth
through social reform and service. A religious utopia.
 “New forms of association must be created. Our disorganized competitive
life must pass into an organic cooperative life”
 “… individualism means tyranny”
 The state must become “the medium through which the people shall cooperate in their search for the kingdom of God and its righteousness”
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Washington Gladden called this “applied Christianity”
By the late 20s and early 30s this Christian idea had become more secular
Slowly the state as directed by God became simply the idea of the God State
(replaced the church)
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Settlement houses
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Public health
Regulate housing and factory conditions
The child
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Carrier of the future
The “hope” of democracy
To protect and nurture
 Herbert Croly (1869-1930)
 1909: The Promise of American Life; 1914: founded the New Republic; 1915:
Progressive Democracy
 Attracted by the German welfare state being constructed by Bismarck
 Hated English liberalism. Saw Teddy Roosevelt as an American Bismarck.
Had no use for Jefferson’s farmer individualists or Hamilton’s idea of a
commercial republic.
 Saw business as blocking the path to the future as defined by a rising
professional class of disinterested specialists trained in the universities
(shared with Wilson).
 Believed that the Protestant Reformation was the source of all ills. Had
unleashed materialism and individualism and destroyed a unified
authoritative moral system. Had brought about the “spiritual disorganization
of society”. Had destroyed the “moral communism” of medieval
Christendom”.
 Not about economics but social unity and equality.
 The creation of such a society required the trained experts and creative
classes who had attained a higher morality. Were interested in public affairs
and not the marketplace. They were the “fourth department” of government.
Those who wanted to restore the “worship” of society. To do so, Americans
had to be “liberated from their past”.
 The object was human perfectibility and the “religious regeneration of the
progressive democratic faith … which is at bottom a spiritual expression of
the mystical unity of human nature”.
 By the early 20s he referred to this as liberalism. It wasn’t about economics
at all (socialism versus capitalism) but about a desired kind of society.
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By 1900 attention focused on the national level
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Politics
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Increasingly a matter of administrative or executive decision
making
Importance of the legislature declines
From legislative to administrative democracy
Agencies and mandates
The basic ideas:
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Natural Rights has been replaced by relativisn and Historicism
The Constitution has been replaced by the Administrative State
 The “Wisconsin idea”. Made popular by Robert La Follette (1855-1925) who
as Governor promoted the idea of working closely with the University of
Wisconsin faculty to construct a “laboratory for democracy” through
research and expert involvement.
 Wanted a strong executive to govern through commissions staffed by
experts. The enemy was the Constitution (the “monarchy of the word”)
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Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)
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1882-84: NY State Assembly
1897-1898: Assistant Sec. of the Navy
1899-1900: Gov. of NY
1901(March-Sept 14) Vice President of the US
1901-1909 President of the US
The politician
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Popular acclaim
Power (basic ambition)
Various roles
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Soldier
Cowboy
Hunter preacher
Author
A moralist
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Fought the corruption of the spoils system as a federal Civil Service
commissioner
Fought corruption in the NYC police department as its Superintendent
between 1895-97
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Harsh personal prejudices
Set new pattern for campaigning
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Once he had nomination
Ran apart
A new financial form (an investment in the office)
Understanding of politics
 Once elected
– three goals:
 To make himself the most important Republican
 To elevate the Executive as the dominant force in the National Government
 To make Washington the most important single influence on national affairs
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Embraced the two most important issues of the day
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(1) The railroads and financial system
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Rates for shipping
Other businessmen
(2) Conservation
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Sense of dwindling resources
Was their natural wealth without limit?
Orderly growth
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Rational management of natural resources
Came by his concern for natural resources and wildlife honestly.
1888: one of the founders of the Boone and Crockett Club (with George
Bird Brinell who was the editor of Field and Stream and the creator of
the Audubon Society)
A wildlife conservation lobby for animals (Buffalo) and national parks.
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Conservation
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Gifford Pinchot
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Chief, Division of Forestry
Rational land use; better resource management
Not preservationist
Regulated private development
Doubled the acres in the public reserve
1908 National Conservation Congress
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44 Governors
+ 500 Experts and participants
Dr. Harvey Wiley
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Chief Chemist, Department of Agriculture
1906 Pure Food and Drug Act
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1903 Department of Commerce and Labor
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Investigate and regulate large corporate enterprises
1906 Hepburn Act
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Interstate Commerce Commission
The Trusts
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Economic combination
1911 Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil and American
Tobacco trusts
The “Bully” Pulpit
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Dramatic investigations
Public conferences
Private “encouragement”
The force of his personality
Find a moral purpose for public officials and private interests
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Broad agreements
Continuing negotiation
Administration
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Indeterminate process
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Expert, flexible, adaptive, continuous
A New definition of the Presidency
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No longer the leader of a faction
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Set the agenda
A New definition of the Presidency
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Set the priorities
Responsible for the “big” problems
One issue at a time
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Woodrow Wilson
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In some ways, a prototype
Moralist and utopian
Distrusted legislative democracy
 The United States was in the vanguard of progress. Opponents were tools of
Satan. God had chosen him to do great things.
 In 1912, Wilson said that we are in the presence of a new organization of
society; a new social stage … the old political formulas do not fit the present
problems; Wilson thought that Americans had to get beyond the Declaration
of Independence.
 It had become an obstacle to rational administration.
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In 1913, he delivered the State of the Union in person (Jefferson)
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The Founders checks and balances was not what the times demanded
George Washington had said that the Congress was “the first wheel of
the government, a wheel which communicates motion to all the rest.”
Wilson had decided that the President was the first wheel
In 1887, he wrote that
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In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite
one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of
the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members.
Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.
In 1912, during the Presidential race, he said that
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When you do socialism justice, it is hardly different from the heart of
Christianity itself.
1885: The State
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Critical of the constitutional system of checks and balances
Wanted a government with the President and masses communicating
by plebiscite
“The man whose faith is rooted in the Bible knows that reform cannot
be stayed”
Wilson: politics “is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton”
Human nature is always changing and can be fashioned by experts devising
policy for the state.
There would be a new class of bureaucrats who would practice the new
science of government without bias.
Effectively changed the meaning of Democracy.
The Declaration was fine as long as you ignored the preface.
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Wanted a new founding
To change the original political ideas of natural rights and constitutionalism.
Rights (life, liberty and property) preceded the state which existed to protect
them. Individuals and economic liberty came first.
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Power could do great things
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Have lost the Calvinist sense of sin
“I cannot imagine power as a thing negative and not positive”
 You can see the political philosophy working its way out in two ways.
 First, the response to criticism; especially about World War One.
In response to the blowing up of the Black Tom munitions dump by
German agents in July 1916, the Congress passed the Espionage Act.
But Wilson wanted more.
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May 1918, the Congress passed the Sedition Act which criminalized
:”abusive language” about the government.
The Justice Department prosecuted Eugene Debs, the Socialist
candidate in 1912, for making statements opposing the war.
Newspapers were barred from the mail; a film maker was jailed for
making a movie about the Revolutionary War; and a priest was
prosecuted for claiming Jesus would have been a pacifist.
German language books were barred from libraries; German language
newspapers were forced out of business and some states banned
speaking German outdoors.
 Second, Wilson embraced Eugenics and the racial theories of the day.
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1913: the civil service was segregated; Photographs of applicants were
required and if you were black you were not hired.
When the NAACP protested the policy, they were told it was in the best
interest of blacks.
These ideas were not solely associated with the South (Jim Crow) but
also embraced by Northern Progressives as well.
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Edward House (Wilson’s closest advisor)
Wrote a novel: Philip Dru
An administrator seizes power during a crisis and governs by replacing
Congress with five experts to pass reforms which had been blocked by
“selfish” interests