Chapter 28
Progressivism and the
Republican Roosevelt
(1901-1912)
Progressive Roots
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Progressive= Promoting or favoring progress
toward better conditions; employing or
advocating more enlightened or liberal ideas,
new or experimental methods
The new crusaders, who called themselves
“progressives,” waged war on evils, notably
monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social
injustice.
Progressive Roots
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The progressive army was large, diverse, and
widely deployed, but it had a single battle cry:
“Strengthen the State.”
The groundswell (public opinion) of the
reformist wave went back to the Greenback
Labor party of the 1870s and the Populist of
the 1890s.
Progressive theorist were insisting that society
could no longer afford the luxury of a limitless
“let-alone” policy.
Politicians and Writers
pinpoint targets
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Well before 1900, perceptive politicians and
writers begun to pinpoint targets for the
progressive attack.
Henry Demarest Lloyd, in 1894, charged
headlong into the Standard Oil Company with
his book Wealth Against Commonwealth.
A writer by the name of Thornstein Veblen
attacked the new rich with The Theory of the
Leisure Class, in 1889.
Politicians and Writers
pinpoint targets
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In the view of Veblen, the parasitic leisure
class engaged in wasteful “business” rather
than productive “industry.”
A Danish immigrant, Jacob A. Riis, from the
New York Sun shocked middle class
Americans in 1890 with his book How the
Other Half Lives.
His account was a strong indictment of the dirt,
disease, vice and misery of the New York
Slums.
New York Slum Bathroom
New York Slum Bedroom
Socialist
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Socialist, many of whom were European
immigrants inspired by the strong movement in
the Old World, for the states social movement,
began appreciable strength to the ballot box.
Social Gospel Movement=promoted a brand of
progressivism based on Christian teachings.
Using religious doctrine to demand better
housing and living conditions for the urban poor.
Feminists entered the fight to improve the lot of
families living and working in the festering cities.
The Muckrakers
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Beginning about 1902 the exposing of evil
became a flourishing industry among American
publishers.
Enterprising editors financed extensive
research and encouraged confrontational
writing by their bright young reporters, whom
President Roosevelt branded as “muckrakers”
in 1906.
Despite presidential scolding, these
muckrakers boomed circulation, and some of
their most scandalous exposures were
published as best-selling books.
The Muckrakers
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Ida M. Tarbell, a pioneer journalist who
published a devastating but factual exposé of
the Standard Oil Company. (Her father had
been ruined by the oil interest.)
Lincoln Steffens, launched a series of articles
in McClure’s titled “Shame of the Cities” where
he unmasked the corrupt alliance between big
business and municipal government.
The American consumer’s appetite for reform
was whetted by Upton Sinclair’s sensational
novel The Jungle, published in 1906.
Politician Progressivism
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Progressive reformers were mainly middle-class
men and woman who felt themselves squeezed
from above and below.
The Progressives simultaneously sought two
goals: to use state power to curb the trusts and to
stem the socialist threat by generally improving the
common person’s conditions of life and labor.
One of the objectives of the progressives was to
regain the power that had slipped from the hands
of the people into those of the “interested”.
Politician Progressivism
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Direct election if U.S. senators became a
favorite goal of progressives, specially after the
muckrakers had exposed the scandalous
intimacy between greedy corporations and
Congress.
The Seventeenth Amendment to the
Constitution was approved in 1913, which
established the direct election of U.S. senators.
Progressivism in the Cities
and States
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Progressives scored some of their most
impressive gains in the cities.
Urban reformers attacked “slumlords,” juvenile
delinquency, and wide-open prostitution, which
flourished in red-light districts unchallenged by
bribed police.
The governor of the state, Robert M. (“Fighting
Bob”) La Follett, was an undersize but
overbearing crusader who emerged as the
most militant of the Republican leaders.
Progressivism in the Cities
and States
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Routing the lumber and the railroad “interests,”
he wrested considerable control from the
crooked corporations and returned it to the
people.
After a desperate fight with entrenched
monopoly, he reached the governor’s chair in
1910.
Progressive Women
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Women proved themselves to be and indispensable part of
the progressive army.
Nineteenth-century notions of “separate spheres” dictated that
a woman’s place was in the home, so most female
progressives defended their new activities as an extensionnot a rejection- of the traditional roles of wife and mother.
Female activist agitated through organizations like the
Women’s Trade Union League and the National Consumers
League, as well as through two new federal agencies, the
Children’s Bureau (1912) and the Women’s Bureau (1920),
both in the Department of Labor.
Florence Kelley, a former President of Jane Addam’s Hull
House, became the state of Illinois’s first chief factory
inspector and one of the nations advocates for improving
factory conditions.
TR’s Square Deal for Labor
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The Square Deal for labors received its acid
test in 1902, when a crippling strike broke out
in the coal mines of Pennsylvania.
The workers demanded, among other
improvements, a 20% increase pay and a
reduction of the working day from ten hours to
nine hours.
As coal supplies dwindled (diminished),
factories and schools were forced to shut
down, and even hospitals felt the icy grip of
winter.
TR’s Square Deal for Labor
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Seeking a desperate solution Roosevelt
summoned representatives of the striking
miner sand the mine owners to the White
House.
A compromise decision ultimately gave the
miners a 10% pay boost and a working day of
nine hours.
TR Corrals the Corporations
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The Interstate Commerce Commission, created
in 1887 to make the public happy, had proved
woefully inadequate.
Congress passed effective railroad legislation,
beginning with the Elkins Act of 1903; which
meant heavy fines could now be imposed both
on the railroads that gave rebates and on the
shoppers that accepted them.
Still more effective was the Hepburn Act of 1906
in which free passes, with their hint of bribery
were severely restricted.
Consumer Protection
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Big meat packers were being shut out of certain
European market houses because some American
meat-from the small packing-houses, claimed the giants- had been found to be tainted.
The American consumer’s appetite for reform was
whetted by Upton Sinclair’s sensational novel The
Jungle, published in 1906.
The book described in noxious detail the filth, disease,
and putrefaction in Chicago’s damp, ill-ventilated
slaughterhouses.
The president was moved by the loathsome mess in
Chicago to appoint a special investigation commission,
whose cold-blooded report almost outdid Sinclair’s novel.
Picture of The Jungle
Conservation
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Before the end of the nineteenth-century farvisioned leader’s saw that such a squandering
of the nation’s birthright would have to be
halted, or America would sink from resources
richness to despoiled dearth.
A first step towards conservation was taken
with the Desert Land Act of 1877,under which
the federal government sold arid land cheaply
on the condition that the purchaser irrigate the
thirsty soil within three years of purchase.
Conservation
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The Forest Reserve Act of 1891, authorizing
the president to set aside public forest as
national parks and other reserves.
The Carey Act of 1894 distributed federal land
to the states on the condition that it be irrigated
and settled.
Many forest were preserved by president
Roosevelt.
The “Roosevelt Panic” of 1907
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Roosevelt was reelected for president in
1904.
Roosevelt suffered a sharp setback in 1907
when there was a panic descended on Wall
St., where there was a financial flurry
featured frightened “runs” on banks,
suicides, and criminal indictments against
speculators.
The “Roosevelt Panic” of 1907
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Conservatives damned him as “Theodore the
Meddler” and branded the current distress as
the “Roosevelt panic.”
Congress in 1908 responded by passing the
Aldrich-Vreeland Act, which authorized
national banks to issue emergency currency
backed by various kinds of collateral.
The Presidency of William
Howard Taft
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Roosevelt departed leaving a successor who would
carry out his policies, the man he chose was William
Howard Taft.
William Howard Taft was the secretary of war and a
mild progressive.
Taft had graduated second in his class at Yale and
had established an enviable reputation as lawyer and
judge.
Taft, in contrast had none of the arts of a dashing
political leader and none of the zest for the fray.
Recoiling from the clamor of controversy, he generally
adopted an attitude of passivity towards congress.
William Howard Taft
Taft’s “Dollar Diplomacy”
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Taft wanted to boost American political interest
abroad, and approach to foreign policy that his
critics denounced as “dollar diplomacy.”
Washington warmly encouraged Wall Street
bankers to take their surplus dollars into
foreign areas of strategic concern to the United
States.
Taft encouraged bankers to invest in China.
Taft Splits the Republican
Party
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Lowering the barriers of the formidable protective tariff-the
“Mother of Trust” – was high on the agenda of the
progressive members of the Republican party, and they
first thought they had a friend and ally in Taft.
Ringing, Taft signed the PayneAldrich Bill, thus betraying
his campaign promises outraging the progressive wigs of
his party, heavily drawn form the Midwest.
Taft rubbed salt in the wound by proclaiming it “the best bill
the Republican party ever passed.”
The Ballinger-Pinchot quarrel of 1910 further widened the
growing rift between the president and the former
president, onetime bosom political partners.
Republicans lost badly the elections of 1910.
Roosevelt breaks with Taft
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In February 1912 Roosevelt formally wrote to the
seven state governors that he was willing to accept the
Republican nomination.
His reasoning was that the third-term tradition applied
to three consecutive elective terms.
A Taft-Roosevelt explosion was near in June 1912,
when the Republican convention met in Chicago.
Roosevelt, a supposedly good sportsman, refused to
quit the game.
Having tasted for the first time the bitter cup of defeat,
he was now on fire to lead the third-party crusade.