Chapter 28
Progressivism and the
Republican Roosevelt,
1901–1912
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I. Progressive Roots
– Progressive ideas and theories:
• The old philosophy of hands-off individualism seemed
out of place in modern machine age
• Progressive theorists were insisting that society could
not longer afford the luxury of a limitless “let-alone”
(laissez-faire) policy
• The people, through government, must substitute
mastery for drift
– Politicians and writers began to pinpoint targets:
• Bryan, Altgeld, and the Populists branded the “bloated
trusts” with the stigma of corruption and wrongdoing.
I. Progressive Roots
(cont.)
• 1894 Henry Demarest Lloyd charged the Standard Oil
Company in his book Wealth Against Commonwealth
• Thorstein Veblen assailed the new rich in his The
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899):
– It was a savage attack on “predatory wealth” and “conspicuous consumption:”
– In his view the parasitic leisure class engaged in wasteful
“business” rather than productive “industry”
– He urged that social leadership pass from these superfluous
titans to truly useful engineers.
• Jacob A. Riis shocked middle-class Americans in 1890:
– With How the Other Half Lives
I. Progressive Roots
(cont.)
– A damning indictment of the dirt, disease, vice, and misery
of the rat-gnawed human rookeries knows as New York
slums
– The book deeply influenced Theodore Roosevelt.
• Novelist Theodore Dreiser:
– Used his blunt prose to batter promoters and profiteers in
The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914)
• Socialists registered appreciable strength at the ballot
box (see pp. 642-643)
• Social gospel movement:
– Promoted a brand of progressivism based on Christian
teachings
– They used religious doctrine to demand better housing and
living conditions for the urban poor
I. Progressive Roots
(cont.)
• Other reformers:
– University-based economists urged new reforms modeled on
European examples
– Feminists added social justice to suffrage on their list of
needed reforms
– Urban pioneers entered the fight to improve the lot of
families living and working in the festering cities.
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II. Raking Muck with the Muckrakers
• Muckraking magazines—McClure’s, Cosmopolitan,
Collier’s and Everybody’s:
–
–
–
–
They dug deep for the dirt that the public loved
Enterprising editors financed extensive research
President Theodore Roosevelt called them muckrakers
Some famous reformer-writers were Lincoln Steffens, Ida M.
Tarbell
– Their targets were:
» Corrupt alliance between big business and municipal
gov’t., exposé of Standard Oil Company, malpractices of
life insurance companies and tariff lobbies, trust, etc.
» Some of the most effective fire of the muckrakers was
directed at social evils:
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II. Raking Muck with the
Muckrakers (cont.)
» The immoral “white slave” traffic in women, the rickety
slums, the appalling number of industrial accidents,
subjugation of blacks and the abuse of child labor
» Vendors of potent patent medicines were also criticized
• The muckrakers signified much about the nature of
the progressive reform movement:
– They were long on lamentation but stopped short of
revolutionary remedies
– They counted on publicity to right social wrongs
– They sought not to overthrow capitalism but to cleanse it
– The cure of American democracy was more democracy
III. Political Progressivism
(cont.)
• “Who were the progressives?”
– Militarists—like Theodore Roosevelt
– Pacifists—Jane Addams
– Female settlement workers, labor unionists, and
enlightened businessmen
– They sought to modernize American institutions
to achieve two goals:
• To use the state to curb monopoly power
• To improve the common person’s conditions of life
and labor.
III. Political Progressivism
(cont.)
– They emerged in both political parties, in all
regions, and at all levels of government
– Their objective was to regain power by:
• Pushing for direct primary elections
• Favored initiative so that voters could directly propose
legislation themselves
• Agitated for the referendum that would place laws on
the ballot for final approval by the people
• For recall to enable voters to remove faithless elected
officials.
III. Political Progressivism
(cont.)
– Rooting out graft became a prime goal
– Introduced the secret Australian ballot to
counteract boss rule
– Direct election of senators was a favorite goal to
be achieved by a constitutional amendment:
• The Seventeenth Amendment, approved in 1913,
established the direct election of U.S. senators.
– Woman suffrage received powerful support:
• States like Washington, California, and Oregon
gradually extended the vote to women
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IV. Progressivism in the Cities and
States
• Progressives scored most impressive gains in
the cities:
– Example of Galveston, Texas: appointed expertstaffed commissions to manage urban affairs
– Other communities adopted the city-manager
system
– Urban reformers attacked: “slumlords,” juvenile
delinquency, wide-open prostitution
– They looked to German and English cities for
examples
Progressivism in the Cities and
States (cont.)
• To clean up their water supplies
• Light their streets
• Run their trolley cars
– They bubbled up to states, like Wisconsin:
• Governor Robert M. (“Fighting Bob”) La Follette was
an overbearing crusader and militant progressive
Republican leader
• He wrested considerable control from the crooked
corporations and returned it to the people
• He perfected a scheme for regulating public utilities
Progressivism in the Cities and
States (cont.)
– Other states marched toward progressivism:
• Undertook to regulate railroads and trusts
• Leaders were Hiram W. Johnson of California, Charles
Evans Hughes of New York.
V. Progressive Women
• Women were an indispensable part of the
progressive army:
– Critical focus was the settlement house
movement—which offered a side door to public
life:
• They exposed middle-class women to the problems
plaguing America’s cities:
» Poverty, political corruption, and intolerable working
and living conditions
• Gave them skill and confidence to attack those evils
V. Progressive Women (cont.)
– Women’s club movement provided a broader
civic entryway for middle-class women
– Women, whose place was seen in the home,
defended their new activities as an extension—
not a rejection—of their traditional roles:
• Thus driven to moral and “maternal” issues
• Agitated through organizations like the National
Consumers League (1899) and the Women’s Trade
Union League (1903), both in the Department of Labor
• Campaigns for factory reform and temperance
V. Progressive Women (cont.)
– Florence Kelley became the State of Illinois's first chief
factory inspector:
» Was one of the nation’s leading advocates for improved
factory conditions
» Took control of the newly founded National Consumers
League
• In the landmark case Muller v. Oregon (1908):
– Louis D. Brandeis persuaded the Supreme Court to accept
the constitutionality of laws protecting women workers by
presenting evidence of the harmful effects of factory labor
on women’s weaker bodies
– Progressives hailed Brandeis’s achievement as a triumph
over existing legal doctrines.
V. Progressive Women (cont.)
– American welfare state focused more on
protecting women and children rather than
granting benefits to everyone
– Setbacks:
• 1905, when the Supreme Court in Lochner v. New
York invalidated a New York law establishing a tenhour day for bakers
• If laws regulating factories were not enforced they
proved worthless—for example, a lethal fire (1911) at
the Triangle Shirtwaist Company of New York
• By 1917 thirty states had workers’ compensation laws.
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V. Progressive Women (cont.)
• Corner saloons attracted the progressives:
– Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU)
founded by Frances E. Willard
– Some states and counties passed “dry “ laws to
control, restrict, or abolish alcohol
– Big cities were generally “wet” due to immigrants
who were accustomed in the Old Country to the
free flow of alcohol
– By World War I (1914) nearly one-half lived in
“dry” territory
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VI. TR’s Square Deal for Labor
• TR feared public interest was submerged in
the progressive movement:
– “Square Deal” for capital, labor, and the public at
large:
– His program embraced three C’s:
• Control of the corporations
• Consumer protection
• Conservation of natural resources
– First test came in the anthracite coal mines of
Pennsylvania
VI. TR’s Square Deal for Labor
(cont.)
• Roosevelt urged Congress to create the new
Department of Commerce and Labor (1903)—ten
years later it was separated in two
• The Bureau of Corporations was authorized to probe
businesses engaged in interstate commerce:
– This bureau helped to break stranglehold of monopoly
– Cleared the road for the era of “trust-busting.”
VII. TR Corrals the Corporations
• First—the railroads:
– Hatch Act (1903) aimed at railroad rebate evil
• Heavy fines could be imposed both on the railroads
that gave rebates
• And on the shippers that accepted them.
– Hepburn Act (1906): free passes, with their hint
of bribery, were severely restricted
• Interstate Commerce Commission was expanded:
– Included express companies, sleeping-car companies and
pipelines
– The Commission could nullify existing rates and stipulate
maximum rates
VII. TR Corrals the Corporations
(cont.)
Trusts—Roosevelt’s opposition:
– Trusts was a fighting word in the progressive era
– He believed they were here to stay:
• Some were “good” trusts—public consciences
• Some were “bad” trusts—lusted greedily for power
– His first burst into headlines was an attack on the
Northern Securities Company (1902):
• A railroad holding company organized by financial
titan J.P. Morgan and empire builder James J. Hill
• They sought to achieve a virtual monopoly
• TR challenged potentates of industrial aristocracy
VII. TR Corrals the Corporations
(cont.)
• The Supreme Court upheld TR’s antitrust suit and
ordered Northern Securities Company to dissolve
– The Northern Securities decision jolted Wall Street
– Angered big business
– Greatly enhanced Roosevelt’s reputation as a trust smasher
• TR initiated over forty legal proceedings against giant
monopolies:
– Supreme Court (1905) declared the beef trust illegal
– The heavy fist of justice fell upon monopolists controlling
sugar, fertilizer, harvesters, and other key products
• TR’s real purpose was symbolic: to prove conclusively
that the government, not private business, ruled the
country
VII. TR Corrals the Corporations
(cont.)
– He believed in regulating, not fragmenting, the big business
combines
– He hoped to make the business leaders more amenable to
federal regulation
– He never swung his trust-crushing stick with maximum force
– Industrial behemoths more “tame” at the end of TR’s reign
• His successor, William Howard Taft:
– Actually “busted” more trusts than TR
– Taft launched a suit against U.S. Steel (1911) but it caused a
political reaction by TR.
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VIII. Caring for the Consumer
• Roosevelt backed a noteworthy measure
(1906) that benefited both corporations and
consumers:
– The meat packing industry called for safer
canned products
– Caused by Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906)
• It intended to focused on the plight of workers
• But instead appalled the public with his description of
disgustingly unsanitary preparation of food products
• It described Chicago’s slaughterhouses.
VIII. Caring for the Consumer
(cont.)
• Roosevelt induced Congress to pass:
– The Meat Inspection Act (1906):
• Decreed that the preparation of meat shipped over
state lines would be subject to federal inspection from
corral to can
– The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906):
• Designed to prevent the adulteration and mislabeling
of foods and pharmaceuticals
IX. Earth Control
• Steps to conservation of US natural
resources:
– Desert Land Act (1877):
• Whereby the federal government sold arid land
cheaply on the condition that the purchaser irrigate
the thirsty soil within three years.
– Forest Reserve Act (1891):
• Authorized the president to set aside public forests as
national parks and other reserves
• Some 46 million acres were rescued.
IX. Earth Control (cont.)
– Carey Act (1894):
• Distributed federal land to the states on condition that
it be irrigated and settled.
– New day for the history of conservation dawned
with Roosevelt (see “Makers of America: The
Environmentalists,” pp. 652-653)
• He seized the banner of conservation leadership
• Congress responded with the landmark Newlands Act
(1902):
– Washington was authorized to collect money from the sale
of public land in western states
– Use the funds for the development of irrigation projects.
IX. Earth Control (cont.)
• The Roosevelt Dam, constructed on the Arizona’s Salt
River, was appropriately dedicated by Roosevelt
(1911)
• TR worked to preserve the nation’s shrinking forests:
– He set aside in federal reserves some 125 million acres
– He earmarked million of acres of coal deposits, and water
resources useful for irrigation and power
• Conservation and reclamation was Roosevelt’s most
enduring tangible achievement
• The disappearance of the frontier—was believed to be
the source of national characteristics as individualism
and democracy
IX. Earth Control (cont.)
• Organizations and societies created:
– Result of Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903)
– Outdoor-oriented Boy Scouts of America
– Audubon Society to save wild native birds
– The Sierra Club (1906) dedicated to preserve the
wildness of the western landscape
• Losses:
– (1913) when San Francisco built a dam in the
Hetch Hetchy Valley
IX. Earth Control (cont.)
– It caused a deep division between conservationists that
persists to the present day
– Roosevelt’s chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, believed that
“wilderness was waste”
– Pinchot and TR wanted to use the nation’s natural
endowment intelligently—thus two battles:
» One against greedy commercial interests that abused
nature
» And against romantic preservationists who simply were
“woodman-spare-that-tree” sentimentality
– A national policy was developed of “multiple-use resource
management”
» Sought to combine recreation, sustained-yield logging,
watershed protection, and summer stock grazing on the
same expanse of federal land
IX. Earth Control (cont.)
– Westerners learned how to work with the federal
management of natural resources:
• Through new agencies, such as the Forest Service and
the Bureau of Reclamation
• They worked with federal conservation programs
devoted to the rational, large-scale, and long-term use
of natural resources
• Single-person enterprises were shouldered aside, in
the interest of efficiency, by the combined bulk of big
business and big government
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X. The “Roosevelt Panic” of 1907
• Roosevelt’s second term:
– He called for regulating corporations, taxing
incomes, and protecting workers
– He declared (1904) under no circumstances
would he be a candidate for a third term
– He suffered a sharp setback (1907) when a panic
descended on Wall Street:
• There were frightened “runs” on banks, suicides, and
criminal indictments against speculators
• The financial world hastened to blame Roosevelt
• Conservatives called him “Theodore the Meddler”
X. The “Roosevelt Panic” of 1907
(cont.)
– Results of the 1907 panic:
• Paved the way for long-overdue fiscal reforms
• Precipitating a currency shortage—showed the need
for a more elastic medium of exchange
• Congress (1908) responded by passing the AldrichVreeland Act:
– It authorized national banks to issue emergency currency
backed by various kinds of collateral
• The path was smoothed for the momentous Federal
Reserve Act of 1913 (see p. 665).
XI. The Rough Rider Thunders Out
• Roosevelt in 1908:
– Could easily have won a second presidential
nomination and won the election
– However, he felt bound in by impulsive
postelection promise of 1904
– He sought a successor who would carry out “my
policies”:
• His choice was William Henry Taft, secretary of war
and a mild progressive
• He often served upon Roosevelt’s absence
XI. The Rough Rider Thunders Out
(cont.)
• In 1908 he “steamrollered” to push Taft’s nomination
on the first ballot
• The Democrats nominated twice-beaten William
Jennings Bryan
– The campaign of 1908:
• Taft—“Boy Orator”—tried to don the progressive
Roosevelt mantle
• Taft read cut-and-dried speech
• The majority chose stability with Roosevelt-endorsed
Taft, who polled 321 electoral votes to 162 for Bryan
• The Socialists amassed 420,793 votes for Eugene V.
Debs (see pp. 599-600).
XI. The Rough Rider Thunders Out
(cont.)
• Roosevelt branded by his adversaries:
– As a wild-eyed radical
– Had a reputation as an eater of errant
industrialists
– The number of laws he inspired were not in
proportion to the amount of noise he made
– Often under attack from the reigning business
lords:
– But they knew they had a friend in the White House
– He should first and foremost be remembered as the cowboy
who tamed the bucking bronco of adolescent capitalism,
thus ensuring it a long adult life.
XI. The Rough Rider Thunders Out
(cont.)
• Roosevelt’s achievements and popularity:
– His youthfulness appealed to the young of all
ages
– He served as a political lightning rod:
• To protect capitalists against popular indignation—
against socialism
– He strenuously sought the middle road between
unbridled individualism and paternalist
collectivism
XI. The Rough Rider Thunders Out
(cont.)
– His conservation crusade:
• Tried to mediate between romantic wilderness
preservationists
– And the rapacious resource-predators
• Was probably his most typical and his most lasting
achievement
– Other contributions of Roosevelt:
• Greatly enlarged the power/prestige of the presidency
• Helped shape the progressive movement
• Opened the eyes of Americans to the fact that they
shared the world with other nations.
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XII. Taft: A Round Peg in a Square Hole
• William Howard Taft:
– Had established an enviable reputation as a
lawyer and judge
– Had been a trusted administrator under
Roosevelt
– Suffered from lethal political handicaps:
• Had not of the arts of a dashing political leader
• He recoiled from the clamor of controversy, generally
adopted an attitude of passivity toward Congress
• Was a poor judge of public opinion
XIII. Taft: A Round Peg in a Square
Hole (cont.)
• His candor made him a chronic victim of “foot-inmouth” disease
• Was a mild progressive, but at heart was wedded to
the status quo rather than to change
– His cabinet did not contain a single
representative of the party’s “insurgent” wing
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XIII. The Dollar Goes Abroad as a
Diplomat
• Taft’s foreign policy:
– Use the lever of American investments to boost
American political interests abroad—dollar diplomacy:
• Encouraged Wall Street to invest surplus dollars into
foreign areas of strategic concern to the U.S.
• Especially the Far East and the Panama Canal
• Thus the bankers would strengthen American
defenses and foreign policies—bring prosperity to the
homeland
• The almighty dollar supplanted the big stick.
XIII. The Dollar Goes Abroad as a
Diplomat (cont.)
– Foreign areas of interest to Taft:
• China’s Manchuria was Taft’s most spectacular effort
• The new trouble spot of revolution-riddled Caribbean
• Wall Street was encouraged to pump dollars into the
financial vacuums in Honduras and Haiti to keep
foreign funds out
• Sporadic disorders in palm-fronded Cuba, Honduras,
and the Dominican Republic brought American forces
to restore order and protect American investments
• 2500 marines (1912) landed in Nicaragua
• They remained in Nicaragua for 30 years (see Map
29.2 on p. 668).
XIV. Taft the Trustbuster
• Taft managed to gain some fame as a
smasher of monopolies:
– Taft brought 90 suits against trusts during his 4
years to 44 for Roosevelt in 7 ½ years
– Most judicial actions came in 1911 when the
Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the
mighty Standard Oil Company:
• It was judged to be a combination in restraint of trade
in violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.
XIV. Taft the Trustbuster
(cont.)
– The Supreme Court handed down its famous
“rule of reason”:
• Doctrine—only those combinations that
“unreasonably” restrained trade were illegal
• This action ripped a huge hole in the government’s
antitrust net
– 1911: antitrust suit against the U.S. Steel
Corporation
• This initiative infuriated Roosevelt
• Once Roosevelt’s protégé, President Taft was
increasingly taking on the role of his antagonist.
XV. Taft Splits the Republican Party
• Progressive members of the Republican Party
who favored lowering tariffs
– Thought they had a friend in Taft
– The House passed a moderately reductive bill
– Senate reactionaries tacked on hundreds of
upward tariff revisions
– Much to the dismay of Taft supporters he signed
the Payne-Aldrich Bill
– Taft called it “the best bill that the Republican
Party ever passed.”
XV. Taft Splits the Republican Party
(cont.)
• Taft also proved to be a dedicated
conservationist:
– Established the Bureau of Mines to control
mineral resources
– One praiseworthy accomplishment was the
Ballinger-Pinchot quarrel (1910):
• Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger opened
public lands in Wyoming, Montana, Alaska to corporate development
• Ballinger was sharply criticized by Gifford Pinchot,
chief of the Agriculture Department’s Division of
Forestry and a stalwart Rooseveltian
XV. Taft Splits the Republican Party
(cont.)
• Taft dismissed Pinchot—insubordination charges
– Caused rift between Roosevelt and Taft
– The reformist wing of the Republican party was
now up in arms
• Taft was being pushed into the stand-pat Old Guard
• 1910 the Grand Old Party was split wide-open, largely
due to the clumsiness of Taft
• Roosevelt returned to New York and then stirred up a
tempest by stumping at Osawatomie, Kansas with a
flaming speech
• His doctrine, “New Nationalism,” urged the national
government to increase its power to remedy
economic and social abuses
XV. Taft Splits the Republican Party
(cont.)
• Results of the tensions between Taft and
Roosevelt and the Republican Party:
– Republicans lost badly in congressional elections
(1910)
– Democrats emerged with 228 seats, leaving the
once-dominant Republicans with only 161
– A socialist representative, Austrian-born Victor L.
Berger, was elected from Milwaukee
– Republicans, by virtue of holdovers, retained the
Senate, 51 to 41.
XVI. The Taft-Roosevelt Rupture
• Now there was a full-fledged revolt:
– 1911: the National Progressive Republican
League was formed
• Fiery, white-maned Senator La Follette (Wisconsin)
became the leading Republican presidential candidate
– February 1912, Roosevelt formally wrote to 7
state governors that he was willing to accept the
Republican nomination
• His reasoning—the third-term tradition applied to
three consecutive elective terms.
XVI. The Taft-Roosevelt Rupture
(cont.)
• Roosevelt, the Rough Rider, came clattering into the
presidential primaries, pushing La Follette aside
– Taft-Roosevelt explosion was near in June 1912,
at the Republican convention in Chicago
• Rooseveltites were about 100 delegates short of
winning the nomination
• They challenged the right of some 250 Taft delegates
to be seated
• Most of these contests were arbitrarily settled for Taft
• Roosevelt refused to quit the game. Having tasted for
the first time the bitter cup of defeat, now on fire, led
a third-party crusade.
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