The Progressive Movement

The Progressive Movement (ca. 1890s-1910s)

Even more energetic a sphere of historical controversy than that over the Populists is the historians' argument over the Progressive movement. The Progressives were a heterogeneous collection of reformers. Active chiefly in the nation's cities and the urban mass media (and in the legislatures of such states as Wisconsin and New York), the Progressives carried out efforts to reform American society and governance on all fronts. They numbered among their ranks social Progressives (such as Jane Addams, the founder of the Hull House settlement movement), economic Progressives (such as Richard Ely, the noted Wisconsin economist who emphasized the need to prevent great concentrations of economic power), legal Progressives (such as Louis D. Brandeis, the noted Massachusetts attorney and U.S. Supreme Court Justice, and his protege, Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter), cultural Progressives (including novelists such as Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair and such muckraking journalists as Ida M. Tarbel l), and of course the great Progressive politicians, themselves making up a remarkable spectrum of Progressive variations.

Occupying the poles of the Progressive political spectrum were Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, each of whom developed his own brand of political Progressive theory and policy.

Roosevelt's New Nationalism emphasized giving a vigorous national government the power to regulate and mediate among large, clashing economic and social actors. "Mere bigness" was no sin if these powerful institutions and organizations could be brought into a stable, cooperatige relationship with one another through the medium of government.

Wilson's New Freedom emphasized using government power to knock the large economic and social forces down to size and keeping government, business, labor, and society at a human scale. Rather than concentrating on using the federal government to solve national problems, Wilsonian Progressives believed in using state and local governments as laboratories of reform. Recognizing the diversity of the American nation, they argued for the need to tailor government responses to problems to the specific political, social, and economic contexts in which they would have to operate.

What held these heterogeneous and quarrelsome Progressives together as a movement was the...

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... become moral, sober, and industrious by adopting and enforcing the Prohibition Amendment and legislation (the notorious Volstead Act) putting it into effect.

The historians' debate on Progressivism divides between "backward-looking" and "forward-looking" interpreters. Richard Hofstadter, the founder and still the leading exponent of the "backward-looking" school, saw Progressives as middle-class Americans, small businessmen and tradesman and professionals, who yearned to restore the idealized America of their youth. Of course, Hofstadter noted in passing, this idealized America never existed, confronting the Progressives with a paradox rich in irony and poignancy. In trying to revive something that was, at best, an inspiring myth, they actually helped to transform the nature of American society, economy, and politics. By contrast, the "forward-looking" school, whose first great advocate was Robert H. Wiebe, maintained that the Progressives confronted head-on the challenges of the emerging "modern" American economy and society. Wiebe's Progressives emphasized efficiency, predictability, and rationality in propounding their public policy and their critiques of society's ills.