• Theodore Roosevelt’s emergence as a national political leader coincided with the onset of what historians have labeled the Progressive Era (1890–1920), an extraordinary period of social activism and political innovation during which compelling public issues forced profound changes in the role of government and presidential leadership.

The Progressive Impulse

• Progressives were liberals, not revolutionaries. They wanted to reform and regulate capitalist society, not destroy it. Most were Christian moralists who felt that politics had become a contest between good and evil, honesty and corruption. What they all shared was the assumption that governments—local, state, and national—must take a more active role in addressing the problems created by rapid urban and industrial growth. Progressivism was more a widespread impulse supported by elements of both major political parties than it was a single movement with a common agenda. Republican Theodore Roosevelt called it the “forward movement” because it emphasized modernizing “old-fashioned” ways of doing things. He and other reformers stood “for the cause of progress, for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind.” To make governments more responsive and “efficient” and businesses more honest and safe, progressives drew upon the new “social sciences”—sociology, political science, psychology, public health, and economics—being developed at research universities. The progressive approach was to enable “experts” to “investigate, educate, and legislate.” Florence Kelley, a tireless activist, voiced the era’s widespread belief that once people knew “the truth” about social ills, “they would act upon it.” Unlike populism, whose grassroots appeal was largely confined to rural regions in the South and Midwest, progressivism was a national movement, centered in large cities but also popular in rural areas among what came to be called Populist progressives. Progressive activists came in all stripes: men and women; Democrats, Republicans, Populists, and Socialists; labor unionists and business executives; teachers, engineers, editors, and professors; social workers, doctors, ministers, and journalists; farmers and homemakers; whites and blacks; clergymen, atheists, and agnostics. Whatever their motives and methods, their combined efforts led to significant improvements. Yet progressivism also displayed inconsistencies and hypocrisies. Progressives often armed themselves with Christian moralism, but their “do-good” perspective was often limited by the racial and ethnic prejudices of the day, as well as by social and intellectual snobbery. The goals of upper-class white progressives rarely included racial equality. Many otherwise “progressive” people, including Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, believed in the supremacy of the “Anglo-Saxon race” and their own superiority to the working poor. They assumed that the workings of modern society were too complicated for the uninformed masses to understand, much less improve, without direction by those who knew better.

The Varied Sources of Progressivism - Economic Depression and Discontent

• More than any other factor, the devastating depression of the 1890s ignited the progressive spirit of reform. By 1900, the U.S. population numbered 82 million; at the turn of the new century, an estimated 10 million Americans were living in poverty with annual incomes barely adequate to provide the minimum necessities of life. The devastating effects of the depression prompted many upper-middle-class urban people—lawyers, doctors, executives, social workers, teachers, professors, journalists, and college-educated women—to organize efforts to reform society, both to help those in need and to keep them from becoming revolutionaries.

Populism

• Populism, with its roots in the rural South and West, was another thread in the fabric of progressivism. The Populist party platforms of 1892 and 1896 included reforms intended to give more power to “the people,” such as the direct election of U.S. senators by voters rather than by state legislatures. Although William Jennings Bryan’s loss in the 1896 presidential campaign ended the Populist Party as a serious political force, many reforms pushed by the Populists were implemented by progressives.

Honest Government

• The Mugwumps—“gentlemen” reformers who had fought the patronage system and insisted that government jobs be awarded on the basis of merit—supplied progressivism with another key goal: the “honest government” ideal. Over the years, the good-government movement expanded beyond ending political corruption to addressing persistent urban issues such as crime, access to electricity, clean water, municipal sewers, mass transit, and garbage collection.

Socialism

• Another significant “progressive” force was the growing influence of socialist ideas. The Socialist Party of America, supported mostly by militant farmers and immigrant Germans and Jews, served as the radical wing of progressivism. Unlike European socialists, most American socialists did not call for the government to take ownership of large corporations. They focused instead on improving working conditions and closing the widening income gap between rich and poor through “progressive” taxation. Most progressives were capitalist reformers, not socialist radicals. They rejected the extremes of both socialism and laissez-faire individualism, preferring new, regulated capitalism “softened” by humanitarianism.

Muckraking Journalism

• Progressivism depended upon newspapers and magazines to inform the public about political corruption and social problems. The so-called muckrakers were America’s first investigative journalists. Their aggressive reporting played a crucial role in educating the upper and middle classes about political and corporate wrongdoing and revealing “how the other half lives”—the title of Danish immigrant Jacob Riis’s pioneering 1890 work of photojournalism about life in the sordid slums of New York City, where some 1.2 million people, mostly immigrants, lived in poverty amid killing diseases. The muckrakers got their nickname from Theodore Roosevelt, who said that crusading journalists were “often indispensable to . . . society, but only if they know when to stop raking the muck.” By uncovering political corruption and writing about social ills in newspapers and popular monthly magazines such as McClure’s, Munsey’s, and Cosmopolitan, the muckrakers changed the face of journalism and gave it a new political role. Roosevelt, both as governor of New York and as president, frequently used muckrakers to drum up support for his policies; he corresponded with them, invited them to the White House, and used their popularity to help shape public opinion.

Religious Activism - The Social Gospel

• During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a growing number of churches and synagogues began emphasizing community service and the care of the unfortunate. New organizations made key contributions to the movement. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and a similar group for women, the YWCA, both entered the United States from England in the 1850s and grew rapidly after 1870. The Salvation Army, founded in London in 1878, came to the United States a year later. The YMCA and YWCA combined nondenominational religious evangelism with social services and fitness training in community centers (segregated by race and gender) across the country. Intended to provide low-cost housing and healthful exercise in a “safe Christian environment” for young men and women from rural areas or foreign countries, the YMCA/YWCA centers often included libraries, classrooms, and kitchens. “Hebrew '' counterparts—YMHAs and YWHAs—provided many of the same facilities in cities with large Jewish populations. Salvation Army centers offered “soup kitchens” to feed the poor and day nurseries for the children of working mothers. The major forces behind the social gospel movement were Protestants and Catholics who feared that Christianity had become too closely associated with the upper and middle classes and was losing its appeal to the working poor. In 1875, Washington Gladden, a prominent pastor in Springfield, Massachusetts, invited striking shoe factory workers to his church, but they refused because the factory owners and managers were members of the congregation. Gladden, heartbroken that Christianity was divided along class lines, responded by writing Working People and Their Employers (1876), which argued that true Christianity was based on the principle that “thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Gladden rejected the view of social Darwinists that the poor deserved their fate and should not be helped. He became the first prominent religious leader to support the rights of workers to form unions. He also spoke out against racial segregation and efforts to discriminate against immigrants. Walter Rauschenbusch, a German American Baptist minister serving immigrant tenement dwellers in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City, became the greatest champion of the social gospel. In 1907, he published Christianity and the Social Crisis, in which he argued that “whoever uncouples the religious and social life has not understood Jesus.” The Christian emphasis on personal salvation, he added, must be linked with an equally passionate commitment to social justice. Churches must embrace “the social aims of Jesus,” he stressed, for Christianity was intended to be a “revolutionary” faith. In Rauschenbusch’s view, religious life needed the social gospel to revitalize it and make it socially relevant: “We shall never have a perfect social life, yet we must seek it with faith.” Like the muckrakers, Rauschenbusch sought to expose the realities of poverty in America and convince statesmen to deal with the crisis. His message resonated with Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and many other progressives in both political parties. Years later, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke for three generations of radicals and reformers when he said that Christianity and the Social Crisis “left an indelible imprint on my thinking.” Rauschenbusch, Gladden, and other “social gospelers” sought to expand the “Kingdom of God” by following Christ’s example by serving the poor and powerless. Rugged individualism may have been the path to wealth, they argued, but “Christian socialism” offered hope for unity among all classes. “Every religious and political question,” said George Herron, a religion professor at Grinnell College, “is fundamentally economic.” And the solution to economic tensions was social solidarity. As progressive economist Richard Ely put it, America could only truly thrive when it recognized that “our true welfare is not an individual matter purely, but likewise a social affair.”

Settlement Houses

• Among the most visible soldiers in the social gospel movement were those who volunteered in innovative community centers called settlement houses. At the Hull-House settlement on Halsted Street in a working-class Chicago neighborhood, two women from privileged backgrounds, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr addressed the everyday needs of the working poor, especially newly arrived European immigrants. Addams and Starr were driven by an “impulse to share the lives of the poor” and to make social service “express the spirit of Christ.” Their staff of two dozen women served thousands of people each week. Besides a nursery for the infant children of working mothers, Hull House also sponsored health clinics, lectures, music lessons and art studios, men’s clubs, an employment bureau, job training, a gymnasium, a coffeehouse, and a savings bank. By the early twentieth century, there were hundreds of settlement houses in cities across the United States, most of them in the Northeast and Midwest. To Addams, the social gospel driving progressive reformers reflected their “yearning sense of justice and compassion.” She and other settlement house leaders soon realized, however, that their work in the rapidly spreading immigrant slums was like bailing out the ocean with a teaspoon. They thus added political reform to their already lengthy agenda and began lobbying for new laws and regulations to improve the living conditions in poor neighborhoods. As her influence in Chicago grew, Addams was appointed to prominent governmental and community boards where she focused on improving public health and food safety. She pushed for better street lighting and police protection in poor neighborhoods and sought to reduce the population’s misuse of narcotics. An ardent pacifist and outspoken advocate for suffrage (voting rights) for women, Addams would become the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Women’s Suffrage Movement

• The majority of men, however, still insisted that women stay out of politics because it would corrupt their moral purity. In 1869 the Wyoming Territory became the first place in the United States to extend equal voting rights to women. In that year, the women’s rights movement split over the issue of whether to concentrate solely on gaining the vote or to adopt a broader agenda. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to promote a woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution, but they considered it only one among many feminist causes to be championed. For example, they also campaigned for new laws requiring higher pay for women workers and making it easier for abused wives to get divorced. Other suffrage activists insisted that pursuing multiple issues hurt their cause. In 1869, they formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), which focused single-mindedly on voting rights, then they were in the East. Between 1890 and 1896, the suffrage cause won three more victories in western states—Utah, Colorado, and Idaho. The movement then stalled for a time until proposals for voting rights at the state level easily won a Washington State referendum in 1910 and carried California by a close majority in 1911. The following year three more western states—Arizona, Kansas, and Oregon—joined in to make a total of nine western states with full suffrage. In 1913, Illinois granted women voting rights in presidential and municipal elections. Yet not until New York acted in 1917 did a state east of the Mississippi River allow women to vote in all elections. Yet the women’s suffrage movement was not free from social, ethnic, and racial prejudices. Carrie Chapman Catt, who became president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association in 1900, warned of the danger that “lies in the votes possessed by the males in the slums of the cities, and the ignorant foreign [immigrant] vote.” She added that the nation, with “ill-advised haste,” had given “the foreigner, the Negro and the Indian” the vote but still withheld it from white women. Throughout the country, most suffrage organizations excluded African American women.

Progressives Aims and Achievements - Political Reforms

• Progressivism set in motion the two most important political developments of the twentieth century: the rise of direct democracy and the expansion of federal power. In his monthly articles in McClure’s magazine, Lincoln Steffens, a leading muckraker, regularly asked: “Will the people rule? Is democracy possible?” Steffens and other progressives often answered that the way to improve America’s democracy was to make it even more democratic. To empower citizens to clean up the corrupt political system, progressives pushed to make the political process more open and transparent. One process was the direct primary, which would allow all members of a political party to vote on the party’s nominees, rather than the traditional practice in which an inner circle of party leaders chose the candidates. In 1896, South Carolina became the first state to adopt a statewide primary, and within twenty years nearly every state had done so. Progressives also developed other ways to increase public participation in the political process (“direct democracy”) so as to curb the power of corporate giants over state legislatures. In 1898, South Dakota became the first state to adopt the initiative and referendum, procedures that allowed voters to create laws directly rather than having to wait for legislative action. Citizens could sign petitions to have a proposal put on the ballot (the initiative) and then vote it up or down (the referendum). Still another progressive innovation was the recall, whereby corrupt or incompetent elected officials could be removed by a public petition and vote. By 1920, nearly twenty states had adopted the initiative and referendum, and nearly a dozen had sanctioned the recall procedure. Progressives also fought to change the way that U.S. senators were elected. Under the Constitution, state legislatures elected senators, a process frequently corrupted by lobbyists and vote-buying. In 1900, for example, Senate investigators revealed that a Montana senator had given more than $100,000 in secret bribes to members of the legislature that chose him. In 1913, thanks to the efforts of progressives, the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the direct election of senators, was ratified by enough states to become law.

The Efficiency Movement

• A second major theme of progressivism was the “gospel of efficiency.” Louis D. Brandeis, a Kentucky attorney who became Woodrow Wilson’s progressive adviser and later a justice of the Supreme Court, believed that “efficiency is the hope of democracy.” The champion of progressive efficiency was Frederick Winslow Taylor, a Philadelphia-born industrial engineer who during the 1890s became a celebrated business consultant, helping mills and factories implement “scientific management.” The nation’s first “efficiency expert,” Taylor showed employers how to cut waste and improve productivity. By breaking down work activities (filling a wheelbarrow, driving a nail, shoveling coal) into a sequence of mechanical steps and using stopwatches to measure the time it took each worker to perform each step, Taylor established detailed performance standards (and cash rewards) for each job classification, specifying how fast people should work and when they should rest. His celebrated book, The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), influenced business organizations for decades. The goal of what came to be called Taylorism was to usher in a “mental revolution” in business management that would improve productivity and profits, raise pay for the most efficient workers, and reduce the likelihood of worker strikes. As Taylor wrote, “Men will not do an extraordinary day’s work for an ordinary day’s pay.” Many workers, however, resented Taylor’s innovations, seeing them as just a tool to make people work faster. Yet his approach to industrial management became one of the most important contributions to capitalist economies in the twentieth century and brought concrete improvements in productivity. Political progressives applied Taylorism to the operations of government by calling for the reorganization of state and federal agencies to eliminate duplication, the establishment of clear lines of authority, and the replacement of political appointees with trained specialists. By the early twentieth century, many complex functions of government had come to require specialists with technical expertise. As Woodrow Wilson wrote, progressive ideals could be achieved only if government at all levels was “informed and administered by experts.” Many cities set up “efficiency bureaus” to identify government waste and apply more cost-effective “best practices.”

Municipal Freedom

• Two Taylorist ideas for reform of city and county governments emerged in the first decade of the new century. One, the commission system, was first adopted in 1901 by the city of Galveston, Texas after the local government collapsed following a devastating hurricane and tidal wave that killed more than 8,000—the greatest natural disaster in American history. The commission system placed ultimate authority in a board composed of commissioners who combined both legislative and executive powers in heading up city departments (sanitation, police, utilities, and so on). Houston, Texas, created a commission system in 1906. Dallas and Des Moines, Iowa, followed in 1907, as did Memphis in 1909. Even more popular than the commission system was the city-manager plan, under which an appointed professional administrator ran a city or county government in accordance with policies set by the elected council and mayor. Staunton, Virginia, adopted the first city-manager plan in 1908. Five years later, the inadequate response of municipal officials to a flood led Dayton, Ohio, to become the first large city to adopt the plan. Yet the efforts to make local governments more “business-like” and professional had a downside. Shifting control from elected officials representing individual neighborhoods to at-large commissioners and nonpartisan specialists separated local government from party politics, which for many working-class voters had been the main way they could have a voice in how they were governed locally. In addition, running a city like business-led commissioners and managers to focus on reducing expenses rather than expanding services, even when such expansion was clearly needed.

The Wisconsin Idea

• At the state level, the idea of efficient government run by nonpartisan experts was pursued most notably by progressive Republican governor Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. “Fighting Bob” La Follette declared war on “vast corporate combinations” and political corruption by creating a nonpartisan state government that would become a “laboratory for democracy.” He established a Legislative Reference Bureau, which provided elected officials with nonpartisan research, advice, and help in drafting legislation. La Follette used the bureau’s reports to enact such reforms as the direct primary, stronger railroad regulation, the conservation of natural resources, and workmen’s compensation programs to support people injured on the job. The “Wisconsin idea” was widely publicized and copied by other progressive governors. La Follette explained that the Wisconsin idea was a commitment to use government power to make “a happier and better state to live in, that its institutions are more democratic, that the opportunities of all its people are more equal, that social justice more nearly prevails.”

Regulation of Business

• Of all the problems facing American society at the turn of the century, one towered above all: the regulation of giant corporations. The threat of corporate monopolies increased during the depression of the 1890s as struggling companies were gobbled up by larger ones. Between 1895 and 1904, some 157 new holding companies gained control of 1,800 different businesses. Almost fifty of these giant holding companies controlled more than 70 percent of the market in their respective industries. In 1896, fewer than a dozen companies other than railroads were worth $10 million or more. By 1903, that number had soared to 300. Concerns over the concentration of economic power in trusts and other forms of monopolies had led Congress to pass the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, but it proved ineffective. In addition, government agencies responsible for regulating businesses often came under the influence of those they were supposed to regulate. Retired railroad executives, for instance, were appointed to the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), which had been created to regulate railroads. The issue of regulating the regulators has never been fully resolved.

Social Justice

• In addition to their work in settlement houses and other areas, many progressives formed advocacy organizations such as the National Consumers’ League, which educated consumers about harsh working conditions in factories and mills and the widespread use of child workers. Other organizations, such as the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, insisted that civic life needed the humanizing effect of female leadership. Women’s clubs across the country sought to clean up filthy slums by educating residents about personal and household hygiene (“municipal housekeeping”), urging construction of sewer systems, and launching public-awareness campaigns about the connection between unsanitary conditions and disease. Women’s clubs also campaigned for child-care centers; kindergartens; government inspection of food processing plants; stricter housing codes; laws protecting women in the workplace; and more social services for the poor, sick, disabled, and abused. Still, others addressed prostitution and alcohol abuse.

The Campaign Against Drinking

• Middle-class women reformers, most of them motivated by strong religious convictions, were the driving force behind the social justice movement. Among the most powerful campaigns was that of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). Founded in 1874 in Cleveland, Ohio, by 1900 the WCTU had grown into the largest women’s group in the nation, boasting 300,000 members. While some of them were motivated by Protestant beliefs that consuming any alcohol was a sin, most saw excessive drinking, especially in saloons, as a threat to social progress and family stability. By attacking drunkenness and closing saloons, reformers hoped to (1) improve family life by preventing domestic violence by husbands and fathers, (2) reduce crime in the streets, and (3) remove one of the worst tools of corruption-free beer on Election Day—in an effort to “buy” votes among the working class. As a Boston sociologist concluded, the saloon had become “the enemy of society because of the evil results produced upon the individual.” Initially, WCTU members met in churches to pray and then marched to nearby saloons to try to convince their owners to close. As its name suggests, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union advocated temperance—the reduction of alcohol consumption. But the WCTU also urged individuals to embrace abstinence and refuse to drink any alcoholic beverages. Under the leadership of Frances Willard, president of the WCTU between 1879 and 1898, the organization moved beyond the moral persuasion of saloonkeepers and drinkers and began promoting legislation to ban alcohol (“prohibition”). Willard also pushed the WCTU to lobby for other progressive reforms important to women, including an eight-hour workday, the regulation of child labor, government-funded kindergartens, the right to vote, and federal inspections of the food industry. More than anything else, however, the WCTU continued to campaign against drinking. The battle against alcoholic beverages took on new strength in 1893 with the formation of the Anti-Saloon League, an organization based in local churches that pioneered the strategy of the single-issue political pressure group. Describing itself as “the Protestant church in action against the saloon,” the bipartisan League, like the WCTU, initially focused on closing down saloons rather than abolishing alcohol. Eventually, however, it decided to force the prohibition issue into the forefront of state and local elections. At its “Jubilee Convention” in 1913, the League endorsed an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, which Congress approved in 1917.

Labor Legislation

• In 1890, almost half of the nation’s wage workers toiled up to twelve hours a day—sometimes seven days a week—in unsafe, unsanitary, and unregulated conditions for extremely low wages. Legislation to ensure better working conditions and limit child labor was perhaps the most significant reform to emerge from the drive for progressive social justice. At the end of the nineteenth century, fewer than half of working families lived solely on the husband’s earnings. Many married women engaged in “homework”—making clothes, selling flower arrangements, preparing food for others, and taking in borders. Parents in poor families also frequently took their children out of school and put them to work in factories, shops, mines, mills, canneries, and on farms. In 1900, some 1.75 million children between the ages of ten and fifteen were working outside the home. Many progressives argued that children, too, had rights in a democracy. The National Child Labor Committee campaigned for laws prohibiting the employment of children. Within ten years, most states had passed such laws, although some were lax in enforcing them. Progressives who focused on children’s issues also demanded that cities build more parks and playgrounds. Further, reformers made a concerted effort to regulate the length of the workday for women, in part because some of them were pregnant and others had children at home with inadequate supervision. Spearheaded by Florence Kelley, the first president of the National Consumers’ League, progressives convinced many state governments to ban the hiring of children below a certain age and to limit the hours that both women and children could work. It took a tragic disaster, however, to spur meaningful government regulation of dangerous workplaces. On March 25, 1911, a fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory (called a “sweatshop” because of its cramped and unventilated work areas) in New York City. Escape routes were limited because the owner kept the stairway door locked to prevent theft, and 146 workers trapped on the upper floors of the ten-story building died or leaped to their deaths. The victims were mostly young, foreign-born women in their teens, almost all of them Jewish, Italian, or Russian immigrants. In the fire’s aftermath, dozens of new city and state regulations dealing with fire hazards, dangerous working conditions, and child labor were enacted across the nation.

Progressive Income Tax

• Progressives also addressed America’s growing economic inequality. One way to redistribute wealth was through a “progressive” federal income tax—so-called because the tax rates “progress,” or rise, as income levels rise, thus forcing the rich to pay more. Such a “graduated” or “progressive” tax system was the climax of the progressive movement’s commitment to a more equitable distribution of wealth. The progressive income tax was an old idea. In 1894, William Jennings Bryan had persuaded Congress to approve a 2 percent tax on annual incomes of more than $4,000. When millionaires responded by threatening to leave America, Bryan exclaimed, “If some of our ‘best people’ prefer to leave the country rather than pay the tax . . . let them depart.” Soon after the tax became law, however, the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional on a technicality. Progressives continued to believe, however, that a “graduated” tax would help slow the concentration of wealth in the hands of the richest Americans. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt announced his support. Two years later, his successor, William Howard Taft, endorsed a constitutional amendment allowing such a tax, and Congress agreed. Finally, in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified by enough states to become law.

Progressivism Under Roosevelt and Taft

• Most progressive legislation originated at the state and local levels. Federal reform efforts began in earnest only when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901. During his rapid rise to national fame and leadership, Roosevelt had grown more progressive with each passing year. “A great democracy,” he said, “has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy.” Roosevelt was a boundless force of nature, an American original, a “steam engine in trousers” with an oversized intellect and ego. His exuberance, charm, and humor, however, made him an irresistible personality. Even his political opponent, Woodrow Wilson, was smitten after meeting Roosevelt in person: “You can’t resist the man.” Roosevelt transformed the presidency and the role of the federal government by breaking with the Gilded Age tradition in which presidents had deferred to Congress. In his view, the problems caused by explosive industrial growth required powerful responses, and he was unwilling to wait for Congress to act. Only an activist president armed with new regulatory agencies and laws could counterbalance the power of the corporations and trusts. “I believe in a strong executive,” Roosevelt asserted. “I believe in power.” During his administration, the White House became the focus of policy-making.

Taming Big Business

• Roosevelt was the first president to use executive power to rein in Big Business. As governor of New York, he had pushed for legislation regulating sweatshops, instituting state inspections of factories and slaughterhouses, and limiting the workday to eight hours. Roosevelt believed in capitalism and the accumulation of wealth, but he was willing to adopt radical methods to ensure that the social unrest caused by the insensitivity of business owners to the rights of workers and the needs of the poor did not mushroom into a revolution. Roosevelt applauded the growth of American industrial capitalism but declared war on corruption and on cronyism—the awarding of political appointments, government contracts, and other favors to politicians’ personal friends. He endorsed a Square Deal for “every man, great or small, rich or poor.” His Square Deal program featured what was called the “Three Cs”: greater government control of corporations, enhanced conservation of natural resources, and new regulations to protect consumers against contaminated food and medications.

Curbing the Trusts

• In December 1901, just a few months after entering the White House, Roosevelt declared that it was time to deal with the “grave evils” resulting from huge corporations exercising dominance over their industries and the nation’s economic life. In his view, the federal government had the right and the obligation to curb the excesses of Big Business on behalf of the public good. Roosevelt’s version of progressivism centered on the belief that governments must ensure fairness. He would wage war against the robber barons who displayed “swinish indifference” to the public good and the “unscrupulous politicians' whose votes were regularly bought and sold by corporate lobbyists. Early in 1902, just five months into his presidency, Roosevelt shocked the business community when he ordered the U.S. attorney general to break up the Northern Securities Company, a vast network of railroads and steamships in the Pacific Northwest organized by J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan could not believe the news. The world’s most powerful capitalist and the wealthiest man rushed from New York City to the White House and told the president: “If I have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.” But the attorney general, who was also at the meeting, told Morgan: “We don’t want to ‘fix it up.’ We want to stop it.” Turning to Roosevelt, Morgan then asked if the president planned to attack his other trusts, such as U.S. Steel and General Electric. “Certainly not,” Roosevelt replied, “unless we find out that . . . they have done something wrong.” After Morgan left, the president told the attorney general to file the antitrust paperwork. In 1904, the Supreme Court would rule in a 5–4 decision that the Northern Securities Company was indeed a monopoly and must be dismantled, thereby opening the way for more aggressive enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Roosevelt fully recognized the benefits of large-scale capitalism, and he thought that the rise of Big Business was the inevitable result of the industrial era. He did not want to destroy the titans of industry and finance, but he did insist that they be regulated for the public good. Altogether, Roosevelt approved about twenty-five antitrust suits against oversized corporations. He also sought stronger regulation of the railroads. By their very nature, railroads often exercised a monopoly over the communities they served, enabling them to charge customers whatever they wanted. In 1903, Congress passed the Elkins Act, making it illegal for railroads to give secret rebates (cash refunds) on freight charges to high-volume business customers. That same year, Congress approved Roosevelt’s request that a federal Department of Commerce and Labor be formed, within which a Bureau of Corporations would monitor the activities of big businesses.

The 1902 Coal Strike

• In everything he did, Roosevelt acted forcefully. On May 12, 1902, for example, some 150,000 members of the United Mine Workers (UMW) labor union walked off the job at coal mines in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The miners were seeking a wage increase, a shorter workday, and official recognition of the union by the mine owners, who refused to negotiate. Instead, the owners shut down the mines. By October, the ongoing shutdown had caused the price of coal to soar, and hospitals and schools reported empty coal bins as winter approached. In many northern cities, the poor had run out of coal for heating. Pastor Washington Gladden led a petition drive urging Roosevelt to step in to mediate the strike. The president decided upon a bold move: he invited leaders of both sides to a conference in Washington, D.C., where he appealed to their “patriotism, to the spirit that sinks personal considerations and makes individual sacrifices for the public good.” The mine owners in attendance, however, refused even to speak to the UMW leaders. Roosevelt was infuriated by what he called the “extraordinary stupidity and temper” of the “wooden-headed” owners, saying he wanted to grab their spokesman “by the seat of his breeches'' and “chuck him out” a window. He threatened to declare a national emergency so that he could take control of the mines and use soldiers to run them. When a congressman questioned the constitutionality of such a move, Roosevelt roared, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!” The threat worked: the strike ended on October 23. The miners won a nine-hour workday and a 10 percent wage increase. Roosevelt was the first president to use his authority to referee a dispute between management and labor.

Roosevelt’s Reelection

• Roosevelt’s forceful leadership won him, friends, and enemies. As he prepared to run for reelection in 1904, he acknowledged that the “whole Wall Street crowd” would do all they could to defeat him. Nevertheless, he won the Republican nomination. The Democrats, having lost twice with William Jennings Bryan, essentially gave the election to Roosevelt and the Republicans by nominating the virtually unknown Alton B. Parker, chief justice of the New York Supreme Court. Parker was the dullest—and most forgettable—presidential candidate in history. One journalist dubbed him “the enigma from New York.” The most interesting item in his official campaign biography was that he had trained pigs to come when called by name. The Democrats suffered their worst election defeat in thirty-two years. After winning the popular vote by 7.6 million to 5.1 million and the electoral vote 336 to 140, Roosevelt told his son it was his “greatest triumph.” Having succeeded to the presidency after William McKinley’s assassination, he had now won an election on his own and, in his view, had a popular mandate to do great things. On the eve of his inauguration in March 1905, he announced: “Tomorrow I shall come into office in my own right. Then watch out for me!”

Progressive Regulation

• Now elected in his own right, Roosevelt launched his second term with an even stronger commitment to regulating corporations and their corrupt owners (the “criminal rich”) who exploited their workers and tried to eliminate competition. His comments irked many of his corporate contributors and congressional Republican leaders. Said the Pittsburgh steel baron Henry Frick, “We bought the son of a bitch, and then he did not stay bought.” To promote the “moral regeneration of business,” Roosevelt first took aim at the railroads. In 1906, he persuaded Congress to pass the Hepburn Act, which for the first time gave the federal Interstate Commerce Commission the power to set maximum freight rates for the railroad industry. Under Roosevelt’s Square Deal programs, the federal government also assumed oversight of key industries affecting public health: meat packers, food processors, and makers of drugs and patent medicines. Muckraking journalists had revealed all sorts of unsanitary and dangerous activities in the preparation of food and drug products by many companies. Perhaps the most powerful blow against these abuses was struck by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906), which told the story of a Lithuanian immigrant working in a filthy Chicago meatpacking plant. After reading The Jungle, Roosevelt urged Congress to pass the Meat Inspection Act of 1906. It required the Department of Agriculture to inspect every hog and steer whose carcass crossed state lines—both before and after slaughter. The Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), enacted the same day, required the makers of prepared food and medicines to host government inspectors, too.

Environmental Conservation

• Theodore Roosevelt was the first president passionately committed to environmental conservation. An avid outdoorsman and naturalist, he feared that unregulated logging and mining companies were destroying the nation’s landscape “by their reckless extermination of all useful and beautiful wild things.” Roosevelt championed efforts to protect wilderness areas and manage and preserve the nation’s natural resources for the benefit of future generations. He created fifty federal wildlife refuges, approved five new national parks and fifty-one federal bird sanctuaries, and designated eighteen national monuments, including the Grand Canyon. In 1898, Roosevelt had endorsed the appointment of his friend Gifford Pinchot, the nation’s first professionally trained forest manager, as head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Division of Forestry. Pinchot, like Roosevelt, believed in economic growth as well as environmental preservation. Roosevelt and Pinchot used the Forest Reserve Act (1891) to protect 172 million acres of federally owned forests from being logged. Lumber companies were furious, but the president held firm, declaring, “I hate a man who skins the land.” Overall, Roosevelt set aside more than 234 million acres of federal land for conservation purposes and created forty-five national forests in eleven western states. As Pinchot recalled, “Launching the conservation movement was the most significant achievement of the T.R. Administration, as he himself believed.”

Roosevelt and the Race

• Roosevelt’s most significant failure as a progressive, as it was for so many of his successors, was his refusal to confront the movement’s major blind spot: racism. Like Populists, progressives worked to empower “the people.” For many of them, however, “the people” did not include African Americans, Native Americans, or some immigrant groups. Most white progressives shared the prevailing racist attitudes of the time. They ignored or even endorsed the passage of Jim Crow laws in the South that prevented blacks from voting and subjected them to rigid racial separation. By 1901, nearly every southern state had prevented almost all African Americans from voting or holding political office by disqualifying or terrorizing them. Hundreds of African Americans were being lynched each year across the South, where virtually no blacks were allowed to serve on juries or work as sheriffs or policemen. A white candidate for governor in Mississippi in 1903 announced that he believed “in the divine right of the white man to rule, to do all the voting, and to hold all the offices, both state and federal.” The South wrote W. E. B. Du Bois, then a young sociologist at Atlanta University, “is simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk.” At the same time, few progressives raised objections to the many informal and private patterns of segregation and prejudice in the North and West. “The plain fact is,” muckraking journalist Ray Stannard Baker admitted in 1909, “most of us in the North do not believe in any real democracy between white and colored men.” Roosevelt confided to a friend in 1906 his belief that “as a race and in the mass,” African Americans “are altogether inferior to whites.” Yet the president made a few exceptions. On October 16, 1901, Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington, the nation’s most prominent black leader, to the White House to discuss presidential appointments in the South. Upon learning of the meeting, white southerners exploded with fury. The Memphis Scimitar screamed that inviting a “nigger” to dine in the White House was “the most damnable outrage that has ever been perpetrated by a citizen of the United States.”

The Brownsville Riot

• The following year, 1906, brought a violent racial incident in Brownsville, Texas, where a dozen or so members of an African American army regiment from a nearby fort got into a shootout with whites who had been harassing them outside a saloon. One white bartender was killed, and a police officer was seriously wounded. Both sides claimed the other started the shooting. An investigation concluded that the soldiers were at fault, but no one could identify any of the shooters and none of the soldiers was willing to talk. Roosevelt responded by dishonorably discharging the entire regiment of 167 soldiers, several of whom had been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for their service in Cuba during the War of 1898. Critics flooded the White House with angry telegrams. Secretary of War William H. Taft urged the president to reconsider his decision, but Roosevelt refused to show any mercy to “murderers, assassins, cowards, and comrades of murderers.” (Sixty years later, the U.S. Army “cleared the records” of all the black soldiers.) Disheartened black leaders predicted that Roosevelt’s harsh language would ignite “race hatred and violence” against innocent African Americans.

Taft and Retrenchment

• After his 1904 election victory, Roosevelt had decided he would not run for president again, in part because he did not want to be the first president to serve the equivalent of three terms. It was a noble gesture but a blunder that would have momentous political consequences. For now, however, he urged Republicans to nominate his long-time friend, Secretary of War William Howard Taft, whom the Republican Convention endorsed on its first ballot in 1908. The Democrats again chose William Jennings Bryan, who still retained a faithful following, especially in the South. Taft promised to continue Roosevelt’s policies, and the Republican platform endorsed the president’s progressive program. The Democratic platform echoed the Republican emphasis on the regulation of business but called for a lower tariff. Bryan struggled to attract national support and was defeated for a third time, as Taft swept the electoral college, 321 to 162.

A Life of Public Service

• William Howard Taft was superbly qualified to be president. Born in Cincinnati in 1857, he was the son of a prominent attorney who had served in President Grant’s cabinet. He had graduated second in his class at Yale and gone on to become a leading legal scholar, serving on the Ohio Supreme Court. In 1900, President McKinley had appointed him the first American governor-general of the Philippines, and three years later Roosevelt named him secretary of war. Until becoming president, Taft had never held an elected office. Unlike the robust, athletic Roosevelt, Taft struggled most of his life with obesity, topping out at 332 pounds and earning the nickname “Big Bill.” Roosevelt, he explained, “loves the woods, he loves hunting; he loves roughing it, and I don’t.” Although good-natured and easygoing, Taft as president never managed—even in his own mind—to escape the shadow of his charismatic predecessor. “When I hear someone say ‘Mr. President,’” he confessed, “I look around expecting to see Roosevelt.” Taft vowed to preserve capitalism by protecting “the right of private property” and the “right of liberty.” In practice, this meant that he was even more determined than Roosevelt to support “the spirit of commercial freedom” against monopolistic trusts, but he was not interested in pushing for additional reforms or exercising extraordinary presidential power. Taft viewed himself as a judge-like administrator, not an innovator, and was reluctant to exercise presidential authority. (After leaving the White House, he got the job he had always wanted: chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.) Taft proved neither as energetic nor as wide-ranging as Roosevelt in his role as a reformer president— a difference that would lead to a fateful break between the two men.

Taft and the Tariff

• President Taft displayed his credentials as a progressive Republican by supporting lower tariffs on imports; he even called a special session of Congress to address the matter. But he proved less skillful than Roosevelt in dealing with Congress. Taft also discontinued Roosevelt’s practice of using interviews with journalists to influence congressmen by using his “big stick through the press.” In the end, Taft’s failure of leadership enabled Congress to pass the flawed Payne-Aldrich Tariff (1909), which did little to change federal policies. Tariff policies continued to favor the industrial Northeast. Taft’s failure to gain real reform and his lack of a “crusading spirit” angered progressive, pro-Roosevelt Republicans, whom Taft called “assistant Democrats.” Spurned by the progressive members of his party, Taft gravitated to the “Old Guard” Republican conservatives. Roosevelt was not happy.

The Ballinger-Pinchot Controversy

• In 1910, the split between the conservative and progressive Republican factions was widened by what came to be called the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy. Taft’s new secretary of the interior, Richard A. Ballinger, opened to commercial development millions of acres of federal lands that Roosevelt had ordered protected. As chief of forestry, Gifford Pinchot complained about the “giveaway,” but Taft refused to intervene. When Pinchot made his opposition public early in 1910, Taft fired him, labeling him a “fanatic.” In doing so, Taft set in motion a feud with Roosevelt that would eventually end their friendship—and cost him his reelection.

The Taft-Roosevelt Feud

• In 1909, soon after Taft became president, Roosevelt and his son Kermit sailed to Africa, where they would spend nearly a year hunting big-game animals. (When he heard about the extended safari, business tycoon J. Pierpont Morgan expressed the hope that “every lion would do its duty.”) Roosevelt had left the White House assuming that Taft would continue to pursue a progressive agenda. But by filling the cabinet with corporate lawyers and firing Gifford Pinchot, Taft had, in Roosevelt’s view, failed to “carry out my work unbroken.” Roosevelt’s rebuke of Taft was in some ways undeserved. Taft had at least attempted tariff reform, which Roosevelt had never dared. Although Taft had fired Pinchot, he had replaced him with another conservationist. Taft’s administration actually preserved more federal land in four years than Roosevelt’s had in nearly eight, and it filed twice as many antitrust suits, including the one that led to the breakup of the Standard Oil Company in 1911. Taft also supported giving women the right to vote and workers the right to join unions. None of that satisfied Roosevelt, however. On August 31, 1910, the angry former president, eager to return to the political spotlight, gave a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, in which he announced his latest progressive principles and proposals—his “New Nationalism.” Roosevelt explained that he wanted to go beyond ensuring a “Square Deal” in which corporations were forced to “play by the rules”; he now promised to “change the rules” to force large corporations to promote social welfare and to serve the needs of working people. To save capitalism from the threat of a working-class revolution, Roosevelt called for tighter federal regulation of “arrogant” corporations that too often tried to “control and corrupt” politics; for a federal income tax (the Sixteenth Amendment had still not become law); and for federal laws regulating child labor. It was a sweeping agenda that would greatly expand the power of the federal government over economic and political life. Then, on February 24, 1912, Roosevelt abandoned his earlier pledge and announced his entry into the race for the 1912 Republican presidential nomination. He dismissed the “second-rate” Taft as a “hopeless fathead” who had “sold the Square Deal down the river.” Taft responded by calling Roosevelt a “dangerous egotist” and a “demagogue.” They began a bitter war in which Roosevelt had the better weapons, not the least of which was his love of a good fight. By 1912, a dozen or so “progressive” states were letting citizens vote for presidential candidates in party primaries instead of following the traditional practice in which a state’s party leaders chose the nominee. Roosevelt decided that if he won big in the Republican primaries, he could claim to be “the people’s choice.” But even though he won all but two primaries, including the one in Taft’s home state of Ohio, his personal popularity was no match for Taft’s authority as party leader. In the thirty-six states that still chose candidates by conventions dominated by party bosses, the Taft Republicans prevailed. At the Republican National Convention, Taft was easily nominated for reelection. Roosevelt was furious. He denounced Taft and his supporters as thieves and stormed out of the convention along with his delegates—mostly social workers, teachers, professors, journalists, and urban reformers, along with a few wealthy business executives.

The Progressive Party

• Six weeks later, Roosevelt urged the breakaway faction of Republicans to reconvene in Chicago to create the Progressive Party. They enthusiastically nominated him as their candidate. He assured the delegates that he felt “fit as a bull moose,” leading journalists to nickname the Progressives the “Bull Moose party.” When Roosevelt closed his acceptance speech by saying, “We stand at Armageddon [the climactic encounter between Christ and Satan], and we battle for the Lord,” the delegates stood and burst into the hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” One reporter wrote that the “Bull Moose” movement was not so much a party as it was a political religion, and Roosevelt was its leading evangelist. Progressives loved him because he showed what a government dedicated to the public good might achieve. And he loved to campaign because it enabled him to engage the people in the democratic process. “The first duty of the American citizen,” he stressed, “is that he shall work in politics.” The Progressive Party platform, audacious for its time, revealed Roosevelt’s growing liberalism. It supported a minimum “living wage” for hourly workers, women’s suffrage, campaign finance reform, and a system of “social security” insurance to protect people against sickness, unemployment, and disabilities. It also pledged to end the “boss system” governing politics and destroy the “unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics.” Conservative critics called Roosevelt “a socialist,” a “revolutionist,” “a virtual traitor to American institutions,” and a “monumental egotist.”

Woodrow Wilson - A Progressive Southerner

• The fight between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt gave hope to the Democrats, whose presidential nominee, New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, had enjoyed remarkable success in his brief political career. Until his nomination and election as governor in 1910, Wilson had been a college professor and then president of Princeton University; he had never run for political office or worked in business. He was a man of ideas who had a keen intellect, an analytical temperament, a tireless work ethic, an inspiring speaking style, and a strong conviction that he knew what was best for the nation.

To Serve Humanity

• Born in Staunton, Virginia, in 1856, the son, grandson, nephew, and son-in-law of Presbyterian ministers, Thomas Woodrow Wilson had grown up in Georgia and the Carolinas during the Civil War and Reconstruction. The South, he once said, was the only part of the nation where nothing had to be explained to him. Tall and slender, with a long, chiseled face, he developed an unquestioning religious faith. Driven by a consuming sense that God had destined him to “serve” humanity, he often displayed an unbending self-righteousness and a fiery temper, qualities that would prove to be his undoing as president. Wilson graduated from Princeton in 1879. After law school at the University of Virginia, he briefly practiced law in Atlanta, but he found legal work “dreadful drudgery” and soon enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to study history and political science, earning one of the nation’s first doctoral degrees. He became an expert in constitutional government and taught at several colleges before being named president of Princeton in 1902. Eight years later, Wilson accepted the support of New Jersey Democrats for the 1910 gubernatorial nomination. And he already harbored higher ambitions. If he could become governor, he reflected, “I stand a very good chance of being the next President of the United States.” Like Roosevelt, Wilson was an intensely ambitious and idealistic man who felt destined to preside over America’s emergence as the greatest world power. Wilson proved a surprisingly effective campaigner and won a landslide victory. The professor-turned-governor then persuaded the state legislature to adopt an array of progressive reforms to curb the power of political party bosses and corporate lobbyists. “After dealing with college politicians,” Wilson joked, “I find that the men who I am dealing with now seem like amateurs.” Governor Wilson soon attracted the attention of national Democratic leaders. At the 1912 Democratic convention, he faced stiff competition from several veteran party leaders for the presidential nomination. But with the support of William Jennings Bryan, he won on the forty-sixth ballot. It was, Wilson said, a “political miracle.”

The 1912 Election

• The 1912 presidential campaign was one of the most exciting in history. It involved four distinguished candidates: Democrat Woodrow Wilson, Republican William Howard Taft, Socialist Eugene V. Debs, and Progressive Theodore Roosevelt. For all of their differences in personality and temperament, the candidates shared a basic progressive assumption that modern social problems could be resolved only through active governmental intervention. No sooner did the formal campaign open than Roosevelt’s candidacy almost ended. While on his way to deliver a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he was shot by John Schrank, a lunatic who believed that any president seeking a third term should be shot. The bullet went through Roosevelt’s thick overcoat, a steel eyeglass case, and fifty-page speech, then fractured a rib before nestling just below his right lung, an inch from his heart. Refusing medical attention, Roosevelt demanded that he be driven to the auditorium to deliver an eight-minute speech to 10,000 supporters. In a dramatic gesture, he showed the audience his bloodstained shirt and punctured text and vowed, “It takes more than this to kill a bull moose.” As the campaign developed, Taft quickly lost ground. “There are so many people in the country who don’t like me,” he lamented. The contest settled into a debate over the competing programs touted by the two front-runners: Roosevelt’s New Nationalism and Wilson’s New Freedom. The New Freedom, designed by Louis Brandeis, aimed to restore economic competition by eliminating all trusts rather than simply regulating them. Where Roosevelt admired the power and efficiency of law-abiding corporations, no matter how large, Brandeis and Wilson was convinced that huge, “heartless” industries needed to be broken up. On Election Day, Wilson won handily, collecting 435 electoral votes to 88 for Roosevelt and only 8 for Taft. After learning of his election, the self-righteous Wilson told the chairman of his campaign committee that “I owe you nothing. God ordained that I should be the next president of the United States. Neither you nor any other mortal could have prevented that.” Had the Republicans not divided their votes between Taft and Roosevelt, however, Wilson would have lost. His was the victory of a minority candidate over a divided opposition. Since all four candidates called themselves progressives, however, the president-elect expressed his hope “that the thoughtful progressive forces of the nation may now at last unite.” The election of 1912 profoundly altered the character of the Republican party. The defection of the Bull Moose Progressives had weakened its progressive wing. As a result, when Republicans returned to power in the 1920s, they would be more conservative in tone and temperament.

Eugene Debs

• The real surprise of the 1912 election was the strong showing of the Socialist party candidate, Eugene V. Debs, running for the fourth time. The tall, blue-eyed idealist had devoted his adult life to fighting against the “monstrous system of capitalism” on behalf of the working class, first as a labor union official, then as socialist promoting government ownership of railroads and the sharing of profits with workers. Debs became the unifying symbol of a diverse movement that united West Virginia coal miners, Oklahoma sharecroppers, Pacific Northwest lumberjacks, and immigrant workers in New York City sweatshops. One newspaper described “The Rising Tide of Socialism” in 1912, as some 1,150 Socialists won election to local and state offices across the nation, including eighteen mayoral seats. To many voters, the Socialists, whose 118,000 dues-paying members in 1912 were double the number from the year before, offered the only real alternative to a stalemated political system in which the two major parties had few real differences. But fear of socialism was also widespread. Theodore Roosevelt warned that the rapid growth of the Socialist party was “far more ominous than any Populist or similar movement in the past.” In 1912, with few campaign funds, Debs crisscrossed the nation giving fiery speeches. He dismissed Roosevelt as “a charlatan, mountebank [swindler], and fraud” whose progressive promises were nothing more than “the mouthings of a low and utterly unprincipled self-seeker and demagogue.” Debs’s untiring efforts brought him more than 900,000 votes, more than twice as many as he had received four years earlier.

A Burst of Reform Bills

• On March 4, 1913, a huge crowd surrounded the Capitol in Washington, D.C., to watch Wilson’s inauguration. The new president declared it “a day of dedication.” He promised to lower “the stiff and stupid” Republican tariff, create a new national banking system, strengthen anti-trust laws, and establish an administration “more concerned about human rights than about property rights.” Roosevelt had been a strong president by force of personality. Wilson became a strong president by force of conviction. Like Roosevelt, Wilson was an activist president; he was the first to speak to the nation over the radio and to host weekly press conferences. He frequently spoke to Congress and visited legislators in their offices. As a political scientist, Wilson was an expert at the processes of government. During his first two years, he pushed through Congress more new bills than any previous president. Like “most reformers,” however, Wilson “had a fierce and unlovely side,” according to the president of Harvard University. He found it hard to understand—much less work with—people who disagreed with him. Wilson’s victory, coupled with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, gave his party effective national power for the first time since the Civil War. It also gave southerners a significant role in national politics for the first time since the war. Five of Wilson’s ten cabinet members were born in the South.

The Tariff and the Income Tax

• Like Taft, Wilson pursued tariff reform, but with much greater success. By 1913, the federal tariff included hundreds of taxes on different imported goods, from oil to nails. The president believed that U.S. corporations were misusing the tariff to keep out foreign competitors and create American monopolies that kept consumer prices artificially high. To attack high tariff rates, Wilson took a bold step: he summoned Congress to a special session that lasted eighteen months, the longest in history, and he addressed its members in person—the first president to do so since John Adams. The new tariff bill passed the House easily. The crunch came in the Senate, the traditional graveyard of tariff reform, where swarms of industry lobbyists grew so thick, Wilson said, that “a brick couldn’t be thrown without hitting one of them.” The president finally won approval thereby publicly criticizing the “industrious and insidious” tariff lobby. The Underwood-Simmons Tariff Act (1913) lowered tariff rates on almost 1,000 imported products. To compensate for the reduced tariff revenue, the bill created the first income tax allowed under the newly ratified Sixteenth Amendment: the initial tax rates were 1 percent on income more than $3,000 ($4,000 for married couples) up to a top rate of 7 percent on annual income of $50,000 or more. Most Americans (99 percent) paid no income tax because they earned less than $3,000 a year.

The Federal Reserve Act

• No sooner had the new tariff passed the Senate than the administration proposed the first major banking reform since the Civil War. Ever since Andrew Jackson had killed the Second Bank of the United States in the 1830s, the nation had been without a central bank. Instead, the money supply was chaotically “managed” by thousands of local and state banks. Such a decentralized system was unstable and inefficient because, during financial panics, fearful depositors, eager to withdraw their money, would create “runs” that often led to the failure of smaller banks. The primary reason for a new central bank was to prevent more such panics, which had occurred five times since 1873. Wilson believed that the banking system needed a central reserve agency that, in a crisis, could distribute emergency cash to banks threatened by runs. But he insisted that any new banking system must be overseen by the government rather than by bankers themselves (the “money power”). He wanted a central bank that would benefit the entire economy, not just the large banks headquartered on Wall Street in New York City. After much dickering, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act on December 23, 1913. It created a national banking system with twelve regional districts, each of which had its own Federal Reserve Bank owned by member banks in the district. Nationally chartered banks, which agreed to regulation by a Federal Reserve Bank in exchange for the right to issue money, had to be members of the Federal Reserve System. State-chartered banks—essentially unregulated— did not (and, indeed, two-thirds of the nation’s banks chose not to become members of the Federal Reserve System). The twelve regional Federal Reserve banks were supervised by a central board of directors in Washington, D.C. The overarching purpose of the Federal Reserve System was to adjust the nation’s currency supply to promote economic growth and ensure the stability and integrity of member banks. When banks were short of cash, they could borrow from the Federal Reserve (“the Fed”), using their loans as collateral. Each of the new regional banks issued Federal Reserve notes (currency) to member banks in exchange for their loans. The Federal Reserve board required member banks to have a certain percentage of their total deposits in cash on hand (“reserve”) at all times. The new system soon proved its worth. The Federal Reserve Act was the most significant new program of Wilson’s presidency.

Antitrust Actions

• President Wilson made “trust-busting” the central focus of his New Freedom program. Giant corporations had continued to grow despite the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Bureau of Corporations, the federal watchdog agency created by Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson decided to make a strong Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the cornerstone of his anti-trust program. Created in 1914, the five-member FTC replaced the Bureau of Corporations and assumed new powers to define “unfair trade practices ' and issue “cease and desist” orders when it found evidence of such practices. Like Roosevelt, Wilson also supported efforts to strengthen and clarify the Sherman Antitrust Act. Henry D. Clayton, a Democrat from Alabama, drafted an anti-trust bill in 1914. The Clayton Antitrust Act declared that labor unions were not to be viewed as “monopolies in restraint of trade,” as courts had maintained since 1890. It also prohibited corporate directors from serving on the boards of competing companies and further clarified the meaning of various “monopolistic” activities.

Wilson Declares Victory

• In November 1914, just two years after his election, President Wilson announced that he had accomplished the major goals of progressivism. He had fulfilled his promises to lower the tariff, create a national banking system, and strengthen antitrust laws. The New Freedom was now complete, he wrote. Wilson’s declaration, however, bewildered many progressives, especially those who had long advocated additional federal social-justice legislation that Wilson had earlier supported. Herbert Croly, the influential editor of the New Republic magazine, wondered how the president could assert “that the fundamental wrongs of a modern society can be easily and quickly righted as a consequence of [passing] a few laws.” Wilson’s about-face, he concluded, “casts suspicion upon his own sincerity [as a progressive] or upon his grasp of the realities of modern social and industrial life.”

Progressivism for Whites Only

• African Americans continued to resent the racial conservatism displayed by most progressives. Carter Glass, the Virginia senator who was largely responsible for developing the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, was an enthusiastic supporter of his state’s efforts to disenfranchise black voters. When questioned by a reporter about being a racist progressive, Glass embraced the label: “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose. To remove every Negro voter who can be gotten rid of.” Similarly, Woodrow Wilson showed little concern about the discrimination and violence that African Americans faced. In fact, he shared many of the racist attitudes common at the time. As a student at Princeton, he had expressed his disgust at the Fifteenth Amendment, which had guaranteed voting rights for black men after the Civil War, arguing that whites must resist domination by “an ignorant and inferior race.” As a politician, Wilson did court African American voters, but he rarely consulted black leaders and largely avoided associating with them. Wilson’s cabinet secretaries racially segregated the employees in their agencies. The president endorsed the policy, claiming that racial segregation “is not humiliating but a benefit.” To him, “separate but equal” was the best way to resolve racial tensions. He was the first president since the Civil War who openly endorsed discrimination against African Americans.

The Vote for Women

• Activists for women’s suffrage also were disappointed in President Wilson. Despite having two daughters who were suffragists, he insisted that the issue of women’s voting rights should be left to the states rather than embodied in a constitutional amendment. Wilson’s lack of support led some leaders of the suffrage movement to revise their tactics. In 1910, Alice Paul, a New Jersey-born Quaker and social worker, returned from working with the militant suffragists of England, where she had participated in various forms of civil disobedience to generate attention and support. After Paul joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), she urged activists to use more aggressive tactics: picket state legislatures, target and “punish” politicians who failed to endorse suffrage, chain themselves to public buildings, incite police to arrest them, and undertake hunger strikes. In March 1913, Paul organized 5,000 suffragists to protest at Wilson’s inauguration. Four years later, having broken with the NAWSA and formed the National Woman’s Party, Paul decided that suffragists must do something even more dramatic: picket the White House. Beginning on January 11, 1917, Paul and her followers took turns carrying signs all day, five days a week, for months, until the president ordered their arrest. Some sixty suffragists were jailed. Paul was sentenced to seven months in prison. She then went on a hunger strike, leading prison officials to force-feed her raw eggs through a tube inserted in her nose. She later recalled that “it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.” Under an avalanche of negative press coverage and public criticism, Wilson finally pardoned Paul and the other activists.

Progressivism Renewed

• By 1916, Wilson’s determination to win reelection revived his commitment to progressive activism. The president nominated Bostonian Louis D. Brandeis, the “people’s attorney,” to the Supreme Court. Brandeis was not just a famed defender of unions against big businesses; he would also be the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court. Progressives viewed the nomination as a “landmark in the history of American democracy.” Others disagreed. Former President Taft dismissed Brandeis as “a muckraker, an emotionalist for his own purposes, a socialist . . . who is utterly unscrupulous.” The Senate, however, confirmed Brandeis’s appointment.

Farm Legislation

• President Wilson also urged Congress to pass the first federal legislation directed at assisting farmers. He first supported a proposal to set up rural banks to provide long-term farm loans. The Federal Farm Loan Act became law in 1916. Under the control of the Federal Farm Loan Board, twelve Federal Land banks offered loans to farmers for five to forty years at low-interest rates. Farmers could borrow up to 50 percent of the value of their land. At about the same time, a dream long advocated by Populists—federal loans to farmers on the security of their crops stored in warehouses—finally came to fruition when Congress passed the Warehouse Act of 1916. These crop-security loans were available to sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and to farmers who owned the land that they worked. Farmers also benefited from the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, which provided federal programs to educate farmers about new machinery and new ideas related to agricultural efficiency, and the Smith-Hughes Act (1917), which funded agricultural and mechanical education in high schools. Farmers with the newfangled automobiles had more than a passing interest as well in the Federal Highways Act of 1916, which helped finance new highways, especially in rural areas.

Labor Legislation

• One of the long-standing goals of many progressive Democrats was a federal child-labor law. When Congress passed the Keating-Owen Act in 1916, banning products made by child workers under fourteen from being shipped across state lines, Wilson expressed doubts about its constitutionality but eventually signed it. Another landmark law was the eight-hour workday for railroad workers. The Adamson Act of 1916 resulted from a threatened strike by railroad unions demanding an eight-hour day and other concessions. Wilson, who objected to some of the unions’ demands, nevertheless asked Congress to approve the Adamson Act. It required time-and-a-half pay for overtime work beyond eight hours and appointed a commission to study working conditions in the railroad industry.

Assessing Progressivism

• Progressivism reached its peak during Woodrow Wilson’s two terms as president. After decades of political upheaval and social reform, progressivism had shattered the traditional “laissez-faire” notion that the government had no role in protecting public welfare by regulating the economy. The courage and compassion displayed by progressives demonstrated that people of goodwill could make a difference in improving the quality of life for all. Progressivism awoke people to the evils and possibilities of modern urban industrial life. Most importantly, progressives established the principle that governments—local, state, and federal—had a responsibility to ensure that Americans were protected from abuse by powerful businesses and corrupt politicians. Yet on several fronts, progressivism fell short of its supporters’ hopes and ideals. It would take the Great Depression during the 1930s to lead to the passage of a national minimum wage and the creation of a government-administered pension program for retirees and disabled workers (Social Security). Like all great historic movements, progressivism produced unexpected consequences. For all of its efforts to give more power to “the people,” voter participation actually fell off during the Progressive Era. Probably the main reason for the decline of party loyalty and voter turnout was that, by the twentieth century, people had many more activities to distract them. New forms of recreation like movies, cycling, automobiles, and spectator sports competed with politics for time and attention. Also, people showed less interest in political parties and public issues in part because of the progressive emphasis on government by appointed specialists and experts rather than elected politicians. Ultimately, progressivism faded as an organized political movement because international issues pushed aside domestic concerns. By 1916, the optimism of a few years earlier was challenged by the distressing slaughter occurring in Europe in the Great War. The twentieth century, which had dawned with such bright hopes for social progress, held in store episodes of unprecedented brutality that led people to question whether “progress” was even possible anymore.

• Theodore Roosevelt’s emergence as a national political leader coincided with the onset of what historians have labeled the Progressive Era (1890–1920), an extraordinary period of social activism and political innovation during which compelling public issues forced profound changes in the role of government and presidential leadership.