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Chapter 28: Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt

As the turn of the century greeted the United States with more immigration, the
“progressives” of a newly shaped reform movement waged war on multiple evils,
notably monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social injustice. With Teddy
Roosevelt pulling the government on their side, the progressives had a battle cry of
“strengthen the state”. The “real heart of the movement” was “to use government
as an agency of human welfare.”

I) Progressive Roots
• The basis of progressivism rooted from all the way back to the Greenback Labor
party of the 1870s and the Populists in the 1890s, trying to reform against the
monopoly domination of society and the concentration of power in hands of the
few
⇒ Well before 1900, perceptive politicians and writers had begun to pinpoint
the targets of the progressive movement
⇒ Populists pointed out that trusts were filled with corruption and wrongdoing
• Individualism
• Progressive theorists insisted that society could no longer afford a laissez-faire
policy
• Muckraking
⇒ Henry Demarest Lloyd criticized the Standard Oil Company with his Wealth
Against Commonwealth in 1894
⇒ Thorstein Veblen, with The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), attacked
“predatory wealth” and “conspicuous consumption”. Veblen believed that
the leisure class only tries to make money instead of forming a good industry;
urged for power from industrial titans to useful engineers
⇒ Danish immigrant Jacob A. Riis, a reporter for the New York Sun, shocked the
middle class Americans in 1890 with How the Other half Lives. Portrayed the
miserable lives of the “other half”, the book deeply influenced TR, the future
NYC police commissioner
⇒ Theodore Dreiser used his literary pieces The Financier (1912) and The Titan
(1914) to batter promoters and profiteers
• Caustic critics of social injustice came from people of multifarious backgrounds
⇒ The Socialists, majorly European immigrants inspired by European Socialist
movements, began to case a influence on the ballot box
⇒ Messengers of the social gospel used Christian teachings in the progressive
movement
⇒ Feminists played a major role in progressivism as they fought for social
justice and enfranchisement
(a) Pioneer feminists included Jane Addams in Chicago and Lillian Wald of
New York
II) Raking Muck with the Muckrakers

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• Muckraking became a hot topic among American publishers. “They dug deep for
the dirt that the public loved to hate”
• Leading muckraking magazines were McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and
Everybody’s
• Roosevelt called these writers and reporters muckrakers in 1906
⇒ He briefly mentioned that their excess of zeal is analogous to the figure in
Bunyan’s Pilgrim Progress who concentrated on raking manure that he
couldn’t see the celestial crown dangling overhead
• New York reporter Lincoln Steffens launched a series of articles titled “The
Shame of the Cities” in McClure’s in 1902 and unmasked the corrupt alliance
between big business and municipal government
• Ida M. Tarbell was a pioneering journalist who used facts to attack the Standard
Oil Company
• Fearing legal reprisals, muckraking magazines spent great time and effort to
verify their material, spending as much as $3000 to verify a single Tarbell article
• Thomas W. Lawson was a manipulative businessman in the stock market and
amassed $50 million in through dubious stock manipulations. His practices were
portrayed in a series of articles on Everybody’s
⇒ Lawson made enemies among his rich associates and died a poor man
• David G. Philips shocked the public in his series in Cosmopolitan titled “The
Treason of the Senate” (1906) by stating the fact that 75 out of 90 senators
were under the manipulation of trusts and railroads, leaving only a minority
group that actually represented the people; trust are the master of puppets
⇒ Impressed TR with his factual information
⇒ Shot by a psycho in 1911
• Muckraking also directed at social evils including “white slave” trafficking of
women, rickety slums, and industrial accidents
⇒ Ray Stannard Baker displayed the subjugation of American blacks, of which
90% still lived in the South with 1/3 illiteracy, in Following the Color Line
(1908)
⇒ John Spargo displayed the abuses of child labor in The Bitter Cry of the
Children (1906)
• The medicine industry were extremely inefficient as patent medicines were
poisonous
⇒ Medicines were adulterated, addictive, and often were spiked with alcohol
while it had ample advertisement
⇒ Medical muckraking attacks in Collier’s were reinforced by Dr. Harvey W.
Wiley, the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture who led his “Poison
Squad” to perform experiments on himself
• Muckrakers signified much about the nature of progressivism
⇒ They were big on presenting the problem and small on finding solutions
⇒ Counted on publicity of the problems instead of drastic political change
⇒ Sought not to change the system, but to work with the system; to reform, not
to revolutionize

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⇒ Believed that to heal the ills of American democracy, more democracy is

needed
III) Political Progressivism
• Progressive reformers were mainly middle-classmen who felt pressure from
above and below, from corporations, labor unions, and immigrants
• Progressives emerged from both parties at all levels of government everywhere
in the country
• Two goals of progressives:
⇒ To use state power to curb the trusts
⇒ To stem the socialist threat by generally improving the common person’s
conditions of life and labor
• Progressive movement was more of a national mood and less of a movement
• IRR: Objectives of the Progressives to retain lost power that shifted to the
“interests”
⇒ Pushed for direct elections so people’s voice won’t be manipulated
⇒ Favored “initiative” for legislatures to initiate from the people, bypassing the
largely bought-up state legislatures
⇒ Agitated for “referendum” for laws to be on ballot for a final approval by the
people. This is especially designed to combat the unholy alliance between big
businesses and state legislatures
⇒ “Recall” enables the people to remove any corrupt elected officials from
office
• To work with the system, multiple state legislatures passed corrupt-practices
acts
⇒ Limited the amount of campaigning money a candidate could spend
⇒ Restricted huge gifts from corporations into the state legislature
⇒ Australian ballot provided an major obstacle for machine politicians as voters’
vote remained private, so it could not be forced and influenced
• For the growing corruption of the Senate, the 17th amendment was approved in
1913 establishing a direct election of the Senate
• Woman suffrage received support of the progressives. Protesting against
“Taxation without Representation”, they gained enfranchisement generally in
the west before they gained nationwide suffrage a decade later from 1910
IV) Progressivism in the Cities and States
• Galveston, Texas was the vanguard of progressive reform of cities
⇒ Appointed expert-staffed commissions to manage urban affairs in 1901
• Other cities and local governments also followed
⇒ Adoption of the city-manager system by many cities. One of the reasons was
to take politics out of municipal government
⇒ Similar local government reforms targeted on efficiency rather than
democracy
⇒ City reforms attacked prostitution, “slumlords”, and juvenile delinquency
⇒ Public-spirited city dwellers also moved away from selling votes
• Naturally, the movement moved up to the state level

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⇒ The vanguard of state reform is Wisconsin

⇒ Governor Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, emerged as the most militant of
the progressive Republican leaders, reached the governor’s seat in 1901
after battling control with monopolies
(a) Worked to pull power away from crooked corporations to the people
(b) Perfected a scheme for regulating public utilities
• Other states followed up the progressive steps
⇒ Oregon was not far behind Wisconsin
⇒ California under the leadership of Hiram W. Johnson, a dynamic prosecutor of
grafters, set up a political machine of its own
⇒ Charles Evans Hughes, reformist Republican governor of New York, gained
national fame as an investigator of wrongdoing of gas and insurance
companies and the coal trust
V) Progressive Women
• Settlement houses were a crucial focus for women’s activism
⇒ Provided a social environment
⇒ Exposed them to the problems of American cities and gave them skills and
confidence to attack those issues
⇒ While literary clubs existed for decades, current problems pushed the
establishment of clubs for social issues and current events instead of
Shakespeare and Henry James
• Female progressivism activists declared their new roles in society an extension,
not a rejection of “separate spheres”
⇒ Defended their argument by saying that they cared for “maternal” issues like
child labor, food efficiency, pensions for mother with dependents, and
conditions in airless tenements
• Females agitated through organizations
⇒ Women’s Trade Union League
⇒ National Consumer’s League
• and newly formed federal agencies
⇒ Children’s Bureau (1912)
⇒ Women’s Bureau (1920)
⇒ They were both in the Department of Labor
• Female on-street protestors concentrated on factory reform and temperance
• Florence Kelley, former resident of the Hull House, became Illinois’s first chief
factory inspector and an national advocate for improving factory conditions
⇒ Took leadership of National Consumers League in 1899
• In Muller v. Oregon (1908), attorney Louis D. Brandeis persuaded the Supreme
Court the constitutionality of women’s rights laws by presenting evidence that
factory conditions were more harmful to women’s weaker bodies.
⇒ Influences of female activism resulted in the focus of protecting women and
children labor rights instead of concentrating on granting it to everyone
• In Lochner v. New York (1905), the Supreme court invalidated a New York law
establishing a 10 hour day for bakers

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⇒ When the judiciary was washed up by the progressives in 1917, the Court
upheld a 10-hr working day law for factory workers
• Laws regulating factories means nothing if not reinforced
⇒ In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York City had a fire accident
with 146 deaths of workers. With locked doors opening inward and
dysfunctional fire escapes, the factory on fire was a death trap
⇒ Pushed by massive strikes of women, the New York legislature passed
stronger laws regulating the hours and conditions of sweatshops
⇒ Employers gradually obtained a mindset to take responsibility to society
instead of exploiting for their own good. By 1917 30 states had workers’
compensation laws
• Saloons were a symbol of corruption and inefficiency, and they were the target
of the progressives
⇒ Antiliquor campaigners received powerful support from militant
organizations, notably the WCTU
(a) WCTU was founded by Frances E. Willard. She found alliance in the Anti-
Saloon League
⇒ Some states and counties passed “dry” laws, while the immigrant-populated
city remained generally “wet” since they had voting rights to oppose dry laws
(a) Number of saloons drastically decreased by the time WWI erupted in 1914
(b) By 1918, the 18th Amendment outlawed alcohol consumption, temporarily
VI) TR’s Square Deal for Labor
• TR decided to be an advocate for public interest because he feared that the
people’s interest are being covered up with “drifting seas of indifference”
• “Square deal” for labor, capital, and the public at large
⇒ Control of the corporations
⇒ Consumer protection
⇒ Conservation of natural resources
• The effectiveness of the Square Deal was tested in the 1902 strike in the
anthracite coal mines of Pennsylvania, demanding, among other improvements,
a 20% payment increase and a reduction of the working day from 10 to 9 hours
⇒ George F. Baer, a spokesmen representing the mine owners also represented
the nonchalance of their attitude towards the strikers, not even agreeing to
negotiate
⇒ As the dysfunctional coal industry impacted the economy, TR, out of
desperation, organized a negotiation in the white house between
representatives of the strikers and the mine owners. He later confessed his
hatred of the stupidity of the mine owners
⇒ Threatening to resolve the conflict with federal troops operating the mine,
mine owners finally agreed to give a 10% pay boost and a 9-hour day
⇒ TR urged the Congress to create the Department of Commerce and Labor
(1903) as a result of the antagonisms between capital and labor
⇒ New cabinet body: Bureau of Corporations; authorized to investigate business
engaged in interstate commerce

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(a) Useful in trust-busting and controlling monopolies

VII)TR Corrals the Corporations
• To prevent the inefficiency of the Interstate Commerce Commission, TR urged
Congress to pass a series of railroad regulation acts
⇒ Elkins Act of 1903 aimed at railroad rebates, as it gave fines to the giver and
receiver of rebates
⇒ Hepburn Act of 1906 targeted at free passes, which were often used for
bribery
• TR perceived trusts as “good” or “bad”
⇒ Good trusts had public conscience and therefore are assets to the economy
⇒ Bad trusts were did not care for laborers, only profits
• Roosevelt as a trustbuster
⇒ Attacked on Northern Securities, a railroad holding company organized by J.P.
Morgan and James J. Hill, in 1902
(a) The railway promoters appealed to the Supreme Court, which ordered the
dissolution of Northern Securities Company
(b) The decision enhanced Roosevelt’s reputation in trust-busting while
angering big businesses
⇒ Roosevelt continued to overthrow monopolies and trusts; he had initiated 40
lawsuits against them
⇒ With his monumental trust-busting reputation, TR’s purpose of his actions
was not to ruin the fortunes of big businesses, but to show them that the
government, not big businesses, ruled the country. TR believed in regulation,
not destruction
• TR’s successor William H. Taft busted more trusts than TR himself; TR
encouraged regulated business
VIII)Caring for the Consumer
• Meat production was inefficient in the U.S
⇒ European markets threatened to ban American meat products
⇒ America demanded safer canned products
⇒ Upton Sinclair portrayed the inefficiency of meat production in his sensational
novel The Jungle, which unintentionally portrayed the disgustingly unsanitary
food products and its making process
(a) This piece of work caused President Roosevelt appoint a special
investigating commission, whose report were comparable to Sinclair’s
novel’s level of description of the meat industry
(b) Congress, urged by TR, passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 which
decreed for the preparation of meat shipped interstate to be subjected
under federal inspection
(c) Pure and Food and Drug Act of 1906 was designed to prevent the
adulteration and mislabeling of food and pharmaceuticals
IX) Earth Control
• Americans wastefully consumed the natural resources at a rapid pace

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• Roosevelt turned a new page in the history of conservation as he took the

leadership of the federal Division of Forestry, formerly lead by dedicated
conservationist Gifford Pinchot
⇒ Conservation may have been Roosevelt’s most enduring tangible
achievement.
• The Desert Land Act of 1877 enabled federal sale of cheap but arid land on the
condition that the purchaser irrigate the land within 3 years
• The Forest Reserve Act of 1891 authorized the president to set aside public
forests as national parks and reserves
• The Carey Act of 1894 distributed federal land to the states on the condition that
it be irrigated and settled
• Newlands Act of 1902 authorized Washington to collect money from the sale of
public lands in the western states and use them for irritation projects
• Roosevelt advocated for the preservation of the nation’s shrinking forests. He
set an example himself by banning Christmas trees from the White House in
1902
• The frontier was believed to be the source of the national characteristics as
individualism and democracy, and TR’s effort to preservation was bolstered by
this upwelling national mood about the disappearance of the national frontier
⇒ Jack London’s Call of the Wild (1903) was among popular books about nature
⇒ The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, dedicated itself to preserving the wildness
of the western landscape
• The Hetch Hetchy controversy, which was when the federal government allowed
San Francisco to build a dam on the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National
park in 1913, initiated a major conservationists division that still persists to the
present day
⇒ Rapacious: Use all resources
⇒ Resourceful:
(a) Use what is needed
(b) Protect what is needed
(c) Preserve to produce
(d) Included TR and Gifford Pinchot
⇒ Romantic: Preserve all; included famed naturalist John Muir
• “Multiple-use resource management” sought to combine recreation, sustained-
yield logging, watershed protection, and summer stock grazing on one piece of
federal-owned land
⇒ Many westerners resisted this management at first, but later they learned to
take advantage of new agencies like the Forest Service and the Bureau of
Reclamation
⇒ Favored big business in the interest of efficiency and pushed away the “one-
man-and-a-dog sheepherder and single-person enterprises
X) The “Roosevelt Panic” of 1907
• Roosevelt was re-elected for a second term due to his immense popularity

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⇒ Called for regulating the corporations, taxing incomes, and protecting

workers
⇒ Were considered “as dangerous and unpredictable as a rattlesnake” by the
conservative Republican bosses
• The Panic of 1907 was blamed on Roosevelt for his trust-busting by the financial
world and especially the conservatives
⇒ TR responded by saying that certain big business manipulated their way into
the panic to ease the effort of trust-busting on themselves
• The panic, fortunately, jumpstarted the fiscal reforms that were needed
⇒ Congress in 1908 responded to the demand of currency by the Aldrich
Vreeland Act, which authorized national banks to issue emergency currency
backed by various kinds of collateral
⇒ Paved the path for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
XI) The Rough Rider Thunders Out
• TR, keeping his promise of not running for a 3rd term, although he could have
easily be nominated and almost guaranteed a win with his popularity, he did not
run for a 3rd term
⇒ He selected William Howard Taft, secretary of war and a mild progressive
• The Election of 1908 was Taft against the 2-time loser William J. Bryan, who
became a 3-time loser
⇒ Socialists amassed half a million votes for Eugene V. Debs, hero of the
Pullman strike
• Roosevelt’s legacy
⇒ TR was considered a wild-eyed radical by his political adversaries
⇒ Well-known for publicity; enlarged the power and prestige of the presidential
office
⇒ “Middle-of-the-road” politician; especially demonstrated in the conservation
crusade
⇒ The “noise” he made during trust-busting was much more extravagant
compared to the laws he inspired and the change he made
⇒ Protected capitalism and were against socialism; favored regulation not
overthrow of big business
⇒ Conservation was TR’s most typical and most lasting achievement
⇒ Shaped progressive reform
⇒ Led America to assume responsibilities and believe that the world depended
on them(imperialist ideas); favored imperialism
XII)Taft: A Round Peg in a Square Hole
• Taft weighed 350 pounds
• Established reputation a conservative lawyer and judge; hostile to labor unions
⇒ Mildly progressive, but favored status quo than to change
⇒ There were no liberals or reformers in Taft’s cabinet
XIII)The Dollar Goes Abroad as a Diplomat
• “Dollar diplomacy”

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• Encouraged bankers to invest in foreign areas of strategic concern to the US for

stability and in those areas and therefore prosperity at home
• Manchuria in China was what Taft was aiming for
⇒ Newly formed opponents Japan and Russia controlled the railroads in these
areas, and Taft saw it as a slam of the Open Door in the face of the US
merchants
⇒ In 1909 Secretary of State Philander C. Knox proposed for a group of
American and foreign bankers to buy Manchurian railroads and then turning
them over to China. Japan and Russia did not want to be forced out of their
dominant economic position and rejected the proposal. Taft was ridiculed
• The Caribbean became filled with revolution rumors that needs to be stabilized,
in the eyes of Taft
⇒ Washington urged for Wall Street bankers to push money in Honduras and
Haiti to keep foreign currency away. This is one of the examples supporting
Taft’s argument for his “dollar diplomacy” to be a continual of the Roosevelt
Corollary of the Monroe Doctrine
⇒ This feeling of necessity for intervention sparked with sporadic disorders
pushed America to use force to protect its economic interests, as America
sent 2,500 marines in Nicaragua for its revolutionary upheaval
XIV)Taft the Trustbuster
• Taft gained his fame as a smasher of monopolies as he brought 90 lawsuits
against trusts during his 4-year-term compared to 44 in 7 ½ years for TR
⇒ The most sensational judicial actions during Taft’s regime was when the
Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of the Standard Oil Company in 1911,
which was judged to be a combination in restraint of trade in violation of the
Sherman Anti-Trust Act
⇒ Simultaneously, the court handed down the controversial “rule of reason”,
which held that only those combinations that are “unreasonably” restrained
trade were illegal. Without an operational definition of unreasonable, this left
a huge gap in the government’s antitrust system
⇒ Taft’s decision in 1911 to initiate a lawsuit against U.S Steel Corporation
angered Roosevelt who was personally involved with one of the mergers of
the Corporation. This would be the preamble for the brutal confrontation
between TR and Taft
XV)Taft Splits the Republican Party
• Taft was a friend turned foe of progressivism
• Taft, although promised during his campaign for tariff reduction, only got pass a
moderately reductive bill
⇒ Senatorial reactionaries led by Senator Nelson W. Aldrich of RI completed
numerous upward tariff revisions
• Taft betrayed his campaign promises and the progressive Republicans and
signed the Payne-Aldrich Bill
• Taft dismissed Gifford Pinchot, chief of the USDA Division of Forestry and a
stalwart Rooseveltian, for insubordination because he sharply criticized the

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Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger’s actions to open public lands to

corporate development in Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska
• Taft’s contributions for conservation actually equaled or surpassed those of TR,
but these achievements remained dormant on the public minds because of the
Ballinger-Pinchot quarrel
• The scene was set for the split of the Republican party
⇒ In his speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, TR proposed a doctrine known as “New
Nationalism” which urged for the national government to increase its power
to remedy economic and social abuses
⇒ Weakened by internal conflicts, the congressional elections of 1910 gave the
Democrats the upper hand with 228 seats versus 161 for Republicans
⇒ Austrian-born Victor L. Berger was elected as a Socialist representative from
Milwaukee, although later denied his seat in 1919 due to the anti-socialist
movements
⇒ The Senate were retained by the Republicans 51 versus 41, except this is
misleading since there is a split-up in the 51 seats on the Republican side
XVI)The Taft-Roosevelt Rupture
• The National Progressive Republican League was formed in 1911
⇒ Originally, the party planned to nominate Senator La Follette of Wisconsin.
But TR changed his views on third terms when he saw his policies discarded
in the hands of Taft
⇒ La Follette was pushed aside as Roosevelt seized the Progressive banner
• The Taft-Roosevelt explosion came in June 1912 in the Republican convention in
Chicago. After Roosevelt was defeated for nomination 250 versus 100
delegates, he left and went on to lead the Progressive Party

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