7.4 The Progressives

Progressivism was not one party. It was a broad movement, mostly of middle-class, urban, college-educated reformers, including many women, who believed experts and an active government could solve social problems. They drew on earlier Populists, the Social Gospel and settlement houses (6.9, 6.11).

Muckrakers were investigative journalists (Roosevelt gave them the name in 1906). Ida Tarbell exposed Standard Oil's tactics, Lincoln Steffens exposed city corruption in The Shame of the Cities (1904), and Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) described filthy Chicago meatpacking plants. The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York, which killed 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women, led to new state safety laws.

Progressives did not agree on how to fix government. Some wanted to give ordinary voters more direct power; others trusted trained experts and professional managers to run government efficiently. Many reforms mixed both ideas.

• Initiative: citizens can propose a law by petition.
• Referendum: voters approve or reject a law directly.
• Recall: voters can remove an official before the term ends.
• Direct primary: voters, not party bosses, choose candidates. Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette's 'Wisconsin Idea' used primaries and university experts to guide policy.
• City reforms: commission and city-manager governments to weaken machines.
• 17th Amendment (1913): voters, not state legislatures, elect U.S. senators.
• 19th Amendment (1920): women's suffrage. Carrie Chapman Catt's National American Woman Suffrage Association lobbied state by state, while Alice Paul's National Woman's Party picketed the White House. Women's war work also strengthened their case.

Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909) promised a 'Square Deal'. He sued to break up the Northern Securities railroad holding company (the Supreme Court agreed in 1904), helped settle the 1902 anthracite coal strike without siding automatically with owners, and signed the Hepburn Act (1906) strengthening railroad regulation, plus the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (both 1906). He was a champion of conservation, meaning managed use of natural resources. With forester Gifford Pinchot, who led the new U.S. Forest Service, he roughly quadrupled the area of national forests, adding about 150 million acres. Preservationists like John Muir wanted wilderness left untouched, and the two sides clashed over damming California's Hetch Hetchy Valley, which Congress approved in 1913. Both camps did support national parks, and in 1916 Congress created the National Park Service to run them.

In 1912 Roosevelt ran on the Progressive ('Bull Moose') Party ticket with his 'New Nationalism', accepting big business but regulating it strongly, while Democrat Woodrow Wilson called for a 'New Freedom' that would break up trusts to restore competition. Wilson won. He signed the Underwood Tariff (1913), which lowered tariffs and created an income tax under the new 16th Amendment; the Federal Reserve Act (1913); the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914), which strengthened antitrust law and said unions were not illegal combinations; and a law creating the Federal Trade Commission (1914).

Courts sometimes blocked reform. In Lochner v. New York (1905) the Supreme Court struck down a limit on bakers' hours, though in Muller v. Oregon (1908) it upheld maximum hours for women. The 18th Amendment (ratified 1919) brought Prohibition, which many Progressives supported as a reform.

Most white Progressives ignored or supported segregation. Southern Progressives promoted disfranchisement as 'clean government', and Wilson allowed segregation in federal offices. Progressives also split over immigration: some backed eugenics and immigration limits, while settlement workers like Jane Addams defended immigrants. Black reformers organized on their own: W.E.B. Du Bois rejected Booker T. Washington's gradualism, helped launch the Niagara Movement (1905) and helped found the NAACP (1909) with white allies.