The Story of America: The Rise of the Progressives [Ep. 40]

On this episode of Our American Stories, the 1896 election made one thing clear: William Jennings Bryan and the Populists had tapped into a growing sense that many Americans were being left behind by a rapidly changing nation. Though Bryan lost, the reformers behind his movement lived on. Soon, a new generation of reformers known as Progressives would seek to modernize government, curb corruption, and apply expertise and administration to the problems of industrial America.

In this installment of our Story of Us—Story of America series, Dr. Bill McClay, author of Land of Hope, shares the story of the rise of the Progressive Movement and explains the ideas that reshaped American politics and society in the early 20th century.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories.
Up next another installment of Our Story of Us The
Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author
of the terrific book Land of Hope, doctor Bill McLay.
Although populist William Jennings Brian would lose the election to
William McKinley, he'd start a revolution would come to be

(00:32):
known as the Progressive Movement. Let's get into this story.
Take it away, Bill.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
It turns out that Brian won more votes six point
five million than any candidate in American history except for
McKinley's performance that year. The fact was there was little
reason to believe this Reform Party was some kind of blip.

(00:58):
But to gain enough traction to win the presidency, the
reform torch would have to be taken up by the
Progressive movement, which included a more middle class and professional dimension.
The progressive movement was filled with educated Americans, civic minded
Americans dabout who were religious and quite earnest morally speaking.

(01:23):
They didn't just wish to address poverty in the poor,
but to change the governance and systems that brought about
that poverty, and by doing so, they would restore democracy itself.
They supported real changes in hope of restoring what they
believed were the classic American values, older value. The movement

(01:47):
started not at the national level, but at the local level.
In the city of Toledo, Ohio, for example, Samuel Golden
Rule Jones, a self made millionaire and Christian socialist, created
free kindergartens, public parks and baths, and the eight hour
work day, all very popular reforms. In Cleveland, Mayor Tom

(02:09):
Johnson was an even bolder reformer than his Toledo counterpart.
One popular fight for reformers was over control of electricity
and water. These reformers wanted household essentials like that controlled
by public rather than private interests. By nineteen fifty, nearly
two thirds of cities had publicly owned water systems, and

(02:31):
many had public transportation too, along with electricity. This was,
to the progressive mindset, a nod to what they called
the public interest. The public interest set apart by the
self interest. The idea was simple, pursuit of the public
interest was the highest ideal and the chief concern of government.

(02:52):
This belief was predicated on the progressive distrust of politics itself,
which they believed was a never ending series of wheeling
and dealing with business and private interests, and manifested in
vote trading or worse, vote buy you. What progressives preferred
was an expert managerial class to run the government for

(03:15):
its own sake and protection, with the added benefit that
they the experts, would have no outside conflicts of interest
getting in their way. To support the public interest, those
experts could proceed in a more scientific and disinterested way
due to their expertise. From all this sprang the creation

(03:35):
of the city manager system of government, with the City
of Dayton, Ohio leading the charge. What that looked like
was quite simple. An unelected professional city manager with the
proper credentials generally gained in the universities, was hired by
the city council to run the many city departments, all
of whom would report not to the city council but

(03:57):
to the city manager, the disinterested expert himself. This system
would by nineteen twenty three, be in place in more
than three hundred cities across the country in one form
or another. Changes were about to happen in state governments
as more governors battled with powerful corporate interests such as
the railroads. Progressives looked to usure in changes in how

(04:20):
laws were made, introducing ideas like the initiative, which would
allow citizens to end run the legislature in passing laws.
And then there was a referendum which gave the people
the power to overrule their legislatures. And last, but not least,
the party primary process would strip party bosses, presumably of

(04:43):
their power. This all showcased a real paradox at the
heart of progressive thinking. On the one hand, they were
quite skeptical of democratic political institutions and look favorably on
the ideas of experts and professionals wherever possible. On the
other hand, they had real faith in the people and

(05:04):
the people's ability to make positive changes reflecting the public interest.
In short, they had great faith in democracy, but much
less faith in democratic institutions. In some places, these new
ways of thinking about government worked In Wisconsin, Robert Lefalet
would give birth to what would be called the Wisconsin idea,

(05:28):
in which government, informed by the best and latest research
at their big local university, the University of Wisconsin at Madison,
would create and put into action the very best thoughtful
policies based on science. The science of government, so to speak.
Rather than the offerings or demands of political pressure groups.

(05:49):
The hope, ideally would be that this process of governance
would produce better government and better delivery of government services
and weed out government corruption. If there was a great
example of this kind of government, it was Wisconsin. But
there were cracks in this system. Progressives, it turns out,
believed human beings were basically good and that evil was

(06:11):
a product of bad social systems. They didn't subscribe to
the idea that there could be something wrong or unchangeable,
or even sinful deep within the soul of the individual.
They also refuted the notion that problems in governance and
government could be solved by a system of competition in
which ambitious people would be countered by other ambitions and interests.

(06:35):
This had been a deeply and longly held American view,
tracing back to James Madison and the Constitution, which is
structured around just such a system of competition. Correction would
be found in improvement discovered through science and the expert class.
Progressives believed this. They believed there was a form of

(06:57):
social intelligence that would prop they ordered the affairs of
human beings and citizens, and that was the problem. There
was an arrogance underlying the progressive view, a form of
paternalism that actually could be shocking, a form of hubris
which could have tragic consequences. Progressives had little understanding or

(07:22):
concern for the plight, for instance, of racial minorities or
religious minorities, and they failed to see that many immigrants
tended to have larger families, and this was a deep
and genuine cultural norm, not some kind of social problem.
It sometimes became impossible to distinguish between the reformers desire

(07:42):
to uplift the people they serve and their desire to
remold and reshape them more to their liking. A shocking
number of progressives came to see real merits in a
growing scientific field, eugenics, a theory that pushed for human
engineering that would all be and what progressives deemed to
be undesirables from the general population. So there was a

(08:06):
battle between the scientific wing of progressivism and the religious wing.
Big conflicts and bigger questions emerged. How could one square
the purifying elements of progressivism with the Christian ethos that
respects each and every human life as equal, equal under
the law, and equally made in the image of God.

(08:27):
How could this scientific efficiency gospel on the workplace front.
How could that be squared with the Christian notions of
the dignity of all work and of the worker. How
could progressives hold these almost diametrically opposed value systems together.
And there's one more important point here. These progressives were

(08:48):
not radical socialists or communists. There was no desire to
destroy capitalism or private property. What they instead hoped for
was to make capitalism more humane, to soften capitalism's rough edges,
and improve such dire earth necessities as worker safety and satisfaction.
Question remained, how to do that? To that question, there

(09:11):
were two answers from their progressives. The first is best
described as the antitrust method. Give government the power to
break up large concentrations of power and wealth, prevent monopolies,
keep all good and healthy competition alive, all of which
would serve the public interest. The second approach, which we'll

(09:32):
call the consolidation method, would accept concentration and bigness in
some businesses as a necessary evil and even a public good,
one that made possible efficiencies based on scale, the kind
of scale that delivered better outcomes to consumers. It was
better to regulate them with the public interest in mind.

(09:55):
Both approaches had been adopted in some form or another
in the economy. The question was which would come to
dominate the reform movement in the years to come and
to some extent today. But one thing was clear. Despite
its city and state beginnings, progressivism would need to grow
into a national movement addressing national issues if it were

(10:15):
to have any real and lasting impact on the country.
Perhaps the biggest lingering question for the progressive movement was
the Constitution itself. Was our founding documents still the pillar
of our governance and the foundation of American law? Or
was the Constitution outdated, not up to the challenges of
modern industrial life. These were questions being asked in almost

(10:37):
every walk of American life, and sooner or later they
would have to be answered.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
The Story of Us The Story of America series with
Bill McLay on our American Stories