The Progressive Era, Part 1:
The Myth and the Reality
by <!-- --><!-- put author name below, before tag -->William L. Anderson, <!-- put date below, before tag -->Posted June 9, 2006
Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger are names that come to mind. FDR's administration invented redlining in its federal housing programs and FDR himself laughed when a federal anti-lynching law was urged on him.
One of the most enduring set of myths from U.S. history comes from the political and social developments in what is called the “Progressive Era,” a period lasting from the late 1800s to the end of World War I. (Of course, one could argue, convincingly, that the Progressive Era never has ended.) The prevailing story told in textbooks, the editorial pages of the New York Times, and the typical classroom holds that this was the time when people began to use the mechanism of government to create the conditions for a better life for all and to begin the arduous process of reining in the excesses of capitalism.
According to the pundits, by the late 1800s many businesses in the United States had grown to gigantic proportions, monopolizing much of the economy. In response to this growing emergency, the government adopted new and “progressive” policies of regulatory agencies and antitrust laws.
Besides regulating business activity, Progressives, through coalitions of intellectuals, political figures, and activists, saw to it that government also began the process of regulating the extraction of natural resources through executive action. (Progressives considered the legislative procedure to be a waste of time that needed to be replaced with a mechanism that permitted the executive branch of government to seek “needed” shortcuts around the give-and-take that accompanied the legislature at work.)
Through Progressive prodding, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which created the Food and Drug Administration and expanded government regulation of food and the workplace. Progressives also secured the right of women to vote and ended the state legislatures’ stranglehold on the national electoral process by mandating the direct election of U.S. senators (which until 1913 were chosen by state legislatures).
Socially, the Progressives were humanitarians who sought to better the lives of ordinary people, with their greatest “triumph” being passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which ushered in the era of Prohibition. (Most modern Progressives are not particularly proud of this “achievement” by their forbears, but the prohibitionist spirit is much more alive than they would like to admit. Today, Progressive lawyers have been busy suing tobacco companies and the liquor industry and attempting to ban products such as silicon breast implants that feminists and other modern Progressives think are not proper things for people to have.)
Last, the Progressive Era trumpeted science and the “enlightened” Social Gospel, which became the religion of choice for religious skeptics who questioned the core doctrines of the Christian faith. From the implementation of “scientific” principles to govern politics, business, and social relationships, Progressivism helped to create a rational basis for modern society. From the creation of the Federal Reserve System to the Sixteenth Amendment that brought about the national income tax, Progressives were able to do away with the impediments created by the U.S. Constitution, which according to them stood in the way of progress.
If there was a downside to the Progressive Era, its modern supporters say, it was that Progressives were not able to do enough before “reactionary” post–World War I forces set in. “Reforms” such as the banning of child labor, minimum wages, the welfare state, further regulation of business, and a completion of the process of transferring legislative power from the Congress to the executive branch would have to wait until the Great Depression, when the nation had supposedly had its fill of laissez faire. Also, in spite of the best efforts of the Progressives, segregation laws institutionalized racism, which worsened strife between whites and blacks.
While Progressivism has captured the hearts and minds of modern intellectuals and others, there is another story to tell about this era, a much darker tale than what generally is told. In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that Progressivism helped to destroy, not preserve, the constitutional order. Far from ushering in the social peace, justice, and prosperity that Progressives promised, Progressivism helped to create the conditions for the Great Depression and helped plunge the country into one war after another. Perhaps the only positive thing we can say about the Progressive Era was that it did not do all of the damage that it could have done.
In taking this look at the Progressive Era, I will be examining a number of social and economic initiatives that took place during that time. I begin with the social policies and laws that came about during that era and dissect Progressivism’s long and sorry legacy.
Early U.S. Progressives
Progressives had their forbears in the Unitarians of early- and mid-19th-century New England. The Unitarians were what we would call the theological “liberals” of that era, and they had come to believe that it was their duty to establish a sort of “kingdom of God” on earth (as opposed to the Christianity that stressed the temporal nature of life and the prospect of Heaven for those who were followers of Christ).
According to Samuel Blumenfeld (“Why the Schools Went Public”; Reason Magazine, March 1979), the public-school movement that swept Boston during the 1840s was led by Unitarians such as Horace Mann. While Mann and his followers pushed government education at the expense of private schools, they were able to form coalitions with Calvinists and the Christian Protestant pietists, who saw public schools as a way to “train” the children of Catholic immigrants who were pouring into the country from Ireland and southern Europe. Moreover, Unitarians and the pietists promoted laws to prohibit the making and sale of alcoholic beverages, again a coalition that was promoted, in part, as a wedge against Catholic immigrants, who came from cultures where alcohol consumption was a normal part of life.
When war broke out between North and South in 1861, the Unitarians were among the most forceful in calling for the complete destruction of the South, and while their influence on the actual fields of battle was negligible, they were highly influential on the political home front. (For example, Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” was a Unitarian.)
While the Unitarians and many of their fellow travelers were small in number, they were very influential because of their high levels of education and literacy, and were the forerunners of what one might call the “liberal elite” of modern society. Their rise to power is notable and important because the mentality of the intellectuals of the mid and late 19th century differed substantially from that of the group of intellectuals who fashioned the early documents of the United States. Unlike the early American intellectuals who saw liberty as a polestar and tried to limit the growth and power of the state, the later intellectuals saw the state as a vehicle for their own political and social agendas. While the original American intellectuals championed the federal system with its balance of powers between the states and central government, the later intellectuals placed their faith squarely in the power of the centralized state.
Darwin, intellectuals, and the state
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859) had an enormous effect on how intellectuals viewed the world. First, it seemed to vindicate the liberal elite who saw the religion of their day as mere superstition. Darwin’s theories permitted the reformers to expound on their own beliefs that they could “reform” society through the miracles of science. Second, it gave impetus to those who believed that government power could be used “wisely” to fashion a new society.
Many Progressives reasoned that if human evolution depended on “survival of the fittest,” then humans could help that process along through eugenics, which also meant “breeding” humans in a way that would advance the “superior” races and vanquish those races that were “inferior.” (Progressives supported eugenics until Hitler’s embrace of it gave it a bad name.)
For example, most people know Margaret Sanger as the founder of Planned Parenthood, but she also was a strong advocate of eugenics. In a 1939 letter, she wrote the following:
We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members. In 1921, she had written,
As an advocate of birth control I wish ... to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit,” admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feebleminded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation. (“The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda”; Birth Control Review, October 1921; page 5.) Another influential Progressive was Herbert Croly, the founder of The New Republic. Libertarian writer Virginia Postrel said of Croly,
Crolyism overturned the ideal of limited government in favor of a combination of elite power — commissions to regulate and plan — and mass democracy.... Frustrated with constitutional limits, Croly wrote, “It remains ... true ... that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.” This statement, while extreme, pretty much sums up today’s governing philosophy. While Croly is not a household word today, he was an important social theorist who influenced Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Both of them used the White House to centralize government in Washington. They also helped to bring about two sets of social policies: Prohibition and segregation.
Prohibition was the shotgun wedding of the secular Progressives and the Christian fundamentalists, both of whom wanted to ban intoxicating beverages, but for different reasons. Progressives saw it as a way to promote what Rexford G. Tugwell called “social virtues,” while fundamentalists thought that alcohol consumption was sinful, which was reason enough for the central government to ban it.
(At least the Progressives realized that the U.S. Constitution did not permit Congress to outlaw the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages without the authority of a constitutional amendment. Today’s “war on drugs,” however, is carried on without such constitutional niceties.)
While Prohibition today is painted as the triumph of fundamentalist bluenoses, most Progressive groups supported it, from the feminists to those who believed that entry into World War I was necessary to spread democracy throughout the world. (For more on this subject, see Murray N. Rothbard’s “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, winter 1989.)
Woodrow Wilson brought segregationist policies to the federal government. Many states and localities already had implemented those laws in their respective areas but with Wilson’s presidency, which began in 1913, the federal government became a leading force in discriminating against blacks in federal hiring practices. Notes Charles Paul Freund,
Wilson’s historical reputation is that of a far-sighted progressive. That role has been assigned to him by historians based on his battle for the League of Nations, and the opposition he faced from isolationist Republicans. Indeed, the adjective “Wilsonian,” still in use, implies a positive if hopelessly idealistic vision for the extension of justice and democratic values throughout the world. Domestically, however, Wilson was a retrograde racist, one who attempted to engineer the diminution of both justice and democracy for American blacks — who were enjoying little of either to begin with. (In fact, Wilson reportedly struck a racial equality clause from the League of Nations charter as well.) While some have tried to claim that Wilson’s racism was due to his Southern upbringing, he simply was acting as a leading Progressive. Progressives reasoned that blacks were not as far “evolved” as whites and, thus, should not be given the same rights and responsibilities. When one combines Wilson’s acts of segregation with racist eugenics practices (through birth control and outright sterilization), it is not hard to understand why the Progressive Era was anything but “progressive” when it came to the rights of African-Americans.
The Progressive Era, contrary to popular belief, was not a time when the U.S. government began to adopt “wise” and “far-sighted” policies that matched the political, economic, and social “needs” of that time. Instead, it was a period during which many of the constitutional limits on government were either “reinterpreted” or simply eviscerated.
Progressives believed that they were bringing in an age of knowledge, enlightenment, and security. Instead, they brought social turmoil, injustice, and war.
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In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917, the very worst of it—disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching—“went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left.
At the heart of Southern’s flawed but useful study is a deceptively simple question: How did reformers infused with lofty ideals embrace such abominable bigotry? His answer begins with the race-based pseudoscience that dominated educated opinion at the turn of the 20th century. “At college,” Southern notes, “budding progressives not only read exposés of capitalistic barons and attacks on laissez-faire economics by muckraking journalists, they also read racist tracts that drew on the latest anthropology, biology, psychology, sociology, eugenics, and medical science.”
Popular titles included Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast (1900) and R.W. Shufeldt’s The Negro, a Menace to American Civilization (1907). One bestseller, Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), discussed the concept of “race suicide,” the theory that inferior races were out-breeding their betters. President Theodore Roosevelt was one of many Progressives captivated by this notion: He opposed voting rights for African-American men, which were guaranteed by the 15th amendment, on the grounds that the black race was still in its adolescence.
Such thinking, which emphasized “expert” opinion and advocated sweeping governmental power, fit perfectly within the Progressive worldview, which favored a large, active government that engaged in technocratic, paternalistic planning. As for reconciling white supremacy with egalitarian democracy, keep in mind that when a racist Progressive championed “the working man,” “the common man,” or “the people,” he typically prefixed the silent adjective white.
For a good illustration, consider Carter Glass of Virginia. Glass was a Progressive state and U.S. senator and, as chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, one of the major architects of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He was also an enthusiastic supporter of his state’s massive effort to disfranchise black voters. “Discrimination! Why that is exactly what we propose,” he declared to one journalist. “To remove every negro voter who can be gotten rid of, legally, without materially impairing the numerical strength of the white electorate.”
Then there was political scientist John R. Commons, an adviser to the Progressive Wisconsin governor and senator Robert M. LaFollette and a member of Theodore Roosevelt’s Immigration Commission. Commons, the author of Races and Immigrants in America (1907), criticized immigration on both protectionist grounds (he believed immigrants depressed wages and weakened labor unions) and racist ones (he wrote that the so-called tropical races were “indolent and fickle”).
[ BTW, he was talking about Italians and Greeks among others. During the Progressive era, eastern and southern Europe were the big sources of immigrants. ]
Woodrow Wilson, whose Progressive presidential legacy includes the Federal Reserve System, a federal loan program for farmers, and an eight-hour workday for railroad employees, segregated the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C. “I have recently spent several days in Washington,” the black leader Booker T. Washington wrote during Wilson’s first term, “and I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”
Perhaps the most notorious figure of the era was Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive and inveterate white supremacist. As senator from South Carolina from 1895 to 1918, Tillman stumped for “Free Silver,” the economic panacea of the agrarian populist (and future secretary of state) William Jennings Bryan, whom Tillman repeatedly supported for president. “Pitchfork” Tillman favored such Progressive staples as antitrust laws, railroad regulations, and public education, but felt the latter was fit only for whites. “When you educate a negro,” he brayed, “you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”
Nor did African Americans always fare better among those radicals situated entirely to the left of the Progressives. Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs, though personally sympathetic to blacks, declared during his 1912 campaign for the presidency, “We have nothing special to offer the Negro.” Other leading radicals offered even less. Writing in the Socialist Democratic Herald, Victor Berger, the leader of the party’s right wing, declared that “there can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many years.” The celebrated left-wing novelist Jack London, covering the 1908 heavyweight title bout between black challenger Jack Johnson and white boxing champ Tommy Burns, filled his New York Herald story with lurid ethnic caricatures and incessant race baiting. “Though he was a committed socialist,” observed Jack Johnson biographer Geoffrey C. Ward, London’s “solidarity with the working class did not extend to black people.”
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As the legal scholar Richard Epstein has noted, “the sad but simple truth is that the Jim Crow resegregation of America depended on a conception of constitutional law that gave property rights short shrift, and showed broad deference to state action under the police power.” Progressivism itself, in other words, granted the state vast new authority to manage all walks of American life while at the same time weakening traditional checks on government power, including property rights and liberty of contract. Such a mixture was ripe for the racist abuse that occurred.
Take the Supreme Court’s notorious decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), a case that has rightly come to symbolize the South’s Jim Crow regime. In Plessy, the Court considered a Louisiana statute forbidding railroads from selling first-class tickets to blacks, a clear violation of economic liberty. In its 7–1 ruling, the Court upheld segregation in public accommodations so long as “separate but equal” facilities were provided for each race, setting off an orgy of legislation throughout the old Confederacy. South Carolina, for example, segregated trains two years after Plessy. Streetcars followed in 1905, train depots and restaurants in 1906, textile plants in 1915–16, circuses in 1917, pool halls in 1924, and beaches in 1934.
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