Overview: The Progressive Era

Author(s): David M. Kennedy

Source: The Historian , MAY, 1975, Vol. 37, No. 3 (MAY, 1975), pp. 453-468
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24444043

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 Overview: The Progressive Era
By

David M. Kennedy*

//> ■ ^ he term 'progressive movement' has been so wide

** I used, so much discussed, and so differently interpret
I that any exposition of its meaning and principles, to
be adequate, must be prefaced by careful definition."
With those words in 1915, Benjamin Parke DeWitt opened t
first comprehensive discussion of progressivism, The Progressi
Movement. He wrote, he explained, in order "to give form an
definiteness to a movement which is, in the minds of man
confused and chaotic."1 Time has not been kind to DeWitt's
ambitious effort to dispel that chaos. His own contemporaries
may have been willing to agree with his basically flattering image
of them, but later observers have increasingly disagreed, not only
with DeWitt, but among themselves, about the character and
meaning of progressivism. Especially after the publication of
Richard Hofstadter's Age of Reform in 1955, the babble of dis
agreement rose to a discordant crescendo, so intense and distracting
that at least one of our colleagues has urged quiet interment as
the only way to restore order. In "An Obituary for the Progressive
Movement," Peter Filene, surveying the confusion about progres
sivism that nearly sixty years of scholarship have wrought, argues
that all the shouting has been about nothing after all. " 'The
progressive movement,' " he concludes, "never existed."2
The persistence of disagreement about progressivism from
DeWitt right down to our own time should humble all who still
wish to say something meaningful about the matter, or even to
continue to use the term. But the term, at least, seems fixed in
our lexicon, and despite Filene's funereal rites, most scholars
continue to assume the reality and importance of the subject.
Given the multiplicity and the tenacity of the attempts "to give
form and definiteness" to the progressive movement, perhaps an
overview can best begin with a review of those attempts at a general
statement that have been made in the past.
• The author is Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, Stanford,
California.
1 Benjamin Parke DeWitt, The Progressive Movement (Seattle, 1968; first
published 1915), 3, viii.
2 Peter G. Filene, "An Obituary for the Progressive Movement," American
Quarterly, XX (1970), 20-34.
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 The Historian

According to DeWitt, progressivism embraced three broad

goals which had been on the American political agenda for
twenty-five years by the time he was writing and which by the
appeared to him to be substantially accomplished: the remov
of corruption from public life, the enlargement of popular part
cipation in government, and the "conviction that the functions
of government at present are too restricted and that they must be
increased and extended to relieve social and economic distress."8
Historians ever since have been broadly in accord that those
objectives constituted a progressive program, though they have
given more attention to some parts of it than to others.
In equally broad terms, it can be argued that the interpretation
of progressivism has gone through five major phases, which have
roughly followed (though not necessarily supplanted) one another.
Those five major interpretive modes might be called, respectively,
the "progressive," the "consensual," the "new left," the "organi
zational," and the "neo-progressive" — all terms which, when
applied to specific authors, need some refinement. In a general
way, however, they do describe at least some recognizable patterns
in the three generations of scholarship on progressivism.

It is no mere coincidence, of course, that the first of the modes

just cited bears the same name as the object of study itself:
progressive. As John Higham has remarked, "the crucial fact"
that explains the distinctiveness of that powerfully influential
school of historians who came to maturity in the early part of this
century "was a broad sympathy with the spirit of reform then
developing in contemporary life."4 For DeWitt and his cohorts,
such as Charles Beard and V. L. Parrington, their conception of
their own political roles dictated their view of American history
in general, and especially of their own era: to them, progressivism
was just another battle, albeit a major one, between the forces of
democracy and the forces of privilege. Since the course of all
history, or at least all American history, could be explained as a
kind of Hegelian elaboration of the principle of democracy, the
outcome of that battle was never really in doubt.
The progressive view of history has been an extremely
appealing one: it embodies moral passion, has its own built-in
dramatic elements in the clash between the "people" and the
"interests," and contains also its own dynamic principle, which
makes it so adaptable to the narrative form that has for so long

' DeWitt, The Progressive Movement, 5.

•John Higham, History: The Development of Historical Studies in the United
States (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1965), 171.
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 Overview

characterized historical discourse. This compatibility of the

progressive view with the dominant American democratic myth,
and with the narrative form, has produced some monuments of
American historical scholarship and has made it a durable and
still compelling approach in the teaching and writing of our
history. But it is not a position without its liabilities. In the
case of the early twentieth century, its chief deficiencies have been
four: by postulating that history was made to move by a process
of cyclical confrontation between the people and the interests, the
progressive historians never bothered to inquire too rigorously
about the identity of reformers or about the timing of reform.
Moreover, given the general progressive eschatology, few serious
questions were raised about the purposes or the results of reform;
it was simply assumed to have been democratic in intention and
to have been largely successful. Its successes were further assumed
to have given the rest of the twentieth century its dominant
characteristics.

Richard Hofstadter, in The Age of Reform, launched a massive,

complex, and subtle assault on the progressive interpretation,
aiming especially at the questions of identity, timing, motive, and
outcome that the older generation had substantially ignored. His
has been called a "consensual" view, because Hofstadter, with so
many of his colleagues in the 1950s, approached the American past
with a skeptical attitude toward the older faith that history pro
gressed toward the realization of a democratic ideal through a cycle
of conflicts along economic lines. He acknowledged his own debt to
the progressive historians, most notably in taking, as they had,
reform itself as his unit of analysis. ("The surge of reform," he
wrote, "has set the tone of American politics for the greater part
of the twentieth century."5) But Hofstadter suspected (and often
regretted) the durability of certain features of American political
culture. Much of his work emphasized the persistent and perennial
factors, such as an abiding, common commitment to capitalism,
which gave coherence and unity to the American experience, rather
than the sharp divisions that the progressives had seen as constantly
generating its transformation. This emphasis was particularly
apparent in his second book, The American Political Tradition.
When he then came to examine progressivism, where division
appeared, at least, to be authentic, it led him to ask some troubling
questions. He questioned especially the assumptions about the
sources, inevitability, and results of reform that had inhered in
the older analysis. Who, he asked, were the progressives? Why

s Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), 3.

4iji>

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 The Historian

did they undertake reform at just this time? And what were th
results of their efforts?

To all of those questions Hofstadter gave answers of great

originality and persuasiveness. It would not be too much to say
that The Age of Reform was the single most influential book ever
published on the history of modern reform. Certainly it did more
than any other to undermine the older progressive analysis. But
it would be a mistake to conclude too quickly that Hofstadter
buried that analysis once and for all.
Hofstadter brought the most originality, perhaps, to his dis
cussion of progressive identity. Here he began with the work of
George Mowry and Alfred D. Chandler, who had shown that the
reformers in California and in the national Progressive party, at
any rate, were economically successful, predominantly urban,
middle-class persons. That fact by itself did much to qualify the
orthodox view that reform was a continuous tradition, always
carried forward by the underprivileged and disadvantaged. Hof
stadter immediately saw that Mowry's and Chandler's findings
distinguished progressivism from populism, with which the
traditional literature had usually identified it. But Hofstadter
drew a still more interesting implication when he noted that the
progressive era, unlike the populist era, had been marked by
general prosperity. "This fact," he wrote, "is a challenge to the
historian. Why did the middle classes undergo this remarkable
awakening at all, and why during this period of general prosperity
in which most of them seem to have shared? What was the place
of economic discontents in the Progressive movement? To what
extent did reform originate in other considerations?" Hofstadter's
answer is by now famous:
It is my thesis that [Progressive leaders], who might be
designated broadly as the Mugwump type, were Progressives
not because of economic deprivations but primarily because
they were victims of an upheaval in status that took place in
the United States during the closing decades of the nineteenth
and the early years of the twentieth century. Progressivism,
in short, was to a very considerable extent led by men who
suffered from the events of their time not through a shrinkage
in their means but through the changed pattern in the dis
tribution of deference and power.6
Several things about this passage, and about Hofstadter's
general argument, deserve comment. First, by distinguishing
populism from progressivism, Hofstadter implicitly suggested the
discontinuous character of the reform impulse. This, in turn, led

'Ibid., 135.

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 Overview

to two other considerations, the latter of which he made explicit

in his concluding pages: that the period around 1900 seemed to
mark a significant break with the past, the beginning of a "modern"
era, and that the New Deal represented the full fruition of the
modern reform tradition, the culmination of a process in which
the progressive period had been only a transistory, and even
contradictory, phase. Further, the notorious "status anxiety"
thesis, which Hofstadter applied only to progressive leadership,
pushed the question of identity and motivation of that leadership
to the center of critical attention and shifted the axis of inquiry
from an economic to a psychological plane. Among the important
findings to which this emphasis on the subjective sources of reform
led Hofstadter were the discovery of a "dark side" of progressivism,
especially manifest in nativism and a penchant for moral absolut
ism, and the conclusion that much progressive economic reform
had been hesitant, ambiguous, and far less effective than an older
view had had it. A persistent atavism, a hankering for an older,
more certain, but, in Hofstadter's judgment, obsolescent economic
order in which individual moral character could be tested, disposed
the progressives to seek "ceremonial solutions" to stubborn
economic problems that, presumably, a more economically self
interested and clear-sighted group would have resolved more
decisively. Though he did recognize that progressive reform had
provided valuable service in taming "industrial barbarism" and
in throwing "big business and the vested interests on the
defensive," Hofstadter nevertheless had opened the door to the
possibility that the progressive movement was not "progressive"
or "liberal" at all in the accepted sense of those terms.7
All of this went a long way toward eroding the older pro
gressive interpretation, but one should not overlook the extent
to which Hofstadter remained within the gross perimeter of the
progressive framework. Most significantly, Hofstadter took as his
subject the ancient progressive one: reform itself. He assumed,
as had his forebears, that the reform tradition, whatever its precise
character might be, was the dominant motif of twentieth-century
American political life. He even gave qualified agreement to the
proposition that "the insistence that the power of law be brought
to bear against [industrial abuses] is among our finest inheritances
from the Progressive movement."8 Hofstadter never really aban
doned, in other words, the notion that a fight, or at least the
elements of a fight, between "reform" and business had much to
do with the essence of progressivism.

■•Ibid., 242, 254.

8 Ibid., 242.

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 The Historian

If Hofstadter severely modified the progressive historiograph

ical framework while still remaining partly within it, the "new
left" view appeared to accept that framework while turning it
squarely on its head. The term "new left" has been much abused,
but writers of this persuasion (such as Gabriel Kolko and James
Weinstein) make in common a harshly critical appraisal of pro
gressivism as "the triumph of conservatism." On this view, the
reality of conflict, or at least potential conflict, between th
"people" and the "interests" is again affirmed, though usually only
implicitly, a presence waiting in the wings as it were, as the drama
of extending corporate control dominates the center of the stage
There should have been such a conflict, in other words, but the
people had no champions (one must make an exception of
Weinstein here, who finds a viable "anticorporation Left" in the
Socialist Party). The progressives — Kolko focusses particularly on
Theodore Roosevelt — were conservatives all along, interested only
in preserving the existing distribution of wealth and power. Pro
gressivism really amounted, Kolko tells us, to "political capitalism,"
the purposive and successful attempt by the largest and mos
powerful business interests to use the federal government to
achieve a measure of stability in the economic and social order
that private efforts had failed to accomplish.
Kolko's book The Triumph of Conservatism (1963) and to a
lesser extent James Weinstein's The Corporate Ideal in the Libera
State (1968) have received stiff criticism from most historians, and
a sympathetic response from many students in the last troubled
decade. Most of the professional commentary aims to show that
Kolko first narrowed progressivism to an extraordinarinly small
compass — federal regulatory legislation — and that he exaggerated
the degree of business control over that legislation by the arbitrary
limitation of his sources and the consequent nearly complete lack
of attention to factors other than business influence.9
Moreover, critics have pointed out that Kolko really said
nothing new when he remarked the basically pro-capitalist char
acter of progressivism. Certainly the so-called "consensus"
historians of the post-World War II period had been at pains to
point out the intramural and essentially capitalist character of
almost all American political debate. Kolko acknowledged as
much when he concluded, "No socially or politically significant
group tried to articulate an alternative means of organizing indus
trial technology. . . . Such a program was never formulated in
* John Braeman, "The Square Deal in Action: A Case Study in the Growth of
'The National Police Power,'" Change and Continuity in Twentieth-Century
America (New York, 1966), 35-80, is a valuable corrective to a part of Kolko's account.

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 Overview

this period either in America or Europe."10 Kolko therefore, so

the argument runs, simply repeated in stronger language what
others had long been saying: that America represents an unusually
successful conservative social order, whose "reforms" have them
selves had a basically conservative thrust. But what is striking in
the reception given Kolko's book is the vehemence with which
it was attacked by other historians who accused him, in effect, of
seeing the same patterns as they in American history. Perhaps the
explanation of that vehemence is to be found in the fact that
whereas the "consensus" writers tried to explain and account for
the conservative context of American history, new left writers
have seemed to blame historical actors for the consequences of
that context without sufficiently acknowledging the context itself.
As Joseph Huthmacher put it in commenting on Kolko's work,
"One is always free to regret that America is America because she
is America. But I'm not sure that preoccupation with such regrets
is conducive to best understanding or explicating the whys and
hows of American history."11
Kolko's work, however, has not been utterly without value in
the explication of those whys and hows. He has, for one thing,
provided a powerful incentive to the examination of early
twentieth-century political economy, a subject that had languished
before the advent of radical inquiries in the 1960s. He has, in
addition, been probably the most forceful single voice in debunk
ing for twentieth-century history Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s cele
brated dictum that "liberalism in America has been ordinarily
the movement on the part of other sections of society to restrain
the power of the business community." As Kolko said, "Only if
we mechanistically assume that government regulation of the
economy is automatically progressive can we say that the federal
regulation of the economy during 1900 to 1916 was progressive
in the commonly understood sense of the term."12 One can, of
course, turn Kolko's statement around, and say that we can call
the government understandings or detentes with private business,
which he discusses, "conservative" in the usual sense of that term
only if we mechanistically assume that the state has no function
other than to reinforce the existing structure of economic power.
In any case, Kolko has helped more than nearly any other writer

10 Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (New York, 1963), 305, 286.
u J. Joseph Huthmacher, "A Critique of the Kolko Thesis," in Otis L. Graham,
Jr., From Roosevelt to Roosevelt: American Politics and Diplomacy, 1901-1941 (New
York, 1971), 101-2.
12 Kolko, Triumph, 58.

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 The Historian

to demythologize the concept of the state that had inhered in a

great deal of liberal historiography.
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460

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 Overview

of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic

means."14
The assimilation of reform to the interests of ambitious elites
who shaped new organizational techniques for the purpose of social
control has led many people to link the Hays-Wiebe approach
with that of Gabriel Kolko. To be sure, there are points of contact.
All three of these authors, for example, demonstrate the anti
democratic character of much progressive reform. But the two
analyses are clearly distinguishable. Kolko is concerned with
showing the continuity of the power of an older capitalist class
that craftily used the state to defend its social and economic
position. Hays and to an even greater extent Wiebe, on the other
hand, argue that a new class, whose power came not from inherited
wealth or status but from the possession of new tools of science,
organizational expertise, and a broad, integrative social vision,
transformed early twentieth-century American society in an
aggressive drive to extend and amplify their influence.
This distinction is an important one, and it stems from an
important debate that followed the publication of The Age of
Reform, a debate in which Hays and Wiebe were intensely inter
ested but which attracted Kolko hardly at all. The point at issue
was the identity of the progressives. In brief, the debate revolved
around the idea of status anxiety that Hofstadter had introduced
as an explanation for progressive reform. Studies in several states
showed that the biographical profile Hofstadter had drawn
of the reformers was nearly identical to that of their opponents.
Hofstadter, in short (and Chandler and Mowry before him), had
not bothered to examine a control group to test the uniqueness
of his explanatory factor. As Hays concluded: "One cannot
explain the distinctive behavior of people in terms of character
istics which are not distinctive to them."15
In rejecting the status anxiety theory, Hays and Wiebe took
the first step in what became an almost complete repudiation of
Hofstadter's account of progressivism. For Hofstadter, the pro
gressives had always displayed a certain irrationality, a troubling
inability to come to terms with the conditions of twentieth-century
life. He spoke, for example, of "the protests of reformers against
... a managerial and bureaucratic outlook." "The central theme
in Progressivism," he said elsewhere, "was this revolt against the
industrial discipline: the Progressive movement was the complaint

"Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York, 1967), 166.
15 Hays, "The Politics of Reform," 158. There is a large literature on this
subject, best summarized in David P. Thelen, "Social Tensions and the Origins of
Progressivism," Journal of American History, LVX (1969), 323-41.
4b I

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 The Historian

of the unorganized against the consequences of organization."16

Compare this with Hays' statement that "The Progressive Era
witnessed rapid strides toward a more centralized system and a
relative decline for a more decentralized system. This development
. . . involved a tendency for the decision making processes inherent
in science and technology to prevail over those inherent in repre
sentative government."17 Or with Wiebe's remarks that the "new
middle class" found "the specialized needs of an urban-industrial
system" a "godsend,"18 that the reformers in the states were
"generally younger men with a passion for the future,"19 and
that the distinguishing characteristic of progressivism was its
penchant for "bureaucratic means."20 Surely Hays and Wiebe
have rescued the progressives from Hofstadter's charges of nostalgia
and irrationality, but one suspects that they have done so by
turning the progressives into the very people long supposed to be
their enemies. Hofstadter had not been unaware of the existence
of a new middle class and its association with progressivism, but
he did not pursue the point, and despite some confusion in Hof
stadter's account, he clearly believed the "typical" progressive —
or at least the typical progressive leader — to be a member of a
displaced older elite, yearning for the restoration of the moral
verities of the nineteenth century.21
There was, of course, always some controversy not only over
the motivation of Hofstadter's progressives but over their repre
sentativeness as well. Hofstadter appeared rather arbitrarily, in
fact, to assume that the genuine progressives were, in a general
sense, those who embraced the positions, especially anti-trust, put
forward by Woodrow Wilson in the presidential campaign of 1912,
known broadly as "The New Freedom." One looks in vain in his
pages for any sustained recognition of regulationists like Theodore
Roosevelt and Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann as authentic
progressives.
But the argument could be made that Hays and Wiebe have
embraced the contrary error — they have accepted as their norma
tive progressives those individuals (though individuals appear only
rarely in Wiebe's pages) who found the large corporate organization
a genial environment and worked to turn it to their own ends.
Both Hofstadter's definition and that of Wiebe and Hays

16 Hofstadter, Age of Reform, 10, 216.

17 Hays, "Politics of Reform," 169.
18 Wiebe, Search for Order, 113.
"Ibid., 177.
» Ibid., 166.
21 See, for example. The Age of Reform, 6-7, 217-20.
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 Overview

dismiss the reality of division among men who called themselves

progressive in the early twentieth century, and in Wiebe's case,
the argument that his progressives looked confidently to the future
and indeed charted the path to modernity is open to strong doubt
in light of Otis Graham's findings that only 40 percent of surviving
progressives supported the New Deal.
In short, the question of progressive identity, simple as it may
be to ask, is still a long way from being satisfactorily answered.
Even the substantial number of studies aimed at discrediting the
status anxiety thesis have not really begun to get at the crucial
part of that thesis: not men's objective social status, but their
subjective perception of that status. And about Hays' and Wiebe's
thesis of a new middle class made up of professionals, bureaucrats,
and experts as the normative progressives, a host of questions still
remain to be put. For one thing, most of the literature on the
nature of "professionalism" suggests its hostility to bureaucracy
and its preference for autonomy. To take one of Wiebe's most
striking examples, certainly the new organizational vitality of the
American Medical Association in the early twentieth century did
not make its members more amenable to bureaucratization in the
normal meaning of the word; if anything, the A.M.A. was designed
more to protect and encourage an old-style entrepreneurship in
what Wiebe nevertheless insists is a typically modernized profes
sion. At the very least, we need to put the Wiebe-Hays thesis to
the same kind of test to which the status anxiety thesis was
subjected: we need, in short, closer studies of the several
professions themselves, with special attention to the divisions
within professional groups. Did lawyers (or engineers) as a group,
for example, favor reform out of some compulsory, reflex response
to "the inner dynamics of professionalization?" An affirmative
answer hardly seems likely, yet the Wiebe-Hays approach tends
strongly to preclude any other response.22
Hays and Wiebe show a certain indebtedness to Hoftsadter
in their concern for the psychological and social, as distinct from
strictly economic, sources of reform, and Wiebe in particular
demonstrates his further obligation to Hofstadter in his preoccu
pation with the contingent character of progressivism, its
dependence on a particular historical moment and condition. But
on re-reading Wiebe, one begins to suspect that he has so far
transcended Hofstadter and other writers that he is not really
discussing progressivism at all. In his first book, Businessmen and

23 For the discussion in this paragraph, I am indebted to Wayne K. Hobson,

"Professionals, Progressives, and Bureaucratization: A Reassessment and Suggestions
for Further Research," Unpublished seminar paper, Stanford University. See also
Jerry Israel, ed., Building the Organizational Society (New York, 1972).
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 The Historian

Reform, he assumed a tangible progressive movement, one char

acterized by a more or less articulate philosophy of the publi
interest, in which businessmen occasionally participated when i
suited their purposes but of which they formed no permanent,
reliable part. In the Search for Order, progressivism was so closel
identified with the general process of bureaucratization that one
wonders what distinguished it from other elements in the society
and wonders equally why Wiebe still used the traditional nomen
clature. (Ironically, Wiebe had criticized Hays on just this count
in Businessmen and Reform.)23 In a recent article, Wiebe seems
finally to have acknowledged the logical implication of his
approach:
The fundamental issue at stake in the history of the
progressive period is modernization. . . . What has happened
to the history of the progressive era, therefore, is far more than
an alteration in priorities, de-emphasizing one problem in
order to emphasize another. The cast of our picture is so
different we can no longer say it contains more of this, less
of that, in comparison with an older view. The subjects that
exercised an earlier generation of historians are being trans
formed to serve very different purposes. While the works of
these scholars provide an indispensable accumulation of infor
mation and a pattern of questions and answers no one wishes
to ignore, recent historians have tried to see all of this through
another lens, to begin again in their search for the proper
angle of historical vision. ... In sum, the current student of
the progressive years wants to know how American society was
put together and how it functioned. Behind these investiga
tions is a compelling sense that something big was abroad in
the land around 1900 . . . and it is this feeling which has
elevated modernization — the term that best captures its
essence — to the place of primacy.
We should now emphasize, he says, "major social changes that
subordinate reforms and reformers to the process of America's
modernization." With Peter Filene, he says that "we should
discard such terms as "progressive' and "progressive movement'
as imprecise and misleading."24
This certainly seems to throw out the baby with the bath
water. It purports to settle the issue of progressivism by simply
dismissing it as too complex, or subsuming it in a larger construct,
modernization, which may have considerable interest in its own
right. Wiebe seems to be declaring his own farewell to reform,
23 Robert H. Wiebe, Businessmen and Reform (Chicago, 1968), 271.
24 Robert H. Wiebe, "The Progressive Years, 1900-17," in William H. Cartwright
and Richard L. Watson, Jr., eds., The Reinterpretation of American History and
Culture (Washington, D.C., 1973), 425-32.
464

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 Overview

or at least the study of it. The result was perhaps predictable given
the welter of confusion that recent scholarship on the subject has
produced.
But not all scholars are prepared to heed Wiebe's call to ignore
petty surface conflict and concentrate instead on the deeper,
inexorable currents of modernization. Many remain convinced
that the intense political partisanship of the progressive period,
so far from being a misleading distraction, constituted instead its
distinguishing characteristic. David P. Thelen's study of Wisconsin
is a case in point. In his emphasis on conflict and the importance
of popular protest, Thelen harks back to the perspective of
progressive histriography. But there are important differences.
Thelen, for example, quite ingeniously cuts the Gordian knot of
progressive identity by giving up the search for a single, all
embracing definition of the typical progressive. Rather, he seeks
to explain what brought different people together into a progres
sive coalition, and he finds his answer in the Depression of 1893-97.
That experience touched so many lives so deeply, usually in
economic terms, that it nurtured a coalition that cut across class,
economic, religious, and ethnic barriers and was unified by a
consciousness of the common cause, or public interest, that Thelen
calls The New Citizenship.25 He leaves little doubt that in
Wisconsin, at least, progressivism was real, that it had specific,
largely economic, historical roots, that it was characterized by a
distinctive ethos, and that it accomplished concrete results.
So there is that fragment to shore against the ruins that so
many other recent scholars of progressivism have left us. Thelen
is undoubtedly right when he refuses to look for the normative
progressive and finds unity instead in a shared experience with
different implications in different cases, but an experience that
nevertheless produced, however briefly, common commitment to
something called "the public interest." There are times, history
suggests, when a diffuse sense of engagement with a larger com
munity is a more palpable reality than usual. The progressive era,
it seems, was one such time. Sheldon Hackney, for example, in
his study of Alabama, has also found the progressives in that state
possessed of a "genuine public spirit," and, as in Wisconsin, a
common consciousness of their roles as consumers was a major
factor in bringing Alabamians together in a progressive coalition.28
Ideology, in short, was important.

x David P. Thelen, The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin,

1885-1900 (Columbia, Mo., 1972).
M Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, N.J.,
1969).

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 The Historian

But, as Samuel Hays has vigorously argued, one should not

confound ideology with behavior. What we need now, therefore,
are fewer studies of what progressive leadership said and more
inquiries into what they did, and what their followers did, espe
cially at the polls. We have precious few analyses of the progressive
electoral base and nothing for the progressive period that matche
the rigor and sophistication of the electoral analyses that scholars
like Paul Kleppner and Richard Jensen have given us for the late
nineteenth century. Surely the elections of 1912 and 1918, so long
focal points in discussions of progressivism, deserve some such
analysis.
We also need another kind of study of the electoral process.
The progressives themselves defined their movement as embracing
three broad goals: an end to corruption, majoritarian political
reforms, and increased government intervention in social and
economic affairs. Of these, the area that has received the least
study has been the area of political reform. We now know that
despite the rhetoric of increased political participation and despite
the achievement of reforms like the direct primary and the direct
election of senators, in fact political participation declined dras
tically in the progressive era. Whereas in 1896 roughly 85 percent
of the potential electorate actually voted in the presidential elec
tion, by 1904 that figure had declined to about 65 percent, and it
eroded still further in the years thereafter. Why was this so?
Walter Dean Burnham writes that the chief function of the
"fourth party system" was "the substantially complete insulati
of elites from attacks by the victims of the industrializing process
and a corresponding reinforcement of political conditions favori
an exclusively private exploitation of the industrial economy."
This is an objective not unlike that Samuel Hays has attributed
to certain urban reformers, but other than his work and Jam
Weinstein's on the city commission and manager movements, w
have few systematic studies of the rather striking disparity betwe
progressive majoritarian ideology and the real results of elector
reform. What evidence there is, however, tends strongly to s
stantiate the conclusion that in electoral matters progressivism
was in effect a conservative, even reactionary, affair.
There is another problem that deserves more attention. It i
the problem that new left writers in particular have urged upo
us: the relation of the state to the economic order. Too much of
the work on this question has been plagued either by the facile
liberal assumption that the state always asserts the public interest
27 Walter Dean Burnham, "Party Systems and the Political Process," in Walter
Dean Burnham and William Nisbet Chambers, eds., The American Party Systems:
Stages of Political Development (New York, 1967), 301.
466

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 Overview

or by a version of the Marxist postulate that the state is only the

executive committee of the ruling class and that its role, therefore,
must be simply to reinforce the pre-existing economic realities.
In fact, in a formally democratic system, once the premise is
granted that the state has a legitimate role to play in economic
matters —and the legitimating of that premise was one of the
things with which progressivism was most concerned — then the
precise use and influence of the state's power is up for grabs. It
is up for grabs not only in the drafting of the original legislation,
but continuously in the operation of the agencies in question.
Any judgment about the nature and employment of political power
in the economy, therefore, cannot rest on legislative history alone.
To be more specific, one of the principal weaknesses of Kolko's
account of "political capitalism" is the fact that his book ends
in 1916. The evidence that he presents — that business groups
were interested in and significantly shaped legislation that was
allegedly intended to regulate those very groups — should surprise
no one, and it is not, by itself, very interesting or conclusive
information. What we need are more histories of agencies and
industries over time that will allow more conclusive judgments
on the very important issues he raises.
Such histories will prove most profitable if they proceed from
an informed consciousness of the uniqueness to America of the
institution of the independent regulatory commission. The
ideology behind that institution is one with deep roots in the
American political tradition, stemming from eighteenth-century
notions about limited and divided sovereignty, and reflecting the
progressive period's distinctive fusion of the traditional fear of
power that is a legacy from the Revolutionary period with the
late nineteenth-century faith in the neutrality and beneficence of
science. Ironically, political scientists like Grant McConnell and
Theodore Lowi seem more sensitive to these historical considera
tions than most historians who write about the modern era.28 We
need, in short, to deepen our understanding of the peculiarly
American context of political economy through comparative study.
Ours is a notoriously, and sadly, parochial guild, but surely there
is much to be learned from comparing the progressive experience
with reform efforts in other industrial societies.
Finally, we must recapture the historicity of the progressive
period. J. R. Pole has remarked that Americans lack "that sense,
inescapable in Europe, of the total, crumbled irrecoverability of
the past, of its differentness, of the fact that it is dead."29 If that
28 See Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York,
1967), and Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York, 1969).
M Quoted in John Higham, Writing American History: Essays on Modem
Scholarship (Bloomington, 1970), 166.
467

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 The Historian

is a failing of American culture it is one that American historian

— who might be expected to have a certain immunity from such
an attitude — have not managed to escape. The instrumental
orientation of progressive historiography, which despite everything
seems still to be our dominant tradition, makes easy, even nece
sary, the assumption that the past is closely related to the present.
Virtually everyone who has written about the progressive era ha
made that assumption (Wiebe, for example, says that "we are
asked to see the shape of our time, however rough, emergin
around those years").30 One consequence has been the heaping
upon the heads of the progressives the blame for a good many
problems that might best be laid at the door of later generations
Of the authors considered here, only Richard Hofstadter (and
one might also mention his student, Otis Graham) seemed deeply
to appreciate the gulf that separates the progressives from us. Much
of the confusion and contradiction that his pages registered
reflected not so much the deficiencies of his own analysis as the
unavoidable ambiguities facing a generation whose task it was t
begin the transformation of the liberal tradition from a defense
against state power to a justification for it. In the realm of political
economy, one splendid recent monograph, Robert Cuff's Τ he Wa
Industries Board, has noted the tendency of almost all other recent
students of the progressive period to "exaggerate the modernity of
America's response to the crisis of World War I." In fact, he
finds, the War Industries Board, so often cited as a typicall
progressive accomplishment and a link to the revival of reform in
the New Deal, reveals the "complexity, hesitancy, and ambiguity
with which government and business leaders alike approached war
mobilization. All parties concerned, writes Cuff, felt a profound
"ambiguity toward the role of the state."31
The progressive era, in sum, was an era of transition, and that
transitional character is one of its most significant aspects. We
cannot look to it for the source of all aspects of our modern life
nor can we make the progressives the heroes or the scapegoats fo
the triumphs or failings, as the case may be, of the rest of the
century. Progressivism, after all, is past, and must be so treated
But past does not mean irrelevant, and certainly does not mean
nonexistent. The persistent interest in progressivism as an object
of study, and the wide range of important and interesting work tha
remains to be done, prompt the conclusion that, as with Mark
Twain, reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated.

30 Wiébe, "The Progressive Years," 426.

81 Robert D. Cuff, The War Industries Board: Business-Government Relations
During World War I (Baltimore, 1973), 5-7.
468

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