History of the USA: Reconstruction to the New Age Politics

Unit 2: The Gilded Age - Economic, Social Divide and Reform

2.1. Growth of Capitalism – Big Business; Competition, Consolidation, Monopolism

➢ Introduction
o The rise of the giant corporation is a story of risk-taking, innovation as well as
of conspiracy, and corruption.
o Views on American Industries; Impacts & Consequences
▪ Andrew Carnegie
• Industrial growth & accumulation of wealth—a cornerstone of a
better America
• Material progress will lead to spiritual and intellectual progress.
▪ Walt Whitman
• Corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration, the judiciary
is tainted, money-making
o How is your answer divided?
▪ Descriptive Narratives on events
▪ Historical Interpretations
➢ The Rise of Corporate America
o The Character of Industrial Change
▪ Six features dominated the world of large-scale manufacturing after the
Civil War: (1) the exploitation of immense coal deposits as a source of
cheap energy; (2) the rapid spread of technological innovation in
transportation, communication, and factory systems; (3) the demand for
workers who could be carefully controlled; (4) the constant pressure on
firms to compete for tooth-and-nail by cutting costs and prices,
eliminating rivals, and creating monopolies; (5) the relentless drop in
prices (a stark contrast to the inflation of other eras); and (6) the failure
of the money supply to keep pace with productivity, a development that
drove up interest rates and restricted the availability of credit.
o Railroad Innovations
▪ Railroad entrepreneurs such as Collis P. Huntington of the Central
Pacific Railroad, Jay Gould of the Union Pacific, and James J. Hill of
the Northern Pacific faced enormous financial and organizational
problems.
o Consolidating the Railway Industries
▪ Problems; Innovating Problems, Inter-state Railways
▪ Solutions: Inter-State Commerce Act
▪ National Depression of 1893 & Business taken over by bankers like J.
Pierpont Morgan
▪ Andrew Carnegie & History Story of Success
o Creating the New Forms of Corporate Organisation
▪ New Industries; oil, salt, sugar, tobacco, and meat-packing industries
etc.
▪ Story of John D. Rockefeller
o Stimulating Economic Growth
▪ The Triumph of Technology

1|Page
 ▪ Specialized Production
▪ Advertising and Marketing
▪ Social and Environmental Costs and Benefits
o The New South
▪ Obstacles to Economic Development
▪ The New South Creed and Southern Industrialization
▪ The Southern Mill Economy
▪ The Southern Industrial Lag
o Factories and the Work Force
▪ From Workshop to Factories
▪ The Hardships of Industrial Labour
▪ Immigrant Labour
▪ Women and Work in Industrial America
▪ Hard Work and the Gospel of Success
o Labour Unions and Industrial Conflict
▪ Organizing Workers
▪ Strikes and Labour Unrest
▪ Social Thinkers Probe for Alternatives
➢ Historical Debate on American Businessman: Industrial Innovator or Robber Baron?
o Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth
o Progressive Historians
▪ Charles & Mary Beard, Rise of American Civilization
▪ Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought
• Views of A.C. Bedford
o Robber Baron Theory
▪ Lewis Corey, The House of Morgan
▪ Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons: The Great American
Capitalists
▪ John Tipple, The Capitalist Resolutions
o Revisionist School
▪ Allan Nevins
▪ Alfred Chandler
▪ Carl Kaysen
o New Left
▪ Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism
o Business Historians
▪ Edward A. Purcell, Jr.
▪ David F. Noble
➢ Conclusion

2|Page
 Unit 2.2: The Populist Challenge: Agrarian Crisis and
Discontent
Hicks, J.D. The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers’ Alliance and the Peoples Party.
Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Movement: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolts in America.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

1. Introduction
a. Consequences of the Civil War
b. The agrarian revolt first stirred on the Southern frontier, then swept eastward
across Texas and the other states of the Old Confederacy and thence to the
Western Plains. It took almost thirty years to spread all parts of the country.
c. J. D. Hicks argues that the various agrarian movements, particularly the
Alliance and the Populist revolts, were but the inevitable attempts of a
bewildered people to find relief from a state of economic distress made certain
by the unprecedented size and suddenness of their assault upon the West and by
the finality with which they had conquered it.
2. Background of the Populist Revolt
a. Southern Economy after the Civil War
i. Crop Lien System
ii. Conditions of Farmers: Case Study
a. S.R. Simonton from South Carolina
b. Matt Brown, Negro farmer from Mississippi
iii. Great Migration
a. Going West or Gone to Texas
b. The Grievances
i. For this condition of affairs, the farmer did not blame himself. The
farmer never doubted that his
lack of prosperity was directly
traceable to the low prices he
received for the commodities he
had to sell.
ii. Not politicians only but many
others who studied the question
held that overproduction was the root of the evil. It is argued that
peasants are distressed due to the rapid expansion of the agricultural
frontier in the United States and the world.
iii. However, the farmers and their dependents refused to place much stock
in the overproduction theory.
iv. Railroads were blamed for this condition also. Southern railroads, like
the western railroads, were accused of levying ‘freight and fares at their
pleasure to the oppression of the citizens and of making their rates
according to the principle, take as much out of the pockets of the farmers
as we can without actually taking at all.’
v. The absence of a free market was the chief reason assigned by many
farmers for the low prices they were paid for their grain. Undoubtedly,
there was great irregularity and unfairness in the grading of grains.

3|Page
 c. The Farmers’ Alliances
i. In September 1877 a group of farmers gathered at the Lampasas County
farm of J. R. Allen and banded together as the “Knights of Reliance.”
In his view, the farmers needed to organize a new institution for
America, a “grand social and political palace where liberty may dwell
and justice be safely domiciled.” How to achieve such a useful “palace”
was, of course, the problem.
ii. The new organization soon changed its name to “The Farmers
Alliance,” borrowed freely from the rituals of older farm organizations,
and spread to surrounding counties. In the summer of 1878, a “Grand
State Farmers Alliance” was formed.

3. Course of the Populist Revolt

a. The Activities of Farmers’ Alliances
i. S. O. Daws, a thirty-six-year-old Mississippian, was the first populist
leader. Daws had developed an interesting kind of personal political
self-respect. Raised in the humiliating school of the crop lien system, he
did not believe the inherited economic folkways were fair, and he
thought he had the right to say so. Late in 1883 the Alliance named Daws
to a newly created position, that of “Traveling Lecturer,” and endowed
the new chief organizer with broad executive powers to appoint sub-
organizers and sub-lecturers for every county in the state of Texas.
a. A “trade store” system was agreed upon wherein Alliance
members would contract to trade exclusively with one merchant.
b. Daws’s efforts had been so impressive that his office and his
appointment powers were confirmed by the convention. The
spring of 1884 saw a rebirth of the Alliance. Daws travelled far
and wide, denouncing credit merchants, railroads, trusts, money
power, and capitalists.
c. Did buyers underweight the cotton, or overcharge for sampling,
inspecting, classifying, and handling?
ii. Another leader was William Lamb who also gave his full efforts in the
organisation. He was made “state lecturer” while Daws continued in the
role of travelling lecturer.
a. William Lamb emerged in 1884-85 as a man of enormous energy
and tenacity. As president of the Montague County Alliance, he
had organized over 100 sub-alliances by October 1885, a record
that eclipsed even Daws’s performance in his own county.
iii. The first spectacular flowering of this culture came in 1886 against the
backdrop of a bitter labour controversy that has come down in history
as the “Great Southwest Strike.” For decades as the nation
industrialized following the Civil War, American industrial workers, in
ways not dissimilar from those of farmers, had groped for ways to
defend themselves against the forms of exploitation associated with the
new corporate system.
a. The most numerically significant of these efforts developed
through an institution known as the Knights of Labour. They had
forced Jay Gould, railroad magnate and guiding spirit 1 of the
Missouri-Pacific lines, to honour a union contract.

4|Page
 b. The cry “we made Jay Gould recognize us” was compelling, and
in 1885-86 the Knights used it to multiply their national
membership from 100,000 to 700,000. But in the spring of 1886,
Jay Gould, through his general manager, H. M. Hoxie, moved to
crush the union by precipitating a conflict.
c. The struggle began when Hoxie fired a union spokesman in
Texas for missing work while attending a union meeting after
the railroad had given him permission to do so.
iv. From beginning to end, the Great Southwest Strike was a series of minor
and major battles between armed strikers and armed deputies and
militiamen, interspersed with commando-like raids on company
equipment by bands of workers.
b. The Populists into Action
i. The movement became increasingly popular throughout Texas in the
mid-1880s, and membership in the organization grew from 10,000 in
1884 to 50,000 at the end of 1885. At the same time, the Farmer’s
Alliance became increasingly politicized, with members attacking the
“money trust” as the source and beneficiary of both the crop lien system
and deflation. In the hopes of cementing an alliance with labour groups,
the Farmer’s Alliance supported the Knights of Labour in the Great
Southwest railroad strike of 1886. That same year, a Farmer’s Alliance
convention issued the Cleburne Demands, a series of resolutions that
called for, among other things, collective bargaining, federal regulation
of railroad rates, an expansionary monetary policy, and a national
banking system administered by the federal government.
ii. President Grover Cleveland’s veto of a Texas seed bill in early 1887
outraged many farmers, encouraging the growth of a Northern Farmer’s
Alliance in states like Kansas and Nebraska. That same year, a
prolonged drought began in the West, contributing to the bankruptcy of
many farmers. In 1887, the Farmer’s Alliance merged with the
Louisiana Farmers Union and expanded into the South and the Great
Plains. In 1889, Charles Macune launched the National Economist,
which became the national paper of the Farmer’s Alliance.
iii. Macune and other Farmer’s Alliance leaders helped organize a
December 1889 convention in St. Louis; the convention was met with
the goal of forming a confederation of the major farm and labour
organizations. Though a full merger was not achieved, the Farmer’s
Alliance and the Knights of Labour jointly endorsed the St. Louis
Platform, which included many of the long-standing demands of the
Farmer’s Alliance. The Platform added a call for Macune’s “Sub-
Treasury Plan,” under which the federal government would establish
warehouses in agricultural counties; farmers would be allowed to store
their crops in these warehouses and borrow up to 80 per cent of the
value of their crops. The movement began to expand into
the Northeast and the Great Lakes region, while Macune led the
establishment of the National Reform Press Association, a network of
newspapers sympathetic to the Farmer’s Alliance.
c. The Elections & the Populist Party
i. By the time of the election year of 1890, both the Southern and the
Northern Alliances were earnestly at work sharing political lines.

5|Page
 a. Both drew much inspiration from activities, already described
from the national conventions held at St. Louis during December
1889.
b. They wanted to nominate the independent state tickets in the
election. They also try to unite various forces of discontent into
a national party. Apart from National Farmers’ Alliance, there
was Union Labour Party.
c. Alliance presidents even resolved that there will not be any
division on party lines and they will cast their votes for
candidates of the people, by the people and for the people.
ii. The success of Farmers’ Alliance candidates in the 1890 elections, along
with the conservatism of both major parties, encouraged Farmers’
Alliance leaders to establish a full-fledged third party before the 1892
elections.
a. The Ocala Demands laid out the Populist platform: collective
bargaining, federal regulation of railroad rates, an
expansionary monetary policy, and a Sub-Treasury Plan that
required the establishment of federally controlled warehouses to
aid farmers.
b. Other Populist-endorsed measures included bimetallism, a
graduated income tax, direct election of Senators, a shorter
workweek, and the establishment of a postal savings system.
These measures were collectively designed to curb the influence
of monopolistic corporate and financial interests and empower
small businesses, farmers and labourers.
iii. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populist ticket of James B.
Weaver and James G. Field won 8.5% of the popular vote and carried
four Western states, becoming the first third party since the end of
the American Civil War to win electoral votes.
a. Despite the support of labour organizers like Eugene V.
Debs and Terence V. Powderly, the party largely failed to win
the vote of urban labourers in the Midwest and
the Northeast.
b. Over the next four years, the party continued to run state and
federal candidates, building up powerful organizations in several
Southern and Western states. Before the 1896 presidential
election, the Populists became increasingly polarized between
“fusionists”, who wanted to nominate a joint presidential ticket
with the Democratic Party, and “mid-roaders”, like Mary
Elizabeth Lease, who favoured the continuation of the Populists
as an independent third party.
c. After the 1896 Democratic National
Convention nominated William Jennings Bryan, a prominent
bimetallist, the Populists also nominated Bryan but rejected the
Democratic vice-presidential nominee in favour of party
leader Thomas E. Watson.
d. In the 1896 election, Bryan swept the South and West but lost to
Republican William McKinley by a decisive margin.
iv. After the 1896 presidential election, the Populist Party suffered a
nationwide collapse. The party nominated presidential candidates in the

6|Page
 three presidential elections after 1896, but none came close to matching
Weaver’s performance in 1892.
a. Former Populists became inactive or joined other parties. Other
than Debs and Bryan, few politicians associated with the
Populists retained national prominence.
v. Historians see the Populists as a reaction to the power of corporate
interests in the Gilded Age, but they debate the degree to which the
Populists were anti-modern and nativist.
a. Scholars also continue to debate the magnitude of influence the
Populists exerted on later organizations and movements, such as
the progressives of the early 20th century.
b. Most of the Progressives, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert
La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, were bitter enemies of the
Populists.
c. In American political rhetoric, “populist” was originally
associated with the Populist Party and related to left-wing
movements, but beginning in the 1950s it began to take on a
more generic meaning, describing any anti-
establishment movement regardless of its position on the left–
right political spectrum.
4. Decline of the Populist Movements
a. The Populist movement never recovered from the failure of 1896, and
national fusion with the Democrats proved disastrous to the party.
i. In the Midwest, the Populist Party essentially merged into the
Democratic Party before the end of the 1890s. In the South, the National
alliance with the Democrats sapped the Populists’ ability to remain
independent.
ii. Tennessee’s Populist Party was demoralized by a diminishing
membership, and puzzled and split by the dilemma of whether to fight
the state-level enemy (the Democrats) or the national foe (the
Republicans and Wall Street).
b. The gravity of the crisis was underscored by a major race riot in Wilmington in
1898, two days after the election. Knowing they had just retaken control of the
state legislature, the Democrats were confident they could not be overcome.
i. They attacked and overcame the Fusionists; mobs roamed the black
neighbourhoods, shooting, killing, burning buildings, and making a
special target of the black newspaper.
c. In 1900, many Populist voters supported Bryan again but the weakened party
nominated a separate ticket of Wharton Barker and Ignatius L. Donnelly, and
disbanded afterward.
i. Populist activists retired from politics, joined a major party, or followed
Debs into the Socialist Party.
ii. In 1904, the party was reorganized, and Watson was its nominee for
president in 1904 and 1908, after which the party disbanded again.
d. In A Preface to Politics, published in 1913, Walter Lippmann wrote, “As I
write, a convention of the Populist Party has just taken place. Eight delegates
attended the meeting, which was held in a parlour.” This may record the last
gasp of the party organization.

7|Page
5. Historical Interpretations of the Populist Movement
a. Since the 1890s historians have vigorously debated the nature of
Populism. Some historians see the populists as forward-looking liberal
reformers, others as reactionaries trying to recapture an idyllic and utopian
past. For some they were radicals out to restructure American life, and for
others they were economically hard-pressed agrarians seeking government
relief.
b. O. Clanton (1991) stresses that Populism was “the last significant expression
of an old radical tradition that derived from Enlightenment sources that had been
filtered through a political tradition that bore the distinct imprint of Jeffersonian,
Jacksonian, and Lincolnian democracy.”
c. Frederick Jackson Turner depicted the Populists as responding to the closure
of the frontier. He wrote that “the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populist demand
for government ownership of the railroad is a phase of the same effort of the
pioneer farmer, on his latest frontier.
i. The proposals have taken increasing proportions in each region of
Western Advance.
ii. Taken as a whole, Populism is a manifestation of the old pioneer ideals
of the native American, with the added element of increasing readiness
to utilize the national government to effect its ends”.
d. The most influential Turner student of Populism was John D. Hicks, who
emphasized economic pragmatism over ideals, presenting Populism as
interest group politics, with have-nots demanding their fair share of
America’s wealth which was being leeched off by non-productive speculators.
i. Hicks emphasized the drought that ruined so many Kansas farmers, but
also pointed to financial manipulations, deflation in prices caused by the
gold standard, high interest rates, mortgage foreclosures, and high
railroad rates.
ii. Corruption accounted for such outrages and Populists presented popular
control of government as the solution, a point that later students of
republicanism emphasized.
e. In the 1930s, C. Vann Woodward stressed the southern base, seeing the
possibility of a black-and-white coalition of poor against the overbearing rich.
f. In the 1950s, scholars such as Richard Hofstadter portrayed the Populist
movement as an irrational response of backward-looking farmers to the
challenges of modernity.
i. Though Hofstadter wrote that the Populists were the “first modern
political movement of practical importance in the United States to
insist that the federal government had some responsibility for the
common weal”, he criticized the movement as anti-Semitic,
conspiracy-minded, nativist, and grievance-based.
ii. According to Hofstadter, the antithesis of anti-modern Populism was the
modernizing nature of Progressivism. Hofstadter noted that leading
progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette Sr., George
Norris and Woodrow Wilson were vehement enemies of Populism,
though Bryan cooperated with them and accepted the Populist
nomination in 1896.
g. James Reichley (1992) sees the Populist Party primarily as a reaction to the
decline of the political hegemony of white Protestant farmers; the share of

8|Page
 farmers in the workforce had fallen from about 70% in the early 1830s to about
33% in the 1890s.
i. Reichley argues that, while the Populist Party was founded in reaction
to economic hardship, by the mid-1890s it was “reacting not simply
against the money power but against the whole world of cities and
alien customs and loose living they felt was challenging the agrarian
way of life.”
h. Lawrance Goodwyn (1976) and Charles Postel (2007) reject the notion that
the Populists were traditionalistic and anti-modern. Rather, they argue, the
Populists aggressively sought self-consciously progressive goals.
i. Goodwyn criticizes Hofstadter’s reliance on secondary sources to
characterize the Populists, working instead with material generated by
the Populists themselves.
ii. Goodwyn determines that the farmers’ cooperatives gave rise to a
Populist culture, and their efforts to free farmers from lien merchants
revealed to them the political structure of the economy, which propelled
them into politics.
iii. Hundreds of thousands of women committed to Populism, seeking a
more modern life, education, and employment in schools and offices.
iv. A large section of the labour movement looked to Populism for answers,
forging a political coalition with farmers that gave impetus to the
regulatory state.
v. Progress, however, was also menacing and inhumane, Postel notes.
White Populists embraced social-Darwinist notions of racial
improvement, Chinese exclusion and separate-but-equal.
6. Conclusion
a. Populist Contributions
b. Success or Failure?

9|Page
 Unit 2.3: The Politics of Progressivism: Movement,
Manifestations under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson

1. Introduction
a. As the twentieth century dawned, groups across the nation grappled with the
problems of the new urban-industrial order. Workers protested unsafe and
exhausting jobs. Experts investigated social conditions. Women’s clubs
embraced reform. Intellectuals challenged the ideological foundations of a
business-dominated social order, and journalists exposed municipal corruption
and industrialism’s human toll. Throughout America, activists worked to make
government more democratic, improve conditions in cities and factories, and
curb corporate power. Historians have grouped all these efforts under a single
label: “the progressive movement.” In fact, “progressivism” was less a single
movement than a spirit of discontent with the status quo and an exciting sense
of new social possibilities.
b. Fundamentally, progressivism was a broad-based response to industrialization
and its social by-products: immigration, urban growth, growing corporate
power, and widening class divisions. In contrast to populism, it enlisted many
more city dwellers, journalists, academics, and social theorists. Finally, most
progressives were reformers, not radicals. They wished to make the new urban-
industrial order more humane, not overturn it entirely.
2. Background of the Progressive Movement
a. The rise of American industry involved more than a shift from a commercial
and agrarian economy to an urban and industrial one. It was itself often
rationalised in the ideology of the self-made man who claimed he attained
success by virtue of his own talents, drive and ambition. It led to a vast disparity
between the poor and rich classes.
i. Thus, the only solution, as Henry George and Edward Bellamy argued,
was the nationalization of all the means of production and distribution
would solve most of America’s major problems.
ii. Between 1900 and 1917 these uncoordinated efforts at reform were
institutionalised in what came to be known as the Progressive
movement. It was actually a series of movements at the local, state, and
national levels of government and society. The movement consisted of
a loose coalition of reformers who sought a variety of goals.
1. Political reforms such as the initiative, referendum, recall, and
the destruction of urban political machines and corruption.
2. Economic reforms such as the regulation of public utilities and
the curtailment of corporate power.
3. Social reforms such as the Americanization of the immigrants,
the amelioration of a lot of the urban poor, and regulation of child
and woman labour as well as many others.
b. Intellectuals, Novelists and Journalists
i. Intellectuals and their philosophies also played a crucial role in making
people aware of the problems. The idea of ‘fittest of the survival’ and
Social Darwinism was challenged in these years by Sociologist Lester
Ward, and utopian novelist Edward Bellamy.
ii. The settlement-house leader Jane Addams also helped shape the
ideology of the Progressive Era. In Democracy and Social Ethics (1902)

10 | P a g e
 and other books, Addams rejected the claim that unrestrained
competition offered the best path to social progress. Instead, she argued,
in a complex industrial society, each individual’s well-being depends on
the well-being of all. Addams urged middle-class Americans to
recognize their common interests with the labouring masses and to
demand better conditions in factories and immigrant slums.
iii. In his novel The Octopus (1901), Frank Norris of San Francisco
portrayed the struggle between California railroad barons and the state’s
wheat growers. Though writing fiction, Norris accurately described the
railroad owners’ bribery, intimidation, rate manipulation, and other
tactics.
iv. Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Financier (1912) featured a hard-driving
business tycoon utterly lacking a social conscience. Dreiser modelled
his story on the scandal-ridden career of an actual railway financier.
3. Background Phase: Grassroots of Progressivism
a. Reforming Local Politics: Beginning in the 1890s, middle-class reformers
battled corrupt city governments that provided services and jobs to immigrants,
but often at the price of graft and rigged elections. In New York City, Protestant
clergy battled Tammany Hall, the city’s entrenched Democratic organization.
In Detroit, the reform mayor Hazen Pingree (served 1890–1897) brought
honesty to city hall, lowered transit fares, and provided public baths and other
services. Pingree once slapped a health quarantine on a brothel, holding hostage
a well-known business leader until he promised to back Pingree’s reforms. The
electoral-reform movement soon spread to the state level.
b. Regulating Business, Protecting Workers: The corporate consolidation that
produced giants like Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil continued after 1900. The
United States Steel Company created by J. P. Morgan in 1901 controlled 80
percent of all U.S. steel production. A year later, Morgan combined six
competing companies into the International Harvester Company, which
dominated the farm-implement business. The General Motors Company,
formed in 1908 by William C. Durant with backing from the DuPont
Corporation brought various independent automobile manufacturers, from the
inexpensive Chevrolet to the luxury Cadillac, under one corporate umbrella.
c. Progressivism and Social Control
i. Urban Amusement: By 1920, the U.S. urban population passed the 50
per cent mark, and sixty-eight cities boasted more than a hundred
thousand inhabitants. New York City grew by 2.2 million from 1900 to
1920, and Chicago by 1 million. America had become an urban nation.
Political corruption was only one of many urban problems.
ii. Extending the achievements of Frederick Law Olmsted and others (see
Chapter 19), reformers campaigned for parks, boulevards, and street
lights; opposed unsightly billboards and overhead electrical wires; and
advocated city planning and beautification projects. Daniel Burnham,
the chief architect of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, led a successful
1906 effort to revive a plan for Washington, D.C., first proposed in 1791.
He also developed plans for Cleveland, San Francisco, and other cities.
Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago offered a vision of a city both more
efficient and more beautiful. He recommended wide boulevards;
lakefront parks and museums; statuary and fountains; and a majestic

11 | P a g e
 domed city hall and vast civic plaza. Chicago spent more than $300
million on projects reflecting his ideas.
d. Battling Alcohol and Drugs: Earlier campaigns had urged individuals to give
up drink. By contrast, the Anti-Saloon League (ASL), founded in 1895, called
for a total ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages.
4. Phase-I: Theodore Roosevelt & William Howard Taft
a. Roosevelt was the first national progressive leader. Once he became the
president, he moved to solve labour disputes, trustbusting, and railroad
regulations.
i. In May 1902, the United Mine Workers Union (UMW) called a strike to
gain not only higher wages and shorter hours but also recognition as a
union. The mine owners resisted, and in October, with winter looming,
TR acted. Summoning the two sides to the White House and threatening
to seize the mines, he forced them to accept arbitration. The arbitration
commission granted the miners a 10 per cent wage increase and reduced
their working day from ten to nine hours.
ii. With his elite background, TR neither feared nor much liked business
tycoons. His 1902 State of the Union message called for breaking up
business monopolies, or “trustbusting.” Roosevelt’s attorney general
soon sued the Northern Securities Company, a giant holding company
recently created by Morgan and other tycoons to control railroading in
the Northwest, for violating the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. On a speaking
tour in the summer of 1902, TR called for a “square deal” for all
Americans and denounced special treatment for capitalists.
1. “We don’t wish to destroy corporations,” he said, “but we do
wish to make them … serve the public good.”
iii. In 1904, a divided Supreme Court ordered the Northern Securities
Company to dissolve.
iv. The Roosevelt administration filed over forty antitrust lawsuits. In two
key rulings in 1911, the Supreme Court ordered the breakup of the
Standard Oil Company and the reorganization of the American Tobacco
Company to make it less monopolistic.
b. He also worked towards consumer protection as he supported the Pure Food and
Drug Act. He gave attention towards an environment-friendly society.
i. Roosevelt had pledged not to seek a third term, and as the 1908 election
approached, the Republican Party’s most conservative leaders regained
control. They nominated TR’s choice, Secretary of War William
Howard Taft, for president. Pledged to support TR’s program, Taft
backed the Mann-Elkins Act (1910), which beefed up the Interstate
Commerce Commission’s regulatory authority and extended it to
telephone and telegraph companies.
ii. Taft’s administration actually prosecuted more antitrust cases than
Roosevelt’s but with little publicity. To the public, TR remained the
mighty trustbuster.
c. In February 1912, Roosevelt announced his candidacy for the Republican
nomination. But Taft wanted a second term. Roosevelt generally walloped Taft
in the Republican state primaries and conventions. Taft controlled the party
machinery, so Roosevelt had to contest with the Progressive Party.
i. Roosevelt outpolled Taft by 630,000 votes, but the Republicans’ split
proved costly.

12 | P a g e
 ii. Wilson easily won the presidency, and the Democrats took both houses
of Congress.
5. Phase-II: Woodrow Wilson
a. Once he became the president, one of the first initiatives towards the progressive
reforms he had taken was the tariff and banking reforms.
i. Wilson appeared personally before Congress in April 1913 to read his
tariff message. A low-tariff bill quickly passed the House but bogged
down in the Senate. Showing his flair for drama, Wilson denounced the
lobbyists flooding into Washington. His censure led to a Senate
investigation of lobbyists and of senators who profited from high tariffs.
ii. Wilson again addressed Congress in June, this time calling for banking
and currency reform. The nation’s banking system clearly needed
overhauling. Totally decentralized, it lacked a strong central institution.
b. He worked for regulating businesses and provided support to the farmers and
workers. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) was created, with the power
to investigate violations of federal regulations, require regular reports from
corporations, and issue cease-and-desist orders (subject to judicial review) when
it found unfair methods of competition.
c. The Clayton Antitrust Act, by contrast, took a legal approach. It listed corporate
activities that could lead to federal lawsuits. The Sherman Act of 1890, although
outlawing business practices in restraint of trade, had been vague about details.
The Clayton Act spelt out specific illegal practices, such as selling at a loss to
undercut competitors.
d. In 1916 (an election year), Wilson and congressional Democrats enacted three
important worker-protection laws. The Keating-Owen Act barred from
interstate commerce products manufactured by child labour. (This law was
declared unconstitutional in 1918, as was a similar law enacted in 1919.)
i. The Adamson Act established an eight-hour day for interstate railway
workers. The Workmen’s Compensation Act provided accident and
injury protection to federal workers.
ii. As we have seen, however, Wilson’s sympathies for the underdog
stopped at the colour line. Other 1916 laws helped farmers. The Federal
Farm Loan Act and the Federal Warehouse Act enabled farmers, using
land or crops as collateral, to get low-interest federal loans.
iii. The Federal Highway Act, providing funds for highway programs,
benefited not only the new automobile industry but also farmers plagued
by bad roads.
e. He also made many such constitutional amendments. The Seventeenth
Amendment (1913) provided for the direct election of U.S. senators by the
voters, rather than their selection by state legislatures, as described in Article I
of the Constitution. This reform, earlier advocated by the Populists, sought to
make the Senate less subject to corporate influence and more responsive to the
popular will.
i. The Eighteenth Amendment (1919) prohibited the manufacture, sale, or
importation of “intoxicating liquors.”
ii. The Nineteenth (1920) granted women the vote.
f. The progressive movement lost momentum as attention turned from reform to
war. The final success of the prohibition and woman-suffrage campaigns came
in 1919–1920, and Congress enacted a few reform measures in the 1920s. But,
overall, the movement faded as America marched to war in 1917.

13 | P a g e
6. Historical Interpretations of Progressive Movements
a. Progressive School: Historians have different opinions on the nature of
Progressive movements. One of the first schools that interpreted this movement
was the Progressive School.
i. They interpreted these reform movements and reformers within a liberal
framework. In their eyes, the reformers in the movement had been
challenging the dominant position of the business and privileged
classes. The reformers’ goals had been clear and simple:
1. to restore government to the people;
2. to abolish special privileges and ensure equal opportunity for
all;
3. to enact a series of laws embodying principles of social
justice.
ii. These reformers, Progressive historians emphasized, were not anti-
capitalists; they had not advocated the abolition of private property
nor sought the establishment of a socialist society.
1. On the contrary, they had taken seriously the American dream;
their fundamental goal had been a democratic and humane
society based on egalitarian ideals and social compassion.
2. The real enemies of society were the businessmen, dishonest
politicians, and “special interests,” all of whom posed a serious
threat to the realization of American democracy.
iii. Vernon L. Parrington, one of the best-known Progressive historians, saw
progressivism as a “democratic renaissance” a movement of the
masses against a “plutocracy” that had been corrupting the very fabric
of American society since the Civil War.
1. Thus, the movement concerned itself not only with political
democracy but with economic democracy as well.
2. To Parrington, progressivism was a broad-based movement that
included members of the middle class, journalists, and scholars-
men, in other words, whose consciences had been aroused by the
“cesspools that were poisoning the national household,” and who
had set for themselves the task of reawakening the American
people.
iv. Most historians writing in the Progressive tradition believed that
reformers, regardless of their specific goals or the eras in which they
appeared, were cast in the same mould because they invariably
supported the “people” against their enemies.
1. Such was the position of John D. Hicks who argues that
American reform efforts drew much of their inspiration from the
Jeffersonian agrarian tradition which had survived intact among
the nation’s farmers and rural population.
v. Not all historians were as friendly and well-disposed toward populism
and progressivism as Hicks. Those historians writing within a socialist
and Marxian tradition, for example, were highly critical of
progressivism because of its superficial nature and its refusal to adopt
more radical solutions to meet the basic needs of American society.
vi. To John Chamberlain, the Progressive movement was an abysmal
failure. Its adherents, claimed Chamberlain, were motivated by an

14 | P a g e
 escapist desire to return to a golden past where honesty and virtue had
dominated over egoism and evil.
1. The failure of the Progressive generation, these critics
emphasized, had led to the reaction of the 1920s, which in turn
had resulted in the disastrous depression of the 1930s.
b. Neo-conservative School: The challenge to democracy by communism since
World War II gave rise to a new group of scholars- the neoconservative
historians- who have been critical of the Progressive school and who embarked
upon their own re-evaluation of America’s past.
i. Writing from a conservative point of view these historians stressed the
basic goodness of American society and the consensus that has
characterized the American people throughout most of their history.
ii. Thus, these scholars insisted that American history could not be written
in terms of a struggle between democracy and aristocracy or the people
against special interests. On the contrary, they tended to stress the unity
and homogeneity of America’s past, the stability of basic institutions,
and the existence of a monistic national character.
iii. Richard Hofstadter attempted to expose the shortcomings, inadequacies
and failures of American liberalism. He attempted to delineate the basic
characteristics of the American political tradition by studying the careers
of nearly a dozen presidents and political leaders, including Andrew
Jackson, John C. Calhoun, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt,
Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
1. Hofstadter's thesis was that the liberal tradition had failed
because it was based upon the idea of a return to an ideology that
emphasized acquisitive and individualistic values. Thus, the
Populists and Progressives had similar deficiencies, neither had
faced up to the fundamental problems of an industrialized and
corporate America.
iv. George E. Mowry was one of the first historians to see progressivism as
a movement by a particular class aimed at reasserting its declining
position of leadership. Motivated by an intense faith in individualistic
values these groups opposed the rapid concentration of power in the
hands of large corporate entities and the consequent emergence of an
impersonal society. The Progressives, Mowry concluded, sought to
recapture and reaffirm the older individualistic values, but they
attempted to do so without undertaking any fundamental economic
reforms or altering to any great extent the structure of American society.
c. Revisionist School: As a result of the rise of the neoconservative school of
historians, the Progressive movement had begun to be interpreted in a new and
different light.
i. Some of these scholars, for example, neatly reversed the Progressive
school approach. Instead of seeing early-twentieth-century
progressivism as a liberal movement, they argued that it was essentially
conservative in nature- a characteristic that was a source of strength
rather than of weakness.
ii. Thus, the historical stature of Theodore Roosevelt rose as historians
such as John M. Blum saw him as a conservative though responsible
president who was flexible enough to deal with the major issues of the
day in a constructive yet practical manner. Conversely, the reputation of

15 | P a g e
 Woodrow Wilson among some historians tended to decline because of
his righteous moralism. Wilson’s New Freedom, they wrote, was
unrealistic because of its worship of a bygone age where all individuals
had equal opportunity in the economic sphere. His foreign policies also
turned out to be dismal failures.
d. Business Schools: Business groups of historians, particularly Alfred D.
Chandler, Jr., have explained the emergence of large corporations behind these
progressive movements.
i. They advanced the thesis that progressivism represented largely an
attempt to govern society in accordance with the new ideals of scientific
management and efficiency.
ii. Samuel P. Hays argued that support for reform in municipal government
came from business and professional groups. These groups felt that the
welfare of the city could best be served if decision-making were
centralized in their hands. In this way, city governments would be run
in a rational and business-like manner.
iii. However, Robert H. Wiebe found a complex situation in history.
Businessmen, he noted, rarely tried to improve the lot of low-income
groups; they fought against unions and social insurance legislation; and
while desiring to purify democracy they opposed its extension.
1. In his book Businessmen and Reform, Wiebe referred to the
Progressive era as an ‘age of organisation’ where the
businessmen turned to the organisation as a means of survival in
an impersonal and changing world.
e. New Left Historians: Disillusioned by the continued existence of war, poverty,
and racism, New Left scholars tended to write about the shortcomings and
failures of American reform, a point of view that grew out of their own belief
that only radical changes in the framework and structure of American society
would solve these problems.
i. Gabriel Kolko argued that both major political parties shared a common
ideology and set of values.
1. Kolko called this common ideology as ‘political capitalism’
which sought the limitation of a growing competition in the
economy. Political capitalism, he noted, ‘redirected the radical
potential of mass grievances and aspirations.’
2. He ways the progressivism was initially a movement for the
political rationalization of business and industrial conditions, a
movement that operated on the assumption that the general
welfare of the community could be best served by satisfying the
concrete needs of business.
ii. The New Left historians saw the movement as one dedicated to the
control of government by business, giving it a reactionary rather than a
reform character.
7. Conclusion
a. For which purposes did this movement start?
b. Nature?
c. Success or Failure: Historical Interpretation?

16 | P a g e