CHAPTER 12
Just exactly what the United States had accomplished in the Gilded Age was assessed in 1897, somewhat caustically, by Mr. Dooley:
I have seen America spread out from th’ Atlantic to th’ Pacific, with a branch office iv th’ Standard He Comp’ny in ivry hamlet. I’ve seen th’ shackles dropped fr’m th’ slave, so’s he cud by lynched in Ohio. . . . An’ th’ invintions . . . th’ cotton-gin an’ th’ gin sour an’ th’ bicycle an’ th’ flyin’-machine an’ th’ nickel-in-th’-slot machine an’ th’ Croker machine an’ th’ sody-fountain an’—crownin’ wurruk iv our civilization—th’ cash raygister.
This emphasis on material progress without spiritual satisfaction was disturbing to many Americans. Moreover, it was not only countryfolk who felt displaced by the political and industrial changes of the Gilded Age. By 1900 middle-class Americans were responding to two challenges to social stability. One was the control of political and economic life by big business. The other was unrest and discontent among the lower classes, especially factory workers and immigrants. At the turn of the century the most important political issue was still monopolies, popularly called “the trusts.” In 1896 Charles B. Spaur estimated that one percent of the population owned more than half of the total national wealth. In 1897 the total value of all corporations individually worth $1 million or more was $170 million. In 1900 the total value was $5 billion. When Andrew Carnegie sold out to the House of Morgan in 1901 the bonds and stocks issued by Morgan for the United States Steel Corporation were valued at $1.4 billion. At this time the average annual wage was between $400 and $500.
As governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) initiated progressive legislation independent of and opposed to the party machine of Senator Tom Platt. Platt realized that, if Roosevelt remained in office much longer, the days of the old guard would be numbered, and he determined to be rid of his exasperating protege by having him elected vice president. (Library of Congress.)
In these circumstances it is not surprising that historian Mark Sullivan, writing in 1925, should suggest that the average American had the feeling that he “was being ‘put upon,’ his horizons shortened by an unseen enemy whom he called the Invisible Government, the Money Interests; the Gold Bugs, Wall Street, the Trusts, and for Westerners, the East.” In 1898 Mark Twain commented sarcastically of a fictitious “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust”: “This world-girdling accumulation of trained morals, high principles, and justice cannot do an unright thing, an unfair thing, an ungenerous thing, an unclean thing.”
The Attack on Monopolies
Captains of industry had lost their heroic image and were roundly condemned for corrupting politics and exploiting labor. When Henry Demarest Lloyd argued against the robber barons, he was speaking for millions who had been disabused of their belief in progress:
Our industry is a fight of every man for himself. The prize we give the fittest is monopoly of the necessaries of life, and we leave these winners of the powers of life and death to wield them over us by the same “self-interest” with which they took them from us. . . . “There is no hope for any of us, but the weakest must go first,” is the golden rule of business. There is no other field of human associations in which any such rule of action is allowed. The man who should apply in his family or in his citizenship this “survival of the fittest” theory as it is practically professed and operated in business would be a monster, and would be speedily made extinct.
Protest was not confined to general criticism of corporations but included specific instances of corporate abuse. One form of protest, the movement to control railroads, eventually led to an initial solution to the problem of the trusts. The abuses of the railroads were so gross that people stirred themselves, and so the whole issue of railroad regulation was raised in several states. By implication, the arguments used extended to other monopolies. Railroad operators saw nothing irregular, let alone wrong, in charging customers low rates where they were in competition with one another and charging high rates where they were not, to compensate for the losses. Thus, rates became dependent, not on the length of the journey, but on the interests of the management. On competitive runs, such as from Chicago to New York, the railroads charged much less than on noncompetitive runs. Accordingly, it cost more to ship freight of the same kind from Rochester to New York than from Chicago to New York. Another practice was to favor some customers over others. Because they provided considerable trade, big customers such as Standard Oil were more likely to be favored with bargain rates than were small ones. Standard Oil also led the notorious practice by which railroads used to turn over part of the rates paid by the smaller customers to the larger customers in the form of rebates. And, as we have also seen, if they infringed their contracts to big shippers, railroads incurred drawbacks or fines—penalties paid for shipping products of their customers’ competitors.
There was, naturally, much opposition to such railroad practices among small customers. The hostility engendered by the railroads in the West is suggested by popular jokes of the period. The monogram of the Houston Eastern and Western Texas Railroad was HEWT, and supposedly stood for “Hell Either Way You Take It.” In 1877 everything went wrong for a Dakota farmer; there were storms in the spring, drought in the summer, and a plague of locusts in the fall. One day his wife found him in a field shaking his fist at the sky, saying, “Goddamn the Great Northern Railroad.” The movement to curb the railroads started in the midwestern states but spread widely. It had different aims: to deny roads more state aid, as in the constitutions of California, Kansas, and Missouri; to recover land grants; to prohibit rebates and free passes; and to regulate rates and services, as in Massachusetts, which supplied a model for others.
The Illinois Constitution of 1870 specifically urged the state legislature to “pass laws to correct abuses and to prevent unjust discrimination and extortion in the rates of freight and passenger tariffs.” The first regulatory law was passed by the state legislature the following year, but was ineffective and declared unconstitutional in state courts in 1873. Farmers responded that fall with a new law establishing a commission to decide rates for passengers and freight alike. In 1874 Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin followed suit with similar laws. However, in these three states the laws were soon repealed. Railroads had retaliated by raising all rates to the legal maximum and withdrawing some services.
In Illinois the law was better defined and more difficult to subvert. Thus railroads appealed to the courts, charging that the Illinois law violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which forbade any state from depriving a person of life, liberty, or property. Their argument was that a state commission that set railroad and elevator rates was denying the companies the free use of their property. There were eight Granger cases. Munn v. Illinois, which went to the Supreme Court in 1876, was the most crucial. There were only fourteen warehouses in Chicago to store the grain from seven states, and the Court had to decide whether the owners had the right of unrestrained control over millions of farmers. Munn’s argument was that the fixing of rates by Illinois was confiscatory. However, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite, speaking for a 5-4 majority in 1877, said otherwise:
Property does become clothed with a public interest when used in a manner to make it of public consequence, and affect the community at large. When, therefore, one devotes his property to a use in which the public has an interest, he, in effect, grants to the public an interest in that use, and must submit to be controlled by the public for the public good.
By its decisions the Court established three principles: the right of government to regulate any business with a public interest; the right of the legislature to decide what is fair and reasonable; and the right of the state to act where Congress has not.
In 1881 New York merchants established a National Anti-Monopoly League to promote a program of railroad reforms that was advertised throughout the country. In 1881 and 1882 Congress was inundated with requests for reform. In its pamphlets the league emphasized that its aims were in the best interests of conservative government. It was
trying to lift the safety valve and prevent an explosion which will surely come, if the great financial free hooters of the country are allowed to go on corrupting our elections, controlling legislation, debauching our courts, and riding roughshod over public rights.
Much more was at stake than the variable cost of railroad rates. What was at issue was the ability of government to supervise capital and industry in the public good. As Henry Demarest Lloyd observed in his exposure of Standard Oil in March 1881: “The movement of the railroad trains of this country is literally the circulation of its blood. Our treatment of the ‘railroad problem’ will show the quality and calibre of our political sense.”
More than thirty bills to regulate railroads were introduced in Congress between 1874 and 1885. The most important were those of Senator Shelby Cullom of Illinois and Representative John Reagan of Texas. In the Cullom bill regulation was to be enforced by an independent commission. In the Reagan bill it was to be enforced by the courts.
But while railroads and reformers were coming together, the Supreme Court was retreating from its liberal position of 1877. When confronted by Wabash v. Illinois in 1886 the Court took a conservative view. The Wabash Railroad had charged certain shippers 15 cents per 100 pounds for carrying goods from Peoria, Illinois, to New York but 25 cents per 100 pounds for the same type of goods from Gilman, Illinois, to New York, although Peoria was 86 miles farther away. What decided the Court for Wabash and against Illinois was that no state could regulate railroad traffic crossing its boundaries. It could decide for itself but not for interstate commerce. Three-quarters of rail traffic crossed state lines. Thus, without federal authority and supervision, railroad legislation was useless.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Wabash case, though technically correct, was morally indefensible. Public anger could be resolved only by enabling legislation. Thus, the Cullom and Reagan measures were combined to form the Interstate Commerce Act signed by President Grover Cleveland on February 4, 1887. The act declared that rates had to be “reasonable and just.” Rebates and discriminations between places, persons, and commodities were now illegal. It was unlawful for a carrier to charge more for a short haul than a long one under similar conditions. Pooling was forbidden. The act established a regulatory Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) of five members (not more than three from the same party) with the duty of inquiring into the railroads’ affairs and making the required reports. Railroads had to give the commission prior notice of increases in rates.
For a short time railroads were willing to accept the new law. But they did so with bad grace and later used every trick to frustrate the commission. A conservative judiciary composed of lawyers trained by corporations protected management against unions and the public. In the Maximum Freight Rate case of 1897 the Supreme Court decided that the ICC did not have the power to fix rates, and in the Alabama Midlands case, also of 1897, it practically invalidated the long- and short-haul regulations. The Court discovered it could not get railroad agents to testify about malpractices and could not get other witnesses to give evidence consistent with their earlier declarations to the ICC. By 1897 aggrieved shippers had succeeded in collecting refunds due them in only 5 out of 225 cases decided by the ICC.
In any case, by the 1890s most of the country’s railroads were part of six huge systems. Four of these were controlled by Morgan and two by Kuhn, Loeb and Company. These huge monopolies could set their own rates at will. The ICC was an irrelevance. In its annual report of 1898 it admitted its failure. Justice John Harlan of Kentucky described it as a “useless body for all practical purposes.”
Nevertheless, after the passing of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, it was inevitable that public opinion would demand full reform of the trusts. In exchange for their votes in Congress for the McKinley tariff of 1890 Republicans gave reformers opposed to monopolies their support for John Sherman’s bill to make monopoly combinations illegal. The most important provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of July 2, 1890, were contained in the first two articles:
1. Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations is hereby declared to be illegal.
2. Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize . . . any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor.
Sherman had intended to give supervision to a federal commission along the lines of the ICC. But in the Senate Judiciary Committee George F. Hoar of Massachusetts and George F. Edmunds of Vermont had this changed, giving jurisdiction to federal courts. No attempt was made to define “trust,” “conspiracy,” or “monopoly,” let alone the allusive phrase, “in the form of trust or otherwise.” In other words, the problem was treated before it was analyzed.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act represented a last opportunity for successful government regulation of monopolies. It failed. Yet it was not the fault of Congress so much as of the Supreme Court. President Benjamin Harrison initiated a trial case against the sugar trust that controlled 85 percent of the nation’s sugar refining. The appeal, E. C. Knight and Co. v. United States, did not come before the Court until 1895 when all but one justice found against the government. According to a sophistical distinction, the Sherman Act did not apply to production, only to commerce. Attorney General Richard Olney had not even prepared the case properly. He offered no evidence that sugar was sold and price-controlled across state lines and hence subject to federal laws. He had not bothered to show how different companies in different states were connected with one another in a trust.
Only seven suits under the Sherman Act were instituted by Benjamin Harrison, eight by Grover Cleveland in his second administration, and three by William McKinley. All were ineffective. Yet, in deference to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the trust itself was abandoned. To evade the law, robber barons used the new Standard Oil device of the holding company. By establishing nominally independent companies, each with the same board of directors, or a series of interlocking directorships, both of which had a controlling interest rather than owning companies outright, they could outwit the law. Between 1893 and 1904 the number of giant combinations increased from 12 to 318, with an increase in aggregate capital from less than $1 billion to almost $7 billion. These 318 companies controlled about two-fifths of the capital invested in manufacturing.
Attempts to curb big business by federal legislation represented a ritual clash between an old-fashioned ideal and modern needs. “In this atmosphere,” said Thurman Arnold in his Folklore of Capitalism (1937), “the antitrust laws were the answer of a society which unconsciously felt the need of great organizations, and at the same time had to deny them a place in the moral and logical ideology of the social structure.” On the surface it seemed that the trusts were to be changed to suit the institution; it was really the other way around, however.
Progressivism
Although Americans liked to pride themselves on the apparent lack of a class structure, as existed in European countries, there were thus clear signs that a self-perpetuating plutocracy was drawing ever further apart from the rest of society in terms of its affluence and outright economic and political clout. When Marshall Field, multimillionaire merchant of dry goods, died in Chicago on January 17, 1906, leaving his children $140 million, his fortune was used as a subject for a text by socialist Joseph Medill Patterson, himself the scion of a wealthy Chicago family. He explained in Collier’s Weekly that, of over 10,000 Field employees, 95 percent earned only $12 a week or less. Sewing-machine operators received $6.75 while, for a working week of fifty-nine hours, the makers of socks and stockings were paid $4.75. Few failed to notice the discrepancy. Some protested it. In his Theory of the Leisure Class (1904) and Theory of Business Enterprise (1912), Thorstein Veblen ridiculed the conventional values of the upper and middle classes as they strove for “conspicuous consumption” and “conspicuous leisure” and the obviously close relationship between respectability and wealth.
In the United States a new reform movement, progressivism, drew on, and benefited from, the rise of dissent in the late nineteenth century. The protests about gilt, guilds, and guilt, expressed by political theorist Henry George in Progress and Poverty (1879) and Utopian novelist Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward (1888), had been complemented by the agrarian revolt. Moreover, the violent strikes and agrarian crusades of the late nineteenth century were thought by some to be a prelude to open class warfare. Thus the Progressives’ response to working-class poverty was partly defensive, arising from a consideration that they should provide constructive solutions to the problems of the huddled masses. Otis Graham pointed out in The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America, 1900-1928 (1977) that urban reformers had ambivalent feelings about the need to alleviate social deprivation: “For the American who did not directly experience such conditions of life, they were deplorable not only because they made for the degradation and unhappiness of those on the bottom, but also for what they threatened to provoke.”
Progressives wanted to limit the power of big business, to make the political system more representative, democratic, and impartial, and to extend the role of government in order to protect the public interest and to ameliorate poverty and social distress. Accordingly, progressive social reforms ranged across such measures as the abolition of child labor, regulation of conditions and hours of work for men, women, and children, minimum wage laws (especially for women), compulsory insurance against unemployment, accidents, sickness, and old age, codes of standards in housing, and various reforms in education.
Progressives proposed to meet the additional costs of their proposals and to meet the problem of the maldistribution of wealth by imposing direct taxes on high incomes and sizable inheritances. In this crucial respect, and those of social insurance and municipal ownership of public utilities, they were adopting the same political position as their new liberal and social democratic contemporaries in Europe.
American Progressives were concerned for the survival of individuality and wanted to resist the conformity exacted from society passing through momentous technological changes. Thus, when Progressives urged equality, they meant not simply formal equality before the law but, more particularly, social, racial, and religious equality protected by all three branches of government—executive, legislative, and judicial. When historian Charles Forcey refers to a “new liberalism,” he explains it as turning away “from a dream of automatic progress by the freewheeling exercise of individual rights to a conviction that only the conscious, co-operative use of governmental power can bring reform.”
Historian Robert H. Walker, in The Reform Spirit in America (1976), concludes that the Progressive movement
grew out of the labor and farm movements of the late nineteenth century, taking from them an appeal to the exploited, both farmers and laborers; an antipathy to monopoly and parisitic wealth; and a determination to pursue economic democracy by purifying political democracy. By bringing to this task intelligence and a sense of political realism, the Progressives hoped for success at all levels of government where naive crusaders had failed.
In comparison with the Populists, Progressives were urbane, middle-class, and intellectual, including the most articulate, literate, and expert members of the professional classes. Their leaders were usually white Anglo-Saxon Protestants from affluent backgrounds and with a college education, who occupied a professional or commercial position that allowed them a certain economic independence and social status. By virtue of their education and their Christian ideals, they were particularly sensitive to exposures of mismanagement, corruption, and accounts of economic and social distress. They were also equipped with the necessary eloquence and with leisure time to engage in serious and considered protest.
It is certainly possible that men of property and local prestige deeply resented their relative loss of status in a society increasingly dominated by big business, as historian Richard Hofstadter suggested in The Age of Reform (1955). The disaffected or displaced not only included professional men but also local industrialists who resented the way their factories were taken over by large corporations. As to the professional classes, small-town lawyers found themselves unheeded by large corporations, who required younger counsel with specific skills in interpreting the new problems of management as their firms merged. Clergymen, also, found themselves unneeded by an increasingly secular society. However, those in certain professions, notably architecture, journalism, and university teaching, were rising in status, as society came to depend ever more on their expertise; and these groups were, perhaps, even more reform-minded than those who suffered a loss in status. Both groups disliked the new corporate plutocracy. The special needs of cities and industry encouraged their self-confidence and raised standards of professional expertise.
This increase in professionalism was perhaps most marked in medicine. Following the discovery by Pasteur and Koch in 1876 that specific microorganisms caused specific diseases, European scientists isolated the sources for a spectrum of diseases—typhoid, malaria, leprosy, tuberculosis, cholera, tetanus, diphtheria, and bubonic plague. American scientists made spectacular discoveries in parasitology, tracing malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and Rocky Mountain spotted fever to mosquitoes, ticks, and lice. Shortly after most of these discoveries, doctors found ways of immunizing humans. The spread of the new scientific medicine gradually eroded folk and quack medicine. The American Medical Association (AMA), first founded in 1846, was reorganized in 1901 as the central organization for a host of local medical societies that had been formed during the 1890s. Its membership expanded from 8,400 in 1900 to over 70,000 by 1910. By 1920 60 percent of the nation’s doctors had joined. The AMA’s entry standards made the training of doctors more professional and modern in medical schools, and persuaded local governments to enforce more exacting standards of public health. By 1912 MIT had its own professional school of public health. Perhaps of all professional groups, it is doctors who provide us with the quintessential characteristics of urban progressivism—objective analysis based on research leading to subjective improvement by humanitarian and economical means.
Not the gentle Jane who founded the settlement Hull House and was a favorite among Progressives, but the far more redoubtable Jane Addams (1860–1935) of 1930. Her outlook had been toughened by, among other things, the bitter disillusion of public rejection during World War I on account of her pacifism. In her last years, however, she became once more a public institution. (Photo by Underwood; Library of Congress.)
Dr. Hermann Biggs was one pioneer doctor who raised standards in public health after studying in the laboratories of Koch and Pasteur. At New York City’s Board of Health, he introduced tests to diagnose cholera in 1892, experimented with a vaccine for diphtheria in 1894, and, in 1897, proposed an ordinance requiring doctors to report basic information on cases of tuberculosis. Subsequently, he was a founder of the National Tuberculosis Association. As a result of the work by pioneers such as Biggs and his counterparts elsewhere, like Charles V. Chapin of Providence, the rate of infant mortality declined greatly. It fell from 273 per 1,000 children in 1885 to 102.4 per 1,000 in 1915.
Perhaps the most remarkable public health campaign based on medical research was the attempt to eliminate hookworm disease, first in Puerto Rico by assistant army surgeon Colonel Bailey K. Ashford and later in the South by Dr. Charles Wardell Stiles, chief of the division of zoology of the United States Public Health Service, who had first distinguished and defined the disease. Through his various associates, southern patriot Walter Hines Page persuaded oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller to donate $1 million to a campaign to eliminate the hookworm. The notion of the legendary hard-hearted Rockefeller cooperating with a crusading zoologist to make war on a debilitating disease previously attributed to congenital southern laziness drew a round of thoughtless ridicule from the press. Ashford used doses of thymol to make the hookworms relax their cling on the host’s intestines and epsom salts to eject them. The remedy cost less than 50 cents per patient. By 1914 half a million children and 397,765 adults had been examined, of whom 382,040 were treated for the disease.
Advances in medicine continued in the early twentieth century. In the field of mental health, Adolf Myer described the concept of dementia praecox, Clifford W. Beers founded the mental hospital movement in 1909, and Elmer Ernest Southard made contributions in the area of neuropsychiatry. This was the period when, by their lectures of 1909 at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung advanced the cause of psychoanalysis in the United States. Subsequently, William Alanson White and S. E. Jelliffe founded the Psychoanalytic Review (1913).
A healthy mind would best resound in a healthy body fortified by an optimum, nutritious diet. Vitamin research in the United States and Europe led to the discovery of vitamin A by Elmer V. McCollum (1912-14); vitamin B (1915-16); and vitamin D (1922). In 1915 Joseph Gold-berger of the United States Public Health Service discovered that pellagra was a deficiency disease. In 1913 Bela Schick devised a skin test to determine susceptibility to diphtheria. Subsequent immunization greatly reduced the incidence of the disease.
Nevertheless, progress in medical education, as distinct from medical research, was somewhat erratic. A report of 1910 by Abraham Flexner for the Carnegie Foundation disclosed abuses in medical education and proposed reform. It stimulated large grants for medical schools at Duke, Vanderbilt, and George Washington universities, and the universities of Chicago, Rochester, and Iowa.
As the status of doctors rose, so too did that of lawyers, although many people considered them shysters in service to the great corporations. Expert lawyers began organizing city and state bar associations, capped by the American Bar Association (ABA) in 1878. The growing demands of business and the civil service encouraged more rigorous training for the newly expanding professions, including knowledge of government, economics, and sociology attained at graduate law schools. In 1894 New York adopted a central examining board of skilled lawyers to supervise terms of admission to practice, and various other states followed its lead. Whereas there had been only 16 bar associations in 1880, by 1916 48 state and 623 local bar associations had been formed to provide a permanent professional structure.
A crucial professional need was for more and better education. The expansion of universities and the widening of their curricula after 1865, beginning with Harvard, reflected increased interest in a more diverse but also more vocation-oriented college education. This in turn led to higher standards of preparation in public and private high schools. From the 1870s the University of Michigan used a system of certificates awarded to the best public schools to encourage wholesale reforms across the state. Special accrediting agencies, established in New England from 1884 onward, set standards that were copied in other regions, reaching the Northwest by 1918.
Moreover, administrators in the great cities realized that their goal must be the formal organization of schools to teach children some industrial skills as well as to read, write, and count. Pressure was put upon them by parents, businessmen, and industrialists, who realized, in their very different ways, that the educational system was not providing sufficient basic knowledge and professional expertise to create enough suitably qualified young people for the urban and industrial workplace. In 1897 concerned parents established a national congress that called for better quality and greater opportunities in education at high schools. High schools responded by expanding and reforming their curricula. Thus, whereas only six states had made attendance at school compulsory in 1871, almost all of the North and West had done so by 1900. Between 1890 and 1910 the number of students and teachers increased fourfold, and doubled again between 1910 and 1920. The movement for vocational training, especially in manual work, began in earnest in the 1890s and spread wider until it achieved the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917, providing for federal support.
Teachers wanted to enhance their prestige, to protect their profession from excessive outside interference, and to counteract the great mobility of staff. Thus in forty-two states they determined to exact specific professional training for teachers; to expand scientific curricula; to promote a system of professional school administration through nonpartisan school boards; to establish certain procedures for promotion; and to demand tenure and definite salary scales with regular increments. In 1905 teachers began to shift the balance of the National Education Association (NEA) away from administrators and college professors and toward schoolteachers, something effectively demonstrated by the election of their candidate, Ella Flagg Young of Chicago, as president in 1910.
It was farmers who faced the most difficult transition from being “the people” to members of a highly skilled professional section, partly because agrarian dissent emphasized that those who toiled to provide food were the true Americans. Commercial farmers, who had been able to profit from the expert application and management of technological processes, and those who had turned scientific agriculture into a profession first led the way to a new awareness of what was feasible. At the turn of the century farmers’ and marketing cooperatives, usually connected to state schools and departments of agriculture, prospered when they achieved some local monopoly in their particular crop. They also created farm bureaus and state federations, and in 1919 established the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF).
In short, a rapidly industrializing society was creating its own large professional middle classes with new skills, expanded knowledge and discipline, and greater expectations of their future roles. Moreover, most of these professional groups—doctors, lawyers, teachers, farmers, and so on—experienced their most formative movement toward collective self-consciousness in the period 1895-1905. Most organizations appeared in the most industrially developed cities, notably in the Northeast. However, not only did the older cities lead the development but they also began to attract more outsiders, such as academics, architects, and journalists, who could make substantial contributions to the development. As Robert H. Wiebe explains in The Search for Order (1967), groups “undergoing similar experiences and sharing similar values and interests” discovered they “spoke a common language and naturally, easily, they began to encourage each other’s efforts toward self-determination.”
Some Solutions to Social Problems
A most common outlet for intense feelings about the need to reform society was the new and growing profession of social work. The most famous social worker among Progressives was Jane Addams, who became a symbolic figurehead for the entire Progressive movement and an American legend in her own lifetime. Middle-class women were educated for a role of emancipation and professional activity that, as yet, did not exist for them, except possibly in teaching. In Everyone was Brave (1969), feminist historian William O’Neill explores the wound of graduation from college for the partially emancipated young women of Addams’s generation: “Suddenly they found themselves not merely alone, but alone in a society that had no use for them. Their liberal education did not prepare them to do anything in particular, except teach, and the stylized, carefully edited view of life it gave them bore little relation to the actual world. In consequence graduation was often a traumatic experience for those young women who had been educated to fill a place that did not yet exist.” One of those places was social work.
Among Addams’s administrators at Hull House, the settlement home for immigrants in Chicago, was Florence Kelley, who had long since freed herself from middle-class morality. The daughter of a Philadelphia judge, she had been educated at Cornell and the University of Zurich, where she married a Polish-Russian doctor. They came to New York and engaged in radical politics, and she translated Marx and Engels into English. They had three children but were not happy together. When she came to Illinois in 1891 it was to seek a divorce, because the laws were more lenient there than in New York. She supported her children by working as a teacher, running an employment agency, and finally by conducting an investigation into the Chicago sweat trade for the State Bureau of Labor Statistics. Unlike the other house executives, Kelley had broken all the social rules and survived. It was on account of pioneer research by workers such as Kelley that settlement houses became focal points for the study of urban social problems based on comprehensive and systematic information. The most wide-ranging research project of this kind was the Pittsburgh survey, published in six volumes between 1909 and 1914. Not least significant were the facts that such studies provided comprehensive ammunition on harsh urban conditions for Progressives who wanted to lobby legislators or raise funds from businessmen.
Social work was also promoted by Social Gospel ministers led by Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, and Francis Greenwood Peabody. Truly Christian people accepted that the capitalist system was ruthless, obliging entrepreneurs and their managers to follow a path of selfish competition, completely at odds with the teachings of the New Testament. They denied that the great inequalities of income could be attributed to differences in individual characters. Moreover, by depriving the establishment of any moral justification, they were recognizing that poverty must be considered, and treated, as a general social problem, rather than as the misfortune of the newly arrived, the ergophobic, or the incompetent.
The Social Gospel was strongest among Unitarians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists, all denominations associated with the urban middle classes, and its leading advocates occupied strategic positions in theological seminaries. Henry F. May in Protestant Churches and Industrial America (1949) relates the rise of the Social Gospel to the period when Protestant churches were trying to convert new immigrants, who were Catholic, Greek Orthodox, or Jewish, through such means as Home Missions, Institutional Churches, and the YMCA, all of which developed social centers. Certain religious denominations created committees to study industrial problems—the Protestant Episcopal church in 1887, the Congregationalists in 1901, the Presbyterians in 1904, the Methodists in 1908, and finally, the Protestant churches, with their Federal Council of Churches, in 1908.
Among the most visible of all the newly emerging and expanding professions was that of investigative journalism. Investigative journalists were watchdogs of progressivism who bared their teeth at corruption, subsequently acquiring the title “muckraker” as a result of a remark by Theodore Roosevelt.
In Chicago, Ray Stannard Baker was embarking on his career as a reporter for the Chicago Record in 1893, the year of both the World’s Columbian Exposition, the hugely successful showpiece of international achievements in the arts and sciences built on the shore of Lake Michigan, and an economic depression that left between 100,000 and 200,000 unemployed in Chicago. In his work, Baker covered both the gleaming White City of the Exposition and the squalid flophouses and soup kitchens of its depression. As a young man of twenty-three, he was baffled and frustrated by the disparity between these two extremes, as he recalled in his autobiography, published in 1945: “What a spectacle! What a human downfall after the magnificence and prodigality of the World’s Fair which had so recently closed its doors! Heights of splendor, pride, exaltation in one month: depths of wretchedness, suffering, hunger, cold, in the next.” Such dislocation was, indeed, highly disturbing, and the young reporter’s commitment to social problems led him to become one of the most celebrated of the investigative journalists. Others were Jacob Riis, Ida Minerva Tarbell, and Henry Demarest Lloyd.
Reform Administrations in Cities and States
What Progressives of all kinds shared was American confidence that, given goodwill and intelligent analysis, the United States’s political, social, and economic problems could be solved by reform of the existing political system. They recognized that the best-intentioned laws were only as good as the government that administered them. Thus Frederic Howe wrote in 1905: “For two generations we have wrought out the most admirable laws and then left the government to run itself. This has been our greatest fault.” Progressives began to propose a new, more flexible, more responsive, and more powerful form of management.
In city after city genuine and Progressive reform candidates found they could get themselves elected as mayor, despite the opposition of previously entrenched political machines. They included Samuel Milton (“Golden Rule”) Jones in Toledo (1897–1904), Tom Lofton Johnson in Cleveland (1899–1909), Seth Low in New York (1901–3), and James D. Phelan in San Francisco (1897–1902).
Furthermore, Progressives wanted effective municipal or state regulation of public utilities. Across the country what reformers really wanted was a better and more impartial administration of essential urban services. In time they became convinced that only the public ownership of utilities could free American cities from a major source of corruption. Public opinion was hostile both to the power of utility monopolies and any “socialistic” attempts at their public ownership.
In Detroit Hazen S. Pingree was the Republican nominee of business leaders in 1889 who wanted an independent mayor to fight against a corrupt Irish ring. To assure his election they decided to appeal to as wide a spectrum of voters as possible. They drew up a ticket containing German, Polish, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon candidates. Once in office, Pingree was obliged to abandon some of his ideals—such as strict enforcement of the liquor laws—in order to hold his diverse coalition together. He needed all the support he could muster to combat municipal corruption elsewhere—on the school board, ferries, and tollroads, and in the awarding of street and sewer contracts. He was immediately locked in a bitter dispute involving the City Railway Company, which wanted an extension of its exclusive contract as the price for the conversion from horsepower to electricity. A difficult situation was inflamed by a drivers’ strike for better pay and conditions. After three days of street violence the company agreed to negotiate with the drivers, securing the extension of its charter from the city council. Charging the aldermen with dishonesty, Mayor Pingree vetoed the contract. He was now sufficiently popular with the public to withstand the hostility of vested interests to his renomination. He served two more terms and accepted revised franchises for gas and transit companies that brought them more fully under civic regulations. He also established the first major publicly owned electric generating plant in America.
In order to introduce and support welfare services it was necessary to raise additional revenue. Pingree decided to make the public utility and transport companies pay handsomely for their franchises without passing on the cost to the public. To acquire the authority to regulate gas rates Pingree ran for governor of Michigan and carried his campaign to the state capital. Once in office, he found his attempts to allow the cities of Michigan due powers of regulation blocked in the state legislature.
Something of a harsher reality behind the facade of dignified political probity comes across in this candid photograph of William McKinley (1843-1901) (front center) and members of his party at his second presidential inauguration in 1901. McKinley and his guests appear as sated politicos staring at the camera with unabashed self-concern, their hard eyes set on material advantage. Yet this group, in spite of its brutal indifference to public needs and a demeanor that would make the characters in a Nast cartoon seem almost pretty by comparison, represented the most popular administration of the Gilded Age. (Library of Congress.)
Survival was an occupational hazard for the city boss. Reform movements provided him with the techniques to cope with rapidly changing urban conditions. By stealing the thunder of the reformers he set the seal on his own stability. Beautifying the city, for instance, improved the life and lot of the whole community but it also led to more connections with business, and more patronage and profit for the machine. The jobs the boss offered the poor and the dispossessed as clerks and construction workers kept them in their place. He was not going to change the conditions that had created his machine.
Following their successes in cities, Progressives turned their attention to state government, first fielding charismatic leaders, and then proposing major reforms. Once again, the same mix of factors yielded Progressives success and failure in state government. Apart from exceptions such as Braxton Bragg Comer of Alabama (1907–11), the important Progressive governors began their careers as leaders of intraparty factions, intent on power rather than a specific program that was sometimes forced on them by certain sections of their middle-class followers. This could lead them away from Progressive reforms. Albert Cummins of Iowa (1902-8) created his first coalition from Republicans opposed to prohibition. Hoke Smith of Georgia (1907-10; 1911) was obliged by his adherents to include Jim Crow racism in his plans.
Once in office, Progressive governors had the unenviable task of piloting legislative programs, directing administration, and holding somewhat diffuse coalitions together all at once. The most skillful, like Robert La Follette of Wisconsin (1901–6), Albert Cummins of Iowa, and Hiram Johnson of California (1911-17), did so by getting their bands of Progressive reformers to concentrate on lobbying state legislators to pass certain measures while they themselves attempted to unite their constituencies by traditional appeals to local spirit.
Extending Democracy
In addition, Progressives wanted to make governments truly responsible by a package of democratic measures, including initiatives, referendums, recall of judges, accurate registration of voters, direct election of senators, proportional representation, direct primaries, secret and simpler ballots, corrupt practices acts, and lobbies in the public interest. They wanted to retain the advantages of the representative system, notably its compactness, experience, and legal knowledge, and eliminate its disadvantages, notably both haste and delay, complexity, corruption, errors, and legislative excesses and shortcomings.
The general principle of the referendum was for state acts and local ordinances to be scrutinized by the electors. If within thirty days of the passing of a city ordinance, or ninety days in the case of a state law, 5 or 10 percent of the voters signed a petition asking that the ordinance or law be submitted to the entire electorate at the next election (or at a special election if 15 or 20 percent of voters so petitioned), and if a majority of those voting favored the measure, it became law; if a majority were against it, it was vetoed by the people. The exceptions to this practice were measures governing immediate public health, peace, or safety. In the case of the initiative, the public took the initiative in requesting a certain law, again by use of a petition signed by 5 or 10 percent. If 15 or 20 percent so petitioned, then the measure had to be submitted to the electorate at the next election. The first state to adopt the initiative and referendum was South Dakota in 1898; by 1912 seventeen states had adopted either or both of these devices.
Primary elections were the means by which voters who were registered with either party chose that party’s candidates for election. In 1899 Minnesota provided for a “direct primary” to select nominees for election to political office, in place of a system of party conventions or caucuses, and the first primary election was held in Minneapolis in September 1900. The previous month a state convention in Madison, Wisconsin, also declared for direct primaries.
The recall was the means by which the people could petition officials to submit themselves to a special election before their term of office had expired. The recall was first applied in cities in 1903, adopted by Oregon in 1908, and used by ten other states by 1914.
By 1912 twenty-nine states were experimenting with various ways of electing senators directly rather than by state assemblies, having instituted primaries while pledging the candidates for the state legislature to elect the senatorial candidate with the most votes. The widespread acceptance of this reform led to its formal adoption by the federal government in the Seventeenth Amendment, passed on May 13, 1912, and ratified on April 8, 1913.
If all adult male citizens were to have the vote, and to be able to vote for more than their representatives, one might also expect the Progressives to have supported women’s suffrage. However, the campaign for women’s suffrage both united and divided Progressives. The proponents of women’s suffrage not only argued for this extension of democratic rights on the grounds of civil rights but also claimed it would introduce both the superior ethics of women into politics and their skills as housekeepers into government. Eventually, women’s suffrage was adopted in 1920 by the federal government as the Nineteenth Amendment, representing what Robert H. Walker calls “more quantitative progress in extending democracy than any other single act in the nation’s history.”
The franchise was extended to women first in western states, led by Wyoming (1893), Colorado (1893), Utah (1896), and Idaho (1896). These were all sparsely populated states that were trying to attract settlers. Historian Alan Grimes has argued that in such areas women proposed, and men supported, women’s suffrage as a conservative device to ensure the dominance of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in politics. By 1912 five more states had adopted women’s suffrage—California, Arizona, Washington, Oregon, and Kansas. Another twenty-two had women’s suffrage on certain subjects.
In the 1870s and 1880s agrarian organizations of the West such as the Grange and its successors, the Alliances, had encouraged women to work alongside men, albeit in supportive, secretarial roles, rather than as equal officeholders, and perhaps as many as a quarter of Southern Alliance members were women. Nevertheless, the agrarian revolt stimulated the activity of women in politics. The Populists included certain prominent women speakers, notably Mary Elizabeth Lease and Annie L. Diggs, both of Kansas, Eva McDonald of Minnesota, Marion Todd of Chicago, and Sarah Emery of Michigan.
The pivotal figure in the movement for women’s suffrage was Susan Brownell Anthony, originally of Massachusetts, whose first crusade was for the abolition of slavery. During the Civil War she was already the country’s leading suffragist, and by her campaign in 1860 won the right of women in New York State to control their own wages and to be guardians of their own children. As publisher of the Resolution, a shortlived weekly journal in New York City, she propounded the slogan “the true republic—men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” She formed the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) in 1889 and served as its president (1892-1900), with the aim of a constitutional amendment to grant women the vote. Although she died in 1906, fourteen years before the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, she also helped create the International Council of Women (1888) and, with Carrie Chapman Cart, the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in Berlin (1904). An indefatigable speaker to audiences, both welcoming and hostile, she endured the hardships of frontier travel and the rigors of resentful audiences to survive and become almost a national institution, widely respected as a superb organizer and executive.
Another activist feminist whose campaign began with the movement to abolish slavery was Elizabeth Cady Stanton of New York, one of the most influential women’s rights leaders and renowned as a journalist and superb orator. When she married the abolitionist lawyer and journalist Henry Brewster Stanton in 1840, she insisted upon the word “obey” being struck from the ceremony, a decision that seemed then a radical act of defiance. She and her husband had seven children. Together with Lucretia Mott she organized the first convention on women’s rights in the United States at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. Overriding Mott’s objections, she insisted on the bill of rights for women containing a suffrage clause. After meeting Susan B. Anthony in 1851, she decided to join her and they became a remarkable team. Stanton became the first president of the National Women Suffrage Association (1869), the precursor of NAWSA, which she also served as president. Together with Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, she compiled the first three volumes of the History of Woman Suffrage.
Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, who became the principal spokesman for the Progressives, was the scion of a wealthy New York family originally of Dutch extraction. His was the seventh generation to be born in Manhattan. His father, Theodore, was a Lincoln Republican later committed to reform movements. His mother, Martha Bulloch, was a southern belle who imparted to “Teedie” her love of heroics and sense of humor. Roosevelt was frail and hyperactive, suffering from violent attacks of asthma on Sundays and poor eyesight on weekdays. Yet he did well at Harvard and entered public life as an assemblyman in Albany in 1882 when he was twenty-three. Both his beloved mother and first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, died within hours of each other on February 14, 1884, in his house. For the next two years he retired to the private life of a rancher in the Badlands of Dakota Territory. His injunction to slow cowboys, “Hasten forward there quickly,” was much quoted in local saloons. In 1886 he married a childhood friend, Edith Kermit Carow, with whom he had five children, and reentered public life, first working as a civil service commissioner from 1889 to 1895 and then as president of the board of police commissioners in New York.
He served McKinley as assistant secretary of the navy, but during the war of 1898 resigned to get into the fighting. He assembled a motley crew of soldiers, the Rough Riders, each seeking adventure and glory. The courageous and dexterous performance of his regiment at San Juan Hill turned him into a legend. Subsequently Roosevelt described his wartime adventures in a best-selling book. Mr. Dooley’s advice to the author was, “If I was him I’d call th’ book ‘Alone in Cubia.’” He also suggested alternative titles: “Th’ Biography iv a Hero be Wan who Knows”; and “Th’ Darin’ Exploits iv a Brave Man be an Actual Eye-Witness, th’ Account iv th’ Desthruction iv Spanish Power in th’ Ant Hills, as it fell fr’m th’ lips iv Teddy Rosenfelt an’ was took down be his own hands.”
Although New York State was held by the Republicans, the administration there had been discredited by extravagan.ee and malpractice. The state boss, Senator Tom Platt, recognized that the only way the Republicans could retain power was by fielding a truly popular and untarnished candidate for governor in the state elections of 1898. Roosevelt was the obvious choice. But Platt was apprehensive that, as governor, Roosevelt would act as independently and aggressively as he had throughout his public career. His fears were justified after Roosevelt won the election and took office in 1899. Roosevelt refused to appoint to public office the party hacks nominated by Platt. Furthermore, he initiated independent social legislation of a kind that was anathema to the old guard on such subjects as conservation, labor, industrial safety, workmen’s compensation, and tenement dwellings.
Roosevelt then proposed a franchise tax to make street railways pay taxes on the true value of their franchises. He wanted to erode the outrageous profits of these traditional Republican supporters. Beside himself with rage, Platt had the speaker of the state legislature tear up Roosevelt’s message on the subject rather than read it to the assembly. Roosevelt responded by dispatching a second message on April 28, 1899, rallied his supporters, and had the bill passed over the unofficial veto of the boss. Platt realized that his days were numbered. If Roosevelt remained in office another two years, Platt figured he would destroy the entire boss system. Yet Roosevelt’s popularity was such that Platt could not deny him renomination in 1900 without discrediting the Republicans and inviting people to vote for the Democrats.
The triumphal entry of William McKinley to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo on President’s Day, September 5, 1901, was intended as a crowning moment of national self-congratulation over America’s own imperialism, industrialism, and republicanism. The tragic anticlimax of McKinley’s assassination the following day deepened the people’s respect for these things. (Photo by C. D. Arnold; Library of Congress.)
Platt decided to remove his exasperating protege by getting him nominated as vice-presidential candidate at the Republican National Convention in June 1900. Roosevelt, like others ambitious for the presidency itself, regarded his proposed elevation as a relegation. He told his confidant Henry Cabot Lodge, “I should be simply shelved as Vice President.” Not since Martin Van Buren in 1836 had an incumbent vice president been elected president. Lodge was the only one of Roosevelt’s friends who advised him to accept the nomination. However, Roosevelt’s growing popularity in the country at large and especially in the West worked against his initial inclination and for Platt. As far as Roosevelt’s many admirers were concerned, being vice president was better than being governor of New York. Mark Hanna liked Roosevelt and what he represented no more than Platt did. As national boss he could refuse Platt’s suggestion and indeed wanted to do so. But he realized that Roosevelt’s presence on the ticket would strengthen McKinley’s chances of reelection very considerably.
McKinley was duly renominated on June 19, 1900, in Philadelphia, and Roosevelt gave in to the Republican elders. The New York Journal carried a cartoon showing Platt as a cowboy astride a pony. He has thrown his lariat and caught Roosevelt by the foot and is ready to tie him up like a wild steer. Roosevelt did the active campaigning, visiting twenty-four states and making about 700 speeches. McKinley simply repeated his front porch campaign of 1896. Americans were urged: “Don’t haul down the flag” now that the Republicans had provided a “Full Dinner Pail.”
William Jennings Bryan was unanimously renominated at the Democratic National Convention in Kansas City on July 5. The Populists had already divided into two feuding factions. “The Spanish war finished us,” stated Tom Watson; “the blare of the bugle drowned the voice of the reformer.” In 1900 they once again fused with the Democrats.
In the election of 1900 McKinley took 7,218,491 votes to Bryan’s 6,356,734, a majority of 51.7 percent. He carried twenty-eight states to Bryan’s seventeen and with them 292 votes in the electoral college to Bryan’s 155. When Platt was asked if he would attend the inauguration, he replied, “Yes, I am going to see Theodore Roosevelt take the veil.”
On September 6, 1901, McKinley paid a second visit to the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo. In the Temple of Music he bent forward to give his customary red carnation to a little girl. He was shot in his stomach at close range by an unemployed artisan and self-styled anarchist, Leon Czolgosz. “I didn’t believe that one man should have so much service and another man should have none,” he told his captors afterwards. Like Garfield before him, McKinley did not die immediately of the gunshot wounds; gangrene set in and killed him eight days later. Roosevelt was on a family vacation in the Adirondacks when the news came that McKinley was dying. He set out for Buffalo and arrived after the president had died. On September 14, 1901, Roosevelt took the oath of office in the same house where McKinley lay dead. The Gilded Age was over. The Age of the Titans—Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson—had begun. As Walt Whitman remarked, “Produce great persons: the rest follows.”