The Progressive Era (1890 – 1920)
Progressivism is the term applied to a variety of responses to the economic and social problems rapid industrialization introduced to America. Progressivism began as a social movement and grew into a political movement.
The early progressives rejected Social Darwinism (survival of the fittest). In other words, they were people who believed that the problems society faced (poverty, violence, greed, racism, class warfare) could best be addressed by providing good education, a safe environment, and an efficient workplace.
Progressives lived mainly in the cities, were college educated, and believed that government could be a tool for change. Social reformers were powerful voices for progressivism. They concentrated on exposing the evils of corporate greed, combating fear of immigrants, and urging Americans to think hard about what democracy meant.
On a national level, progressivism gained a strong voice in the White House when Theodore Roosevelt became president in 1901. TR believed that strong corporations were good for America, but he also believed that corporate behavior must be watched to ensure that corporate greed did not get out of hand (trust-busting and federal regulation of business).
The Founders believed that all men are created equal and that they have certain inalienable rights. All are also obliged to obey the natural law, under which we have not only rights but duties.
We are obliged “to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves” (Jefferson). The main rights were thought to be life and liberty, including the liberty to organize one’s own church, to associate at work or at home with whomever one pleases, and to use one’s talents to acquire and keep property.
The Progressives rejected these claims as naive. In their view, human beings are not born free.
John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the Progressives, wrote that freedom is not “something that individuals have as a ready-made possession.” It is “something to be achieved.”
In this view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the state.
This brings us to the purpose of government.
For the Founders, thinking about government began with the recognition that what man is given by nature — his capacity for reason and the moral law discovered by reason — is, in the most important respect, more valuable than anything government can give him.
However, the Founders thought that civilization is indispensable for human well-being. Although government can be a threat to liberty, government is also necessary for the security of liberty.
As Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” But since men are not angels, without government, human beings would live in “a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger.”
For the Founders, then, Government is always and fundamentally in the service of the individual, not the other way around.
The purpose of government, is to enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing the people’s natural rights. It does so by preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others. In the founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.
Government’s main duty for the Founders was to secure that freedom — at home through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a strong national defense.
The Progressives regarded the Founders’ scheme as defective.
They rejected the Founders’ conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.
In accordance with their conviction that all human beings are by nature free, the Founders taught that political society is “formed by a voluntary association of individuals: It is a social compact, by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people, that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good” (Massachusetts Constitution of 1780).
For the Founders, government was to be conducted under laws, and laws were to be made by locally elected officials, accountable through frequent elections to those who chose them. The people would be directly involved in governing through their participation in juries selected by lot.
The Progressives treated the social compact idea with scorn.
For the Progressives, it was of no great importance whether or not government begins in consent as long as it serves its proper end of remolding man in such a way as to bring out his real capacities and aspirations.
For the Founders, government had to be limited both because it was dangerous if it got too powerful and because it was not supposed to provide for the highest things in life.
A society like the Founders’ that limits itself to protecting life, liberty, and property was one in which, as Progressive President Woodrow Wilson wrote with only slight exaggeration, “all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform and say, ‘Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else.'” Wilson thought that such a society was unable to deal with the conditions of modern times.
Wilson rejected the earlier view that “the ideal of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible.”
He stated that a government of this kind is unjust because it leaves men at the mercy of predatory corporations. Without government management of those corporations, Wilson thought, the poor would be destined to indefinite victimization by the wealthy and that previous limits on government power must be abolished.
In Progressivism, the domestic policy of government had two main concerns.
First, government must protect the poor and other victims of capitalism through redistribution of resources, anti-trust laws, government control over the details of commerce and production: i.e., dictating at what prices things must be sold, methods of manufacture, government participation in the banking system, and so on.
Second, government must become involved in the “spiritual” development of its citizens — not, of course, through promotion of religion, but through protecting the environment (“conservation”), education (understood as education to personal creativity), and spiritual uplift through subsidy and promotion of the arts and culture.
The Founders thought that laws should be made by a body of elected officials with roots in local communities. They should not be “experts,” but they should have “most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society” (Madison).
The Progressives wanted to sweep away what they regarded as this amateurism in politics. They had confidence that modern science had superseded the perspective of the liberally educated statesman. Only those educated in the top universities, preferably in the social sciences, were thought to be capable of governing.
Politics was regarded as too complex for common sense to cope with. Government had taken on the vast responsibility not merely of protecting the people against injuries, but of managing the entire economy as well as providing for the people’s spiritual well-being.
Only government agencies staffed by experts informed by the most advanced modern science could manage tasks previously handled within the private sphere.
The Progressives did not intend to abolish democracy, to be sure. They wanted the people’s will to be more efficiently translated into government policy. But what democracy meant for the Progressives is that the people would take power out of the hands of locally elected officials and political parties and place it instead into the hands of the central government, which would in turn establish administrative agencies run by neutral experts, scientifically trained, to translate the people’s will into concrete policies. It is not hard to see the connections between the progressive movement of the past and our current situation.
Whether one regards the transformation of American politics over the past century as good or bad, the foundations of that transformation were laid in the Progressive Era. Today’s liberals, and the teachers of today’s liberals, learned to reject the principles of the founding fathers from their teachers, the Progressives.
So how did we get where we are today? The progressive movement taught our current liberals some simple step to follow. This is how it works:
Step One – Dramatize and Talk up the Problem
How many times have you heard that the problem is big business, corporate greed and Wall Street? The rich are getting richer while children are starving in the streets. We are constantly bombarded with this nonsensical narrative.
Step Two – Make sure that no proper debate happens
What we get are sound bites, nothing more. No serious debate ever takes place. Both sides immediately revert to mudslinging and name calling, then move on to the next issue.
Step Three – Use the Mainstream Media and Public Institutions –
Do I even need to go here? We see media bias today like we have never seen throughout our history.
Step Four – Use the Education System to Indoctrinate Children –
Our schools have become a breeding ground for the teachings of the progressive movement. Common core and the liberal takeover of our colleges and University have created an entire generation of young people who are totally clueless when it come to the founding principles of our great nation.
Step Five – Legislate and get the Government to spend more money.
Here, the Progressives outdid themselves. They were successful in pushing through four constitutional amendments in a short span of roughly 10 years: the Sixteenth Amendment, authorizing a direct income tax (This provided the money they needed); the Seventeenth Amendment, establishing direct elections to the United States Senate (This shifted power from the States to the Federal Government); the Eighteenth Amendment, imposing prohibition (This demonstrated the power now wielded by the Federal government in imposing social reform) ; and the Nineteenth Amendment, (Giving women the right to vote and progressives a huge of political activists willing to join their cause for social reform).
Step Six – Intimidate –
Get into a discussion with a modern progressive and see how long it takes before you are told you are ignorant or labeled as a sexist, a racist, a bigot or a homophobe.
The irony here is that in the name of tolerance progressives impose their intolerance and tyranny.
Everyone in society is to be treated fairly and with dignity – except those who don’t agree with the progressive agenda!