The Progressive Era
1. How did progressivism and organized interest groups
reflect the new political choices of Americans?
2. Why did progressives believe in the ability of
individuals to affect positive change? How has this idea
manifested itself in political reform efforts?
3. What reforms did American women, African
Americans, and urbanites seek?
4. Why and how did President Roosevelt expand the
Federal government's power within the economy?
5. How did President Wilson seek to accommodate his
progressive principles to the realities of political power?
One needs to keep in mind the intellectual
elements of the progressive outlook and
recognize the interaction of progressive
ideas with the academic disciplines of
economics, philosophy, psychology, and
law.
and lets keep in mind as well the successes
and failures of the labor movement during
the Progressive Era. But consider in what
ways this was a turning point for the labor
movement?
And finally we must recognize the
struggles of African Americans to
secure their rights during the
Progressive Era. And the aspects of
progressive reform that undermined
blacks’ rights?
The Course of Reform
Progressive Ideas
progressivism embraces a widespread,
many-sided effort after 1900 to build a
better society there was no single
progressive constituency, agenda, or
unifying organization.
placed great faith in scientific management
and academic expertise
The urban middle class occupied the center
of progressive action as exemplified by Jane
Addams, founder of the settlement
movement and Hull House.
The urban middle class experienced a
generational crisis that reflected a crisis of
personal faith acted out by reforming
American society to meet their Christian
mission.
They felt a sense of urgency to reform
society in part because they were not
insulated from the ills of industrialism.
Progressive Ideas
The starting point for progressive thinking was
that if the facts could be known, everything else
was possible. They placed great faith in scientific
management and academic expertise and also felt
that it was important to resist ways of thinking that
discouraged purposeful action.
Progressives thought the Social Darwinists of the
Gilded Age wrong in their belief that society
developed according to fixed and unchanging laws
agreed with philosophers such as William James
William James’s doctrine - pragmatism - a
philosophical doctrine developed primarily by
William James that denied the existence of
absolute truths and argued that ideas should be
judged by their practical consequences. Problem
solving, not ultimate ends, was the proper concern
of philosophy, in James's view. Pragmatism
provided a key intellectual foundation for
progressivism.
Progressives prided themselves on being
tough-minded, but in truth were unabashed
idealists.
The progressive mode of thought nurtured a
new kind of reform journalism when, at the
turn of the century, editors discovered that
readers were most interested in the exposure
of mischief in America.
The term muckraker was given to journalists
who exposed the underside of American life;
however, in making the public aware of social
ills, muckrakers called the people to action.
Progressive leaders often grew up in homes
imbued with evangelical piety or struggled
through crises where their religious
strivings could be translated into secular
action
Reform became a major, self-sustaining
phenomenon.
The old order was challenged and changed both
politically and economically.
Reformers believed that problems could be
addressed through scientific investigation and that
people had the ability to master their environment.
Educated women found a congenial intellectual
environment in which to play an active public
role.
Religion played an underlying role in much
reform activity.
There was a drive for information gathering and a
high degree of confidence in academic expertise.
Inexpensive general-circulation magazines
containing exposés became popular reading
material.
Investigative journalism established itself as
a legitimate enterprise.
Muckraking publications attracted new
converts to progressive reform.
Exposure of municipal corruption gave rise
to reform on the local level.
Ida M. Tarbell served as
managing editor of
McClure's Magazine, where
her "History of the Standard
Oil Company” ran in serial
form for three years. Her
revelations of the ruthless
practices John D.
Rockefeller used to seize
control of the oil-refining
industry convinced readers
that it was time for
economic and political
reforms to curb the power of
big business. Tarbell grew
up in the Pennsylvania oil
region and knew firsthand
how Standard Oil crushed
competitors-- her father was
forced out of business by
Rockefeller's South
Improvement Company.
Women Progressives
Frances Kellor was a graduate of
Cornell University and worked
toward a PhD at the University of
Chicago. She lived periodically at
Hull House and joined the circle of
social reformers that congregated
there. Kellor was especially
concerned with the plight of jobless
women and their exploitation by
commercial employment agencies.
Her book Out of Work was a
pioneering investigation, paving the
way for the modern study of
unemployment. Her study on the
problems of immigrants in New
York led to the establishment of the
New York State Bureau of
Industries and Immigration in 1910.
Kellor was chosen to be its head,
the first woman to hold so high a
post in New York State government.
Middle-class women, who had long carried the
burden of humanitarian work in American cities,
were among the first to respond to the idea of
progressivism.
Josephine Shaw Lowell founded the New York
Consumers' League in 1890 to improve wages and
working conditions for female clerks in the city
stores by "white listing" progressive businesses.
The league spread to other cities and became the
National Consumers' League in 1899,and, under the
leadership of Florence Kelley, became a powerful
lobby for protective legislation for women and
children.
Among the achievements of the National Consumers'
League was the 1908 Supreme Court decision of
Muller v. Oregon, which limited women's workdays to
ten hours. Argued by Louis D. Brandeis, the case
cleared the way for a wave of protective laws for
women and children and helped usher in a
maternalistic welfare system in the United States.
Settlement houses, such as Hull House founded by
Jane Addams, helped alleviate social problems in the
slums and satisfy the middle-class residents' need to
pursue meaningful lives.
Women activists breathed new life into the suffrage
movement by underscoring the capabilities of women.
Social reformers founded the National
Women’s Trade Union League in
1903, which was financed and led by
wealthy supporters. The league
organized women workers, played a
considerable role in their strikes, and
trained working-class leaders, such as
Rose Schneiderman and Agnes Nestor.
Rose Schneiderman sought to improve the
lives of working class women through the
vote, education, and legislative protection
such as the eight-hour day and minimum
wage laws. A Polish immigrant who grew up
impoverished in New York’s Lower East
Side, Schneiderman was well acquainted
with the life of an industrial worker. She
quickly learned about trade unions and
organized her shop into the first female local
of the Jewish Socialist United Cloth and Cap
Makers’ Union. Schneiderman actively
worked for the Women’s Trade Union
League (WTUL), an organization dedicated
to unionizing working women and lobbying
for protective legislation. She had a long
career in the WTUL as well as in the
International Ladies’ Garment Workers’
Union (ILGWU), holding a variety of
leadership positions in both.
In 1897, she founded the
International Glove
Makers Union and
became its first president.
In addtion, Nestor was
involved in the Women's
Trade Union League in
which she provided
support for female
unionists through
educational work. During
1913-1948 she was the
president of the Chicago
chapter of the Women's
Trade Union League.
Inspired by British suffragists, around 1910
American suffrage activity picked up and its
tactics shifted; Alice Paul began to use
confrontational tactics to get women the vote by
rejecting the state-by-state route and advocating a
constitutional amendment that would grant the
right to vote to women everywhere.
Paul organized the militant National Woman's
Party in 1916. Meanwhile, the more mainstream
National American Woman Suffrage Association
(NA WSA) was rejuvenated under the leadership
of Carrie Chapman Catt, who organized a broadbased campaign to push for a constitutional
amendment for woman suffrage.
The Women's Trade Union
League was established at a
convention of the
American Federation of
Labor in 1903. The two
female images on its
insignia represent the bond
between the mother and the
woman worker, the one
caring, the other strong.
The WTUL accepted the
primacy of women's
maternal obligations but
recognized the reality of
women's labor
involvement. Thus one of
the defining goals framed
by their clasped hands: to
guard the home. The other
two objectives were a
maximum of eight working
hours a day for women and
a wage sufficient to allow a
woman to support herself.
In 1896 women voted in only four statesWyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah. The
West led the way in the campaign for
woman suffrage, partially because of
demographics, as in the case of Wyoming,
where only 16 votes were needed in the
state's tiny legislature to obtain passage of
the vote for women. This flag illustrates the
number of states where women voted.
In a fundamental shift, younger womencollegeeducated and self-supportingbegan refusing to be
hemmed in by the social constraints of women's
"separate sphere." The term feminism, just starting
to come into use, originally meant freedom for full
personal development.
Feminists were militantly pro-suffrage because
they considered themselves to be fully equal to
men, not a weaker sex entitled to men's protection.
Disputes led to the fracturing of the women's
movement, dividing the older generation of
progressives from their feminist successors who
prized gender equality higher than any social
benefit.
Urban Liberalism
A shift occurred in the center of gravity within
progressivism by 1910, as reflected in the career of
California Governor Hiram Johnson. A new strain
of progressive reform known as urban hiberalism
emerged from the partnership of urban middleclass
reformers, machine bosses, and the working class.
This new breed of urban middle-class reformers
pressured the state to take over the needs of the
urban poor.
Also confronting the bosses of the traditional
political machine were leftist parties like the
Socialist Party, which elected a congressman in
1910 and ran Eugene Debs as a presidential
candidate in 1912.
Urban liberalism was also driven by
nativism in the form of moral reform
movements and immigration restriction.
Although city machines adopted urban
liberalism, trade unions did not, and
rejected state attempts to interfere in labor
affairs.
As the major spokesmen for unions, Samuel
Gompers preached that workers should not seek
from government what they could accomplish by
their own economic power and self-help through a
process known as voluntarism, a creed that
weakened substantially during the progressive
years.
Over time as muckraking exposes revealed labor
exploitation, labor retreated from voluntarism by
embracing urban liberals' progressive legislation,
especially in the area of industrial hazards since
liability rules, based on common law, favored
employers and not injured workers.
But health insurance and unemployment
compensation, popular in Europe, conjured
up images of state-induced dependency
among the urban liberal reformers. These
major social reforms remained beyond the
reach of urban liberals in the Progressive
Era.
It would take a major depression during the
1930s to enable reformers to fashion a
permanent state solution to poverty.
After the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire, some machine politicians led the
way in making laws and regulations in
order to improve labor conditions, but
it was clear that urban social problems
had become too big to be handled by
party machines.
The doors were the problem. Most were locked (to
keep the working girls from leaving early); the
few that were open became jammed by bodies as
the flames spread. When the fire trucks finally
came, the ladders were too short. Compared with
those caught inside, the girls who leapt to their
deaths were the lucky ones. "As I lookd up I saw a
love affair in the midst of all the horror," a
reporter wrote. A young man was helping girls
leap from a window. The fourt "put her arms
about him and kiss[ed] him. Then he held her out
into space and dropped her." He immediately
followed. "Thud-- dead, Thud-- dead...I saw his
face before they covered it...He was a real man.
He had done his best." -New York Tribune, March
26, 1911.
Former machine politicians such as Al Smith
and Robert Wagner formed ties with
progressives and became urban liberals—
advocates of active intervention by the state in
uplifting the laboring masses of America’s
cities.
The conversion of machine politicians was a
reaction to strong competition from a new
breed of middle-class progressive, skilled
urban reformers and the challenge from the
left by the Socialist Party.
The always pragmatic city machines adopted
urban liberalism without much ideological
struggle.
During the progressive years, the unions’ selfreliant “voluntarism” weakened substantially as
the labor movement came under attack by the
courts.
Judges granted injunctions to prohibit unions from
striking, and, in the Danbury Hatters case, the
Supreme Court’s decision rendered trade unions
vulnerable to antitrust suits.
After the American Federation of Labor’s “Bill of
Grievances” was rebuffed by Congress, unions
became more politically active.
Organized labor joined the battle for progressive
legislation and became its strongest advocate,
especially for workers’ compensation for
industrial accidents.
Between 1910 and 1917, all industrial states
enacted insurance laws covering on-the-job
injuries, yet health insurance and unemployment
compensation scarcely made it into the American
political agenda.
Old-age pensions met resistance because the
United States already had a pension system for
Civil War veterans and their survivors whose
enforcement was extremely lax. Easy access to
these veterans’ benefits prompted fears that a new
generation of workers could become dependent
upon state payments.
Not until a later generation experienced the Great
Depression would the country be ready for social
insurance.
Reforming Politics
Like the Mugwumps, progressive reformers
attacked the boss rule of the party system,
but did so more adeptly and more
aggressively, though their ideals of civic
betterment elbowed uneasily with their
politician’s drive for self-aggrandizement.
Progressive politicians, especially Robert
La Follette, felt that the key to reforming
party machines was to reclaim the power to
choose candidates. The progressives took
that power away from the bosses and gave it
to voters in a direct primary.
LaFaollette was transformed into a
political reformer when a Wisconsin
Republican boss attempted to bribe him in
1891 to influence a judge in a railway case.
As he described it in his Autobiography,
"Out of this awful ordeal came
understanding; and out of understanding
came resolution. I determined that the
power of this corrupt influence...should be
broken." This photograph captures him at
the top of his form, expounding his
progressive vision to a rapt audience of
Wisconsin citizens at an impromptu street
gathering.
Many progressive politicians-Albert B.
Cummins of Iowa, William S. U'Ren of
Oregon, and Hiram Johnson of Califomia,
all skillfully used the direct primary as the
stepping stone to political power; they
practiced a new kind of popular politics,
which was a more effective way to power
than the backroom techniques of machine
politicians.
Racism and Reform
At a time when black men were being driven
from politics in the South, their wives and
sisters got organized themselves and became an
alternative voice of black conscience. Sara
Iredell Fleetwood, superintendent of the
Freedman's Hospital Training School for
Nurses, founded the Colored Women's League
of Washington, D.C. in 1892 for purposes of
"racial uplift." This picture of the league was
taken on the steps of Frederick Douglass's
home in Anacostia, Washington. Mrs.
Fleetwood is seated at the far right, third row
from the bottom. The notations are by someone
seeking to identify the other members, a
modest effort to save for posterity these
women, mostly teachers, who did their best for
the good of the race.
This is a photograph of a history class at Hampton
Institute, a freedmen's school founded in 1868 in
Virginia where Booker T. Washington began his
career, and a model for many similar institutions
throughout the South. In a controversial
experiment in interracial education, Hampton also
began enrolling Native American students in
1878. Freed people regarded the educational
opportunities that Hampton and other such schools
provided them as immense privileges.
Nonetheless, such institutions, which were often
overseen by white benefactors, maintained strict
controls over their black students to train them in
the virtues of industriousness and self-discipline.
The young women were prepared for jobs as
teachers, but also as domestic servants and
industrial workers. In 1899,
Hampton's white trustees hired America's first
important female documentary photographer, Frances
Benjamin Johnston, who was white, to portray the
students' educational progress. Her photographs were
displayed at the Paris Exposition of 1900, where they
were much praised for both their artistic achievement
and their depiction of racial harmony. This image is
exceptionally rich for the diversity of its subjects and
the complexity of its content. A white female teacher
stands in the center among her female and male,
African American and Native American, students. All
are contemplating a Native American man in
ceremonial dress.
When all is said and done, we need to keep
in mind that a number of critical events in
African American history occurred during
the Progressive Era. Among these:
The primary originated in the South and by
1903 it was operating in seven southern states.
In the South, the primary was a white primary
that effectively barred African Americans from
political participation.
This exercise of white supremacy was justified
by labeling southern blacks as an "ignorant
electorate,» a racism accepted by leaders such
as Taft, who assured Southerners that "the
federal government has nothing to do with
social equality," and Wilson, who signaled that
he favored segregation of the u.S. civil service.
The foremost black leader of his day, Booker T.
Washington, spread a doctrine known as the
Atlanta Compromise; Washington thought that
black economic progress was the key to winning
political and civil rights.
Younger, educated blacks thought Washington
was conceding too much and became impatient
with his silence on segregation and violence
against blacks, such as the 1908 Springfield,
Illinois, race riot.
The Niagara Movement, led by William
Monroe Trotter and W. E. B. Du Bois,
defined the African American struggle for
rights: they proclaimed black pride, insisted
on full civic and political equality, and
resolutely rejected submissiveness.
Sympathetic white progressives fonned the
National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909.
The NAACP's national leadership was dominated
by white leadership. But the editor of The Crisis,
W. E. B. Du Bois, was an African American, and
he used that platform to demand equal rights for
blacks.
The National Urban League took the lead on
social welfare, uniting in 1911 the many agencies
serving black migrants arriving in northern cities.
In the South, welfare work was the province of
black women, who utilized the southern branches
of the National Association of Colored Women's
Clubs, which had started in 1896.
The Progressive Era
Part II
The Making of a Progressive President
Like many budding progressives, Theodore
Roosevelt was motivated by a high-minded
Christian upbringing, but he did not scorn power
and its uses.
During his term as governor of New York,
Roosevelt asserted his confidence in the
government's capacity to improve the lives of
people.
Roosevelt was chosen as William McKinley's
running mate by Republicans who hoped to
neutralize him, but he became president in 1901
after McKinley's assassination.
As president, Roosevelt adroitly used the
patronage powers of his office to gain control of
the Republican Party and displayed his activist
bent.
Roosevelt was troubled by the threat that big
business posed to competitive markets.
The mergers of individual businesses into trusts
decreased competition; bigger business meant
power to control markets. By 1910, 1 percent of
the nation's manufacturers accounted for 44
percent of the nation's industrial output
With the passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act of
1890, the federal government had enabled itself to
enforce firmly established common laws in cases
involving interstate commerce, but the power had
not been exercised.
In 1903 Roosevelt established the Bureau of
Corporations in order to investigate
business practices and to support the Justice
Department's capacity to mount antitrust
suits.
After winning the presidential election,
Roosevelt became the nation's trustbuster,
taking on corporations such as Standard Oil,
American Tobacco, and Du Pont
Theodore Roosevelt was motivated by a high-minded Christian
upbringing, but he did not scorn power and its uses.
In this vivid cartoon from the
humor magazine Puck, Jack
(Theodore Roosevelt) has come
to slay the giants of Wall Street.
To the country, trust-busting took
on the mythic qualities of the
fairy tale-- with about the same
amount of awe for the fearsome
Wall Street giants and hope that
in the prowess of the intrepid
Roosevelt. J.P. Morgan is the
giant leering at front right.
In the Trans-Missouri decision of 1897, the
Supreme Court held that actions restraining or
monopolizing trade automatically violated the
Sherman Antitrust Act.
Roosevelt was not anti-business, and he did not
want the courts to punish "good" trusts, so he
exercised his presidential prerogative to decide
whether to prosecute a trust.
In 1904 U.S. Steel approached Roosevelt with a
deal-cooperation in exchange for preferential
treatment. This "gentlemen's agreement" appealed
to Roosevelt because it met his interest in
accommodating the modern industrial order while
maintaining his public image as slayer of the
trusts.
Roosevelt was convinced that the railroads' rates and
bookkeeping needed firmer oversight, so he pushed
through the Elkins Act (1903) and the Hepburn
Railway Act (1906), achieving a landmark expansion
of the government's regulatory powers over business.
Although Roosevelt was not a preservationist like John
Muir, he did advocate a conservationist position
regarding the West's natural resources. He believed in
efficient use and sustainability. He utilized the Public
Lands Commission (1903) to preside over the public
domain for purposes of efficient management.
An expanded Forest Service headed by expert forester
Gifford Pinchot helped Roosevelt to reverse a century
of heedless exploitation and imprint conservation on
the nation's public agenda.
Influenced by Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
(1906), Roosevelt authorized a federal
investigation into the stockyards. Soon
after, the Pure Food and Drug and Meat
Inspection Acts were passed and the Food
and Drug Administration was created.
During Roosevelt's campaign he called his
program the Square Deal, meaning that
when companies abused their corporate
power, the government would intercede to
assure Americans a fair arrangement.
Upton Sinclair was a desperately poor, young socialisthoping to remake the world
when he settled down in a tarpaper shack in Princeton Township and penned his
Great American Novel.
He called it "The Jungle," filled it with page after page of nauseating detail he had
researched about the meat-packing industry, and dropped it on an astonished
nation in 1906.
During Roosevelt's campaign he called his
program the Square Deal, meaning that
when companies abused their corporate
power, the government would intercede to
assure Americans a fair arrangement.
The power wielded by John D. Rockefeller and
the Standard Oil Company is captured in this
political cartoon, which appeared in the January
22, 1900, issue of The Verdict. Rockefeller is
pictured holding the White House and the
Treasury Department in the palm of his hand,
while in the background the U.S. Capitol has been
converted into an oil refinery. Standard Oil
epitomized the gigantic trusts that many feared
were threatening democracy in the Gilded Age.
The Fracturing of Republican
Progressivism
William Howard Taft had served Roosevelt
loyally as governor-general of the Philippines and
as secretary of war. He was an avowed Square
Dealer, but he was not a progressive politician.
Taft won the election against William Jennings
Bryan in 1908 with a mandate to pick up where
Roosevelt had left off; however, this was not to
be.
William Howard Taft had
little aptitude for politics.
When Theodore Roosevelt
tapped him as his successor
in 1908, Taft had never
held an elected office. A
legalist by training and
temperament, Taft moved
congenially in the
conservative circles of the
Republican Party. His
actions dismayed
progressives and eventually
led Roosevelt to challenge
him for the presidency in
1912. The break with
Roosevelt saddened and
embittered Taft, who
heartily disliked the
presidency and was glad to
leave it.
William Howard Taft had served Roosevelt
loyally as governor-general of the
Philippines and as secretary of war. He was
an avowed Square Dealer, but he was not a
progressive politician.
Taft won the election against William
Jennings Bryan in 1908 with a mandate to
pick up where Roosevelt had left off;
however, this was not to be.
Progressives felt that Roosevelt had been too easy
on business, and with him no longer in the White
House, they intended to make up for lost time.
Although Taft had campaigned for tariff reform,
he ended up approving the protectionist PayneAldrich Tariff Act of 1909. which critics charged
sheltered eastern industry from foreign
competition.
After the Pinchot-Ballinger
affair. in which he fired Pinchot,
the first Chief of the United
States Forest Service, for
whistle-blowing on a conspiracy
to hand public land to a private
syndicate, the progressives saw
Taft as a friend of the "interests"
bent on plundering the nation's
resources.
Ballinger served as mayor of Seattle, then as
commissioner of the General Land Office from
1907–1908. In 1909, President William Howard
Taft appointed him Secretary of the Interior.
While Secretary, he was accused of having
interfered with investigation into the legality of
certain private coal-land claims in Alaska. After a
series of articles in Collier's Weekly that roused
the conservationists an investigation was
demanded. A congressional committee exonerated
Ballinger, but the questioning of committee
counsel Louis D. Brandeis made Ballinger's anticonservationism clear. He resigned in March,
1911
Galvanized by Taft's defection. the
reformers in the Republican Party became a
dissident faction. calling themselves the
“Insurgents."
Roosevelt knew that a party split would
benefit the Democrats, but he was driven to
set aside party loyalty when he clashed with
Taft over the question of trusts.
Unlike Roosevelt. Taft was unwilling to
pick and choose trusts for prosecution; he
instead relied on the letter of the Sherman
Act.
In the Standard Oil decision of 1911. the Supreme
Court once again asserted the rule of reason.
which meant that the courts, not the president.
would distinguish between good and bad trusts.
Taft.s attorney general brought suit against U.S.
Steel, basing the antimonopoly charges in part on
an acquisition approved by Roosevelt. Anxious to
reenter politics. Roosevelt could not ignore what
appeared to be a direct attack on his honor.
Roosevelt had made the case for what he called
the New Nationalism, its central tenet being that
human welfare had priority over property rights.
The government would become "the steward of
the public welfare."
Roosevelt added to his proposed program a
federal child labor law. regulation of labor
relations, a national minimum wage for
women. and. most radical perhaps.
proposals to curb the power of the courts
based on his insistence that they stood in the
way of reform.
Roosevelt was too reformist for party
regulars who handed Taft the Republican
presidential nomination for the 1912
election, so Roosevelt led his followers into
a new Progressive Party, nicknamed the
"Bull Moose" Party.
Woodrow Wilson and the New
Freedom
As Republicans battled among themselves,
Democrats made dramatic gains in 1910, taking
over the House of Representatives and capturing a
number of traditionally Republican governorships.
Governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson,
compiled a sterling refonn record; he then went on
to win the Democratic presidential nomination in
1912.
. Wilson warned that the New Nationalism
represented a future of collectivism, whereas
his own New Freedom policy would preserve
political and economic liberty.
Wilson and Roosevelt differed over how
government should restrain private power.
Wilson won the election of 1912 because he
kept the traditional Democratic vote, while the
Republicans split betWeen Roosevelt and
Taft. Wilson's New Freedom did not receive a
clear mandate from the people in that he
received only 42 percent of the popular vote.
Wilson
encountered the
same dilemma that
confronted all
successful
progressives: how
to balance the
claims of moral
principle with the
unyielding
realities of
political life.
Progressives
prided themselves
on being realists
as well as
moralists.
However, the election did prove decisive in the
history of economic refonn; Wilson attacked the
problems of tariff and banking reform.
The Underwood Tariff Act of 1913 pared rates to
25 percent; the trust-dominated industries were
targeted to foster competition and reduce prices
for consumers.
The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave the nation a
banking system that was resistant to financial
panic, delegating financial functions to tWelve
district reserve banks. This strengthened the
banking system and placed a measure of restraint
on Wall Street.
To deal with the problem of corporate
power, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914
amended the Shennan Act; the Clayton
Act's definition of illegal practices was left
flexible to distinguish whether an action
stifled competition or created a monopoly.
The Federal Trade Commission was established in 1914, and it received broad powers
to investigate companies and issue "cease
and desist" orders against unfair trade
practices.
Steering a course between Taft's conservatism and
Roosevelt's radicalism, Wilson carved out a middle
way that brought to bear the powers of government
without threatening the constitutional order and
curbed abuse of corporate power without
threatening the capitalist system.
The labor vote had grown increasingly important
to the Democratic Party; before his second
campaign, Wilson championed a host of bills
beneficial to American workers-a federal child
labor law, the Adamson eight-hour law for railroad
workers, and the landmark Seamen's Act, which
eliminated age-old abuses of sailors aboard ship.
Wilson encountered the same dilemma that
confronted all successful progressives: how to
balance the claims of moral principle with the
unyielding realities of political life.
Progressives prided themselves on being
realists as well as moralists.
Progressives made presidential leadership
important again, they brought government
back into the nation's life, and they laid the
foundation for twentieth-century social and
economic policy.