The Progressive Era was a period of American history which lasted from 1896 to 1932, preceded by the Gilded Age, marked by World War I and the Roaring Twenties, and followed by the Great Depression. The "Progressive" movement of the era aimed to improve labor, sanitation, conservation, voting rights, and morality and address the wealth disparities and moral and political corruption of the Gilded Age, and it attempted to influence politics through both the pro-business Republican Party and the pro-worker Democratic Party. Republican Progressives included Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Charles Evans Hughes, while Democratic Progressives included William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, and Al Smith.
History[]
Background[]
The Gilded Age, ushered in by the end of the American Civil War and marked by the ensuing growth of the economic and political power of Northeastern big businesses and Western railroad companies, resulted both in the industrialization of America, the growth of big cities, and a booming national economy, as well as urban poverty and unsafe living conditions, the rise of monopolies and a limitation of business competition, price-fixing by powerful corporations, and the formation of labor and agrarian movements to challenge Northeastern business interests at a time when both the conservative Republican Party and the classical liberal Bourbon Democrats championed them.
The 1896 presidential election led to a realignment in American politics, marking the end of the Civil War-era Third Party System, which had seen the conservative Republican Party dominate American politics through associating itself with the victorious Union, Yankee Protestantism business interests, a high protective tariff, and the nation's economic successes, and the Bourbon-dominated Democratic Party associate itself with liberal laissez-faire capitalism, civil service reform, lower tariffs, white supremacism in the American South, and support for immigrants and Catholics. The Fourth Party System saw the Republican Party experience factionalism between its conservative "Standpatter" wing (led by Mark Hanna and Joseph Gurney Cannon) and its progressive "Insurgent" wing (led by Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft), while the Democrats, under the leadership of William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, adopted progessive policies, courted Catholic and Jewish immigrant voters, opposed imperialist expansion overseas, and fought for liberal reforms at home.
The Progressive Movement[]
During the 1890s, the rapid expansion of national advertising and the growing popularity of magazines led to the creation of mass media, and journalists and writers known as "muckrakers" covered political and business corruption, exposing social and political sins and shortcomings. McClure's magazine notably took on corporate monopolies and political machine while raising awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor. Additionally, as the number of millionaires rose from 100 in the 1870s to 4,000 by 1892 and 16,000 by 1916, wealthy men such as Andrew Carnegie preached the "Gospel of Wealth", which called for philanthropic gifts to colleges, hospitals, medical research, libraries, museums, religion, and social betterment.
Politically, Progressives pushed for reigning in big businesses and protecting consumers, preserving national parks and the wilderness from exploitation, providing better living and working conditions to women, children, and immigrants, advocating for sanitation reforms which led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, an eight-hour workday and safer conditions for workers, collective bargaining for labor unions, promoting access to birth control, granting women the right to vote, regulating trusts and monopolies to prevent them from stifling competition and fixing prices, limiting political corruption, reducing the power of party bosses and political machines by providing for the direct election of Senators through the 17th Amendment (passed in 1913 and in full effect by 1919), and a nationwide Prohibition on alcohol. The Progressives were united in their goal of improving society and humanity, although many of their conservative opponents viewed human nature as fixed and vast wealth and opportunity gulfs as an inevitable consequence of industrialization. Additionally, Progressives championed the role of a big government in stepping in to fix social problems in a departure from the laissez-faire attitudes of the Gilded Age, during which time charities and voluntary associations would be relied upon to tackle social issues; Progressives believed those issues too big for that approach to handle, and favored the action of local, state, and federal governments.
However, the Progressives were divided on issues such as voting rights, as, while they extended the right to vote to women, they generally considered only white, well-educated, and native-born people to be "good voters", and worked to impose literacy tests and residency requirements in the North, and made no effort to challenge Jim Crow laws and Black disenfranchisement in the South. While a few Progressives championed immigrants' rights, most Progressives supported the complete assimilation of immigrants, the restriction of Asian, Southern and Eastern European, and Mexican immigration. Most Progressives were also believers in scientific racism and the supremacy of the "Anglo-Saxon" or "Nordic" race, leading to them supporting racial segregation, xenophobia, and even the eugenics movement to encourage white women to have more children, sterilize "undesirable" women, and "purify" the gene pool. Thus, while Progressives aimed to improve society and find a remedy for the social problems caused by urbanization and industrialization, they only supported those improvements for those they deemed worthy of participation in American society, namely White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. While they cured the worst excesses of corruption, sanitation, and exploitation, they failed to rescue America from its over-reliance on big business, leading to the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression of the 1920s-1930s.
Politics[]
By the 1890s, the closing of the American frontier and the end of Manifest Destiny brought a temporary end to American territorial expansion, and new markets began to dry up as a result. America had a long history of isolationism and an aversion to foreign wars, but, in 1893, American expatriate sugar plantation owners in Hawaii overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom and created the Republic of Hawaii, and 162 US Marines were sent in by the local American military representative to protect American interests. While the previous President of the United States Benjamin Harrison had been in favor of annexing Hawaii, a long-time trading partner of the United States since the 1820s and an island whose absolute monarchy had been replaced by a constitutional monarchy in 1887 before its 1893 overthrow, President Grover Cleveland, an anti-imperialist Democrat, believed that immediately annexing Hawaii was in violation of Hawaiian sovereignty. A failed counter-revolution in 1895 led to the abdication of Queen Lili'uokalani, and, upon the accession of President William McKinley to the presidency in 1897, the US Senate twice failed to annex the Hawaiian Islands before passing the Newlands Resolution a year later and formally annexing Hawaii on 12 August 1898.
Non-interventionism was wholly abandoned on the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898, with the explosion of a US Navy ship in Havana harbor being blamed on the Spanish garrison in Cuba, and resulting in a war in which the United States seized the colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from the Spanish Empire. In response, the American Anti-Imperialist League was founded by Grover Cleveland, Carl Schurz, Andrew Carnegie, and Samuel Gompers to protest America's new foreign policy, arguing that republican government must be derived from "consent of the governed". However, the imperialist movement became strong within the Republican Party, which argued that it was the duty of Americans to spread the light of civilization and democracy to the "backward" people of the world, and sought for America to become a world power. Imperialists also argued the importance of relentless expansion as the backbone of American capitalism (as the conquest of the frontier and the construction of railroads had made America the world's leading industrial power), and Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that, if the United States wished to be a world power, it had to establish domination of the seas, which the US Navy achieved through the Spanish-American War and the annexation of both Caribbean and Pacific ports. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, under William Jennings Bryan, opposed imperialism overseas. In 1900, the Anti-Imperialist League endorsed Bryan's presidential candidacy, but Bryan's opposition to the gold standard led to many of the Anti-Imperialist League's leaders (including Bryan's archnemesis, Cleveland himself) breaking with the league.
After the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, his Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, a war hero and adventurer, assumed the presidency. Roosevelt, a progressive conservative, supported an increased American presence in Latin America and the Pacific, believed in a strong US Army and US Navy in order to "speak softly and carry a big stick", and oversaw the US Navy's intervention in the Panamanian independence struggle from Colombia in order to ensure the construction of the Panama Canal. In 1904, a year after the Venezuelan crisis of 1902–1903, the Roosevelt Corollary replaced the Monroe Doctrine and stipulated that the United States would intervene in the financial affairs of Latin America whenever necessary in order to prevent the European great powers from having any economic hold over them. This policy enabled the United States to wage several "Banana Wars" in Latin America to restore order to countries undergoing political and economic turmoil.
Roosevelt's domestic policies were based on the principles of the Progressive Era, and he pushed for "Three C's" with his "Square Deal": consumer protection, control of corporations, and conservation. He passed the Meat Inspection Act of 1906 and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, requiring the federal inspection of meats and prevented canned foods and pharmaceuticals from being contaminated or mislabeled. He also curbed the abuses of giant corporations by siding with striking coal miners in 1902, busting the railroad, meat, and sugar trusts for unfair business practices, and setting aside 230 million acres of public land for national forests, wildlife refuges, and national parks. He left office in 1908 after two terms, but his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, drifted back towards pro-business conservatism and disappointed Roosevelt by raising tariff duties and opening some public lands for development. In 1912, Roosevelt responded by running for President as the candidate of the center-left "Progressive", or, "Bull Moose Party", which called for campaign finance reform, lower tariffs, the creation of a social insurance system, an eight-hour workday, and women's suffrage. Most Progressive Republicans remained with the Republican Party, however, intending to change it from within; as a result, the Progressive Party and Republican Party split their vote, enabling the progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson to win the presidency.
Wilson was a progressive Democrat who believed in the power of the federal government to expose corruption, regulate the economy, eliminate unethical business practices, and improve the general condition of society. He campaigned on the "New Freedom" platform, which promised banking, tariff, and business reforms while pledging to respect individual freedoms and private industry, in line with the Democratic Party's liberal tradition. He created the Federal Reserve System, championed anti-trust legislation, improved protections for workers, and established the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on monopolistic business practices. However, the Southern Democrats used their influence in the Woodrow administration to resegregate the federal government in a huge step backwards for civil rights. Wilson won re-election in 1916, emphasizing better protections for female workers, the elimination of child labor, and the establishment of a minimum wage, while also campaigning on keeping the United States out of World War I; many Irish and German voters did not wish to join the war on the side of Britain or against the German Empire, respectively.
Ultimately, however, German unrestricted submarine warfare, the Sinking of the RMS Lusitania, and the discovery of the Zimmerman Telegram led to the United States declaring war on Germany in April 1917. Wilson envisioned a postwar world in which all nations enjoyed mutual cooperation and respect, belonging to a League of Nations which would peacefully resolve all international disputes, but staunch opposition from isolationists (including the Progressive Republicans George W. Norris, William Borah, Robert M. La Follette, and Hiram Johnson, Irish and German Democrats, and American nationalists) led to the United States declining to join the League; Borah claimed that it would purchase peace at the cost of American independence, and Johnson called the League a "gigantic war trust", as membership in the League would require the United States to join foreign wars to enforce peace abroad.
The Progressive Era was brought to an end by World War I, as the prim and proper attitudes of the Progressive Era were replaced by a war-weary, disillusioned, carefree attitude of leisure and consumption during the "Roaring Twenties". While the Progressives succeeded in banning alcohol through Prohibition from 1920 to 1933, and in granting women the right to vote in 1920, America experieced a conservative turn during the 1920s as liberal internationalism was replaced by conservative isolationism. The Russian Revolution of 1917 and a series of labor strikes and anarchist bombings in 1919 led to the "First Red Scare", in which the American public grew afraid that radical communists were threatening the country. These incidents, along with the popularity of the eugenics movement, led to a growing concern among native-born white Protestants that America was becoming progessively less American. The Ku Klux Klan, which had been refounded in 1915, experienced a resurgence not just in the South, but also in the North and Midwest, during the 1920s due to its opposition to Jewish and Catholic immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The new Klan, supported by the white Protestant middle-class, framed its crusade in moral and religious terms, seeing themselves as vigilante who sought to restore justice by preventing Blacks, immigrants, Catholics, Jews, liberals, and progressives from attaining wealth, social status, and political power. However, religious and civic groups battled the Klan through education, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergymen condemned the organization in no uncertain terms, and the NAACP also educated the public about the Klan's atrocities, leading to its dramatic decline at the end of the 1920s.
In 1921, Congress limited the number of immigrants allowed from Europe to 350,000, a third of pre-World War I levels, and, in 1924, Congress further limited immigration by setting more restrictive quotas which heavily favored Northern and Western European immigrants and slashed Southern and Eastern European immigration to 1% of pre-World War I levels, accepted only 1,000 African immigrants per year, and banned Asian immigration. As Western farmers relied upon Mexican immigrants for seasonal labor, their immigration was unrestricted. Also in 1924, Congress granted full citizenship to Native Americans, although many of them had difficulty accessing the rights of citizenship from reservations.
Meanwhile, the rise of a criminal class, the corruption of public officials, and a widespread disrespect for the rule of law caused by Prohibition discredited the Progressive movement, whose faith in the federal government's ability to fix social problems had led to the adoption of a social experiment which only worsened criminal activity, public corruption, and a casual disregard for the rule of law.
Additionally, the deaths of Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt saw the passing of a generation of Progressive leaders by the time of the 1920 presidential election. The waning of the Red Scare took with it the last vestiges of Progressive zeal, and German and Irish voters deserted the Democratic Party due to its support for World War I and the League of Nations. American voters were tired of reform and witch hunts and were ready for Warren G. Harding's promised "return to normalcy". The 1912 and 1916 presidential elections had solidified the pro-business conservatives' control over the Republican Party, and Harding's Vice President (and future President) Calvin Coolidge declared, "The chief business of the American people is business." He chose the progressive conservative Herbert Hoover as his Secretary of Commerce; Hoover supported partnerships between government and businesses, while his Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon believed in running the government as efficiently as any business. Harding proceeded to oversee tax cuts, the country's first budgeting process, the reduction of the United States' war debts, an emergency tariff which both increased American purchasing power and inflated the prices of goods, and worked towards global peace efforts through the Washington Naval Treaty and other efforts.
However, Harding's administration was plagued by accusations of corruption as the result of the Teapot Dome scandal. Harding died in office in 1923 and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge, a fiscally conservative Republican who supported limiting the size and scope of the government, but held progressive beliefs and supported women's suffrage and the direct election of Senators. As Governor of Massachusetts, Coolidge won the support of progressives for lowering the work week for women and children from 54 to 48 hours and for vetoing state legislator wage increases, while winning conservative support for cutting state spending, trimming the public debt, and suppressing the Boston police strike of 1919. As President, Coolidge cut taxes, reduced federal spending, signed the Immigration Act of 1924 into law, subscribed to the laissez-faire ideology of free-market capitalism, shrank the federal debt and budget deficit as the economy boomed, and supported the Kellogg-Briand Pact in a bid to outlaw war.
The 1920s also brought about a backlash against immigrants and modernism as city dwellers tended to embrace the cultural changes of the era and rural towns clung to traditional norms. Nativist fears about foreign anarchists spiked following the anarchist assassinations of the Spanish prime minister in 1897, the Italian king in 1900, and even President William McKinley in 1901, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the trials and executions of the Italian immigrant anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1921. The trial exposed the divisions between nativists and immigrants, and both nativists (including the Klan) and labor unions succeeded in pressuring the government to slash immigration with legislation in 1921 and 1924.
The last President of the Progressive Era was Herbert Hoover, campaigned on Coolidge’s legacy of economic prosperity, pledging to support business, improve the quality of life of the nation’s farmers, and conduct a relatively isolationist foreign policy, but he was ambivalent on Prohibition and rejected laissez-faire capitalism in favor of government-business partnerships. Hoover regarded himself as a Progressive, reorganizing of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, organizing the Federal Bureau of Prisons, closing tax loopholes for the wealthiest Americans, expanding national park lands, strengthening of protections for labor, disavowing military interventionism in Latin America. Hoover also launched a public works program which included the construction of the Hoover Dam, implemented stronger protections for labor, substantially increased federal subsidies for agriculture, and passed the Glass-Steagall Act of 1932, which limited the activities of commercial banks in an attempt to stabilize the banking sector. Many of these policies served as the foundation of his successor Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, but some of his policies worsened the Depression, such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which initiated a trade war with Europe and exacerbated the Depression.
The 1932 election marked the end of the Fourth Party System and the Progressive Era and the onset of the Fifth Party System and the New Deal era, bringing about a major political realignment. Hoover's belief in minimal government interference in the economy and that debt relief would weaken the work ethic of working Americans failed to fix the Depression, causing Hoover to turn towards interventionism in 1931, approving federal loans to vital industries and massive relief and public works projects. In 1932, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidency in a landslide, promising a "New Deal" to benefit the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid. Roosevelt's New Deal led to a shakeup of both parties' coalitions, as the New Deal coalition cemented the Democratic Party's ties to labor unions, Jewish and Catholic immigrants, and Southern white farmers, while adding Black support and liberals, building a "New Deal Coalition" with Liberal Republicans. Meanwhile, the Democrats' business wing withered outside of the South, and the 1930s saw the rise of the "Old Right", a coalition of business-oriented conservative Republicans, conservative Southern Democrats, former Progressive Republicans such as Hoover, and agrarians who dreamed of restoring a pre-modern communal society and preserving traditional values. After 1932, the term "liberal" was associated with "big government" and social programs, while the term "conservative" came to mean support for limited government and free-market economics.