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A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920

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"Progressivism" is one of the vaguer words in the history of American politics, and we could always do with a new attempt to define it. And Michael McGerr's new book starts out promisingly. There is an apparently detailed description of the very rich, workers and farmers which appears to be based on the latest research. The book is supported with sixty pages of notes, though there are no archival sources, and the primary sources are mostly from the usual suspects (Wilson, Roosevelt, Jane Addams, plus a few memoirs from Hamlin Garland and Rahel Golub.) McGerr continues with a discussion of the middle class, and how concern over increasing class conflict and social instability encouraged them to support a Progressive philosophy-one that encouraged a sense of association instead of the old individualism, as well as a strong Protestant moralism that valued duty and discouraged pleasure. He then looks at how Progressives sought to change Americans, such as by encouraging school attendance, supporting prohibition, attacking divorce and improving country life. There then follow chapters on limiting class conflict, regulating big business, and imposing segregation. However, Progressivism does meet its nemesis. The rise of the automobile and modern transportation, the rise of popular amusements and jazz, and a more liberal attitude towards sexuality threatens Progressivism's stern ethic. The attempts to encourage government regulation in the First World War only undercut support for it, leading to the disastrous electoral defeat of 1920. In the end, McGerr concludes, this reinforces the "basic lesson" that "reformers should not try too much."

Unfortunately on closer examination one sees that McGerr has produced a superficial book. It's not just that looking at the endnotes one finds that most of the book could have been written a decade earlier with little loss, with some chapters printed two or three decades earlier. It's not just that the chapters on labor and business are not especially original. There are larger problems with causation and logic. One of the things researchers in the seventies and eighties noted about Progressivism was its variety. It had supporters in all regions, it appealed to workers and farmers as well as the middle class, it appealed to immigrant Catholics, Protestant moralists, and secular intellectuals. Progressives could be in both parties, and included racist imperialists and the most humane socialists. Instead of dealing with this variety, McGerr limits it to the middle class, since none of the other groups "advocated the full range of progressive positions as consistently as the middle class did." The problem is that the same middle class made up the overwhelming majority of politicians in the unProgressive Gilded Age, as well as the overwhelming majority of politicians in the age of Harding and Hoover. In the fifties Richard Hofstadter introduced the idea of "status anxiety." This idea was a flawed one, but at least it tried to explain why some of the middle class supported Progressivism and others didn't. McGerr never does so.

There are other gaps. There is no discussion of Progressivism in a comparative context, so we do not learn how successful they were in comparison with their European contexts (This is especially true of their view of the state). Much discussion of Progressivism asks about its connection with modernity. Was the Progressive endorsement of such things as prohibition and racial segregation a sign of its reactionary character? Or did such measures show how "modern" apparently reactionary people as prohibitionists and racists were? And if so, what does that say about modernity as a whole? McGerr does nothing to answer this question. There is no discussion of foreign policy before the First World War, no real discussion of why the United States entered the war, and little discussion of its postwar plans. This complicates the whole idea of a Progressive break with its predecessors and successors. There are obvious continuities with McKinley and Roosevelt, and scholars such as William A. Williams and Frank Costigliola have pointed out that the twenties was not an era of simple minded isolationism.

There are problems with McGerr's emphasis on pleasure as the solvent of Progressivism. There is an emphasis on increasing sexuality, but there are no facts about illegitimacy, pre-marital sex, prostitution or abortion. Moreover, far from dying in 1920, the twenties marked the triumph of Prohibition, and it was still an electoral winner for Herbert Hoover in 1928. Not did Protestant Hegemony go away either. At other points McGerr takes his sources' complaints at face value, whether about Progressive distaste for the vulgarly wealthy or Republican complaints about the First World War. It is not clear why regulation of the economy should be so fatal to the Democrats, when conservatives accepted a version of it in Britain and France and won the post-war elections. And to say that Progressives shouldn't have tried too hard simply reflects journalistic cant and its willingness to split the differences between the two sides, as well as its easy contempt for people with more principle. One could ask industrial workers denied a union, immigrants and African-Americans living with the GOP's enormous condescension, or Sacco and Vanzetti whether Republican domination was simply part of the natural balance of things. Ultimately this is a book that is less than it appears. In such works scholars tend to summon up amusing anecdotes as a substitute for analysis. But McGerr is no Orlando Figes or Simon Schama. The most memorable story concerns the fact that J.P. Morgan, when he didn't like the tune of the hymn being played, would ostentatiously jingle the coins in his pocket. Those crazy rich people.

In A FIERCE DISCONTENT, Michael McGerr, has written compact history of progressivism -- the wide, complex river of reform that began to overrun the constrictive banks of Victorianism in the 1870s, gathered force and power with the tacit and sometimes outright approval of the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, and then vanished into the great cataract of the Red Scare in the immediate aftermath of WWI. Through a narrative of the social and economic cross-currents which progressives attempted either to control or unleash, a narrative interwoven with a terse biographies of reformers as well as those whom they hoped bring into confluence with their vision of the "middle-class paradise" (in William James' scornful elitist characterization), McGerr tells a story of epic sweep.

"To change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; to segregate society" were, according to McGerr, the four quintessential battles of the progressive movement. With this formulation he thus includes Carrie Nation as a progressive, making a strong argument that in her attacks on drinking and barrooms she was attempting to change the behavior of men, and in so doing, improve the lives of women, and change society for the better. He also includes Frank Lloyd Wright, who in his "destruction of the box" and the creation of the prairie style attempted to refashion the very spaces that people lived in. Along the way, we fall in with Jane Addams, Roosevelt, the Wobblies, Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, and less well-known people such as Rahel Golub, a young girl from New York's Lower East Side who develops the "double vision" of the immigrant daughter -- one eye seeing the middle-class America as embodied by the settlement workers, and the other eye seeing the inside of her tenement, her workbench and her suddenly constrained life.

By concentrating on the extra-political activities of the progressives, such as the anti-divorce and Chatauqua movements, McGerr shifts the emphasis away from usual story of the Progressives later political interventions. What comes across most clearly in this history therefore is the evangelical zeal with which the reforming middle-class attempted to change not just the economic and social arrangements of America and the American state, but the American people. They sought to spread their "Social Gospel" among both the lordly "upper ten" at the top and the working classes who slaved at the bottom in the sweatshops. Believing that if these undisciplined classes at the extremes of the spectrum could be made to see the error of their ideological assumptions and adopt the progressive ideal of "association," (as opposed to the creed of individualism among the "upper ten" and the mutualism of the working classes), then these groups would come to see the wisdom of the progressive approach.

Progressives attempted to bridge the social distance between the rich and poor through the mediating ideology of association. An ideology probably more socialistic than they would care to admit, the progressives of the middle-class, their lives transformed by the dislocations caused by rampant industrial capitalism of period after the Civil War, attempted, in turn, to transform society at large, to domesticate its protagonists and harness its chaotic and often violent energies. As McGerr points out, for the poor that meant such programs the establishment of settlement houses in their neighborhoods, such as Jane Addams Hull-House, where the poor could be gently brought into contact with their social betters, and indoctrinated into the ways of the progressivism. (Indoctrination is perhaps too strong a word here for the progressives never had one single absolute agenda, which turned out to be both one of its strengths and its liabilities).
For the wealthy they first used the weapon of public remonstrance, raising a hue and cry over the immoral extravagance of the lifestyles of the hyper-rich during the Gilded Age. The ultra-rich were taken to the woodshed by such progressives as Thorstein Veblen; eventually they learned never to expose themselves to such scrutiny. Later, as reformers grew in power and influence, political strategies were instituted: the progressive income tax and, depending on Roosevelt's political needs, trust-busting, and labor negotiations.

We can now see that in the last of the four battles -- to segregate society -- that the "good" intentions of Progressives had in this battle actually caused harm to the American promise of equality of opportunity and social justice. Under the spell of eugenics as elaborated by sociologists and anthropologists, progressives encouraged segregation as a means to avoiding conflict. Progressives looked away as African Americans, two generations after the Civil War and increasingly unwilling to toe the racial line any longer, were viciously "put in their place" by lynch mobs and a revived KKK across the South. McGerr notes that the politics of exclusion were reversed for the Indians. The Federal government worked hard to assimilate American Indian tribes. The difference? Land. To get Indian land the government under Roosevelt passed legislation that gave Indians individual title to parcels of land. Then, the ten of thousands of acres stolen through this process were then were sold to speculators and ranchers.

Nearly overwhelmed by the assault of modernism as it broke down categories of time and space, the rise of individualism in the modernist movements in art, architecture and literature, and by the pleasure principle of early consumer society, progressive morality shifted to include the possibility of both collectivism and individualism. But when the Red scare broke, when even a secular saint like Jane Addams was suspected of being a Bolshevik, the death knell for progressivism was sounded. McGerr suggests that we live in the disappointed wake of the progressive era, and in the flotsam and jetsam of gutted programs, half-funded reforms and rhetoric. Poisoned by the relentless stream of invective poured out on liberal reform and big government by conservatives from Coolidge on, the epic attempt to reform America has resulted in the "less-than-epic" politics of today where we are skeptical of both government and of reform.

McGerr's book is a valuable resource on helping to define who the progressives were and what they wanted to accomplish. The Progressives were at their peak in influence from the late 19th Century until the end of World War I, from Theodore Roosevelt's administration to Woodrow Wilson's administration. As McGerr stated, Progressives wanted to transform Americans into their own image of a middle class society, uplifting the poorest workers while chastising the wealthiest. It is this transformative vision that makes the Progressive movement stand out from most other political movements in our country's history. In addition to transforming Americans, McGerr says Progressives wanted to end class conflict, use government to control big businesses, and use segregation to help implement their objectives successfully.

McGerr is effective in adding the human dimension to his history of Progressivism. The Garlands, young Rahel Golub and her immigrant family, the Bradley-Martins and others are all used to give an image of who some of the wage laborers, upper class and progressive reformers were. The reformers include many of the standard names like Hull-House founder Jane Addams, salon smashing Carrie Nation, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and a host of other reformers in all different strata of society. Many organizations that formed to support the various agendas of the Progressive movement are also mentioned, including the Anti-Saloon League, the Country Life Commission, and others that represented various Progressive causes.

I felt the author was most focused on and interested in the Progressive belief in transforming other people to conform to this middle class vision of society and he handles the issue very ably. Whether it be their dislike of rugged individualism or their crusades against personal vices like divorce and alcohol or their belief in the promises of education, the Progressives truly believed people could be changed and molded into their way of thinking. While a bold and radical idea, it is also naive and arrogant. As time revealed, people grew tired and resistant to the Progressive idea of changing people's attitudes and way of living. Times had changed with technological innovations like the automobile and new recreational and leisure activities that allowed for a new sense of personal freedom. The effects of World War I and the new challenges in a post-war society also added to the decline of Progressive ideals.

Surprisingly, I didn't think the author gave a lot of attention to more of the legislative accomplishments of the Progressive Era, especially during the Wilson Administration, but overall as well. He mentioned many topics that led to enacted legislation, but generally with little detail. McGerr is quite good in showing the larger picture and how people reacted to the movement and how external factors effected its progression and or decline. The social aspects of the Progressive movement are his clear strong points. From a political standpoint I think the author was more sympathetic to the more radical reformers who wanted greater, more broad-sweeping reform. He shows the Progressives for who they were and what they hoped to achieve, with their strengths and their flaws. I think he is right in assessing the times we live in as a bit disappointing politically. But as he stated, that is one of the consequences of the Progressive Era with its high hopes and expectations, expectations that realistically could never be accomplished.

The Progressives can be credited for bringing many political, economic and social issues to the forefront of public debate as well as leaving a legacy of some very notable legislative accomplishments that endure to this day. Ultimately, they could not overcome the innate belief held by so many concerning the importance of the individual and that person's belief in being allowed to achieve whatever type of life and way of living they felt entitled to pursue without other individuals, groups or government telling them how to live. As McGerr stated in his conclusion, the Progressives overreached; they tried to accomplish too much. The backlash it produced has led other leaders as well as a large section of the population to approach any mention of reform, at least in relation to individuals, with a justifiable amount of caution.

This well-done account of the rise of the Progressive Movement is as good on the history of the period, and is studded with many interesting details about the Victorian period in the gestation of the great challenge to the world of big business. Notable, and what makes the book out of the ordinary, is depiction of the limits of the movement seen in the account of the movement's attitudes toward segregation. This was also the era of consolidated Jim Crow, where were the Reformer? The book is food for thought indeed given the strange similarity to our own era of politics, or lack of it.

Advertised as an overview of the Progressive movement, A Fierce Discontent is more an effort to explore the psychology and social history of the Progressives. McGerr's essential point is that the Progressive movement was a middle class effort to assert control in a world where economic and social change were disturbing the economic, social, and psychological equipoise of the American middle classes. In this view, Progressivism includes both the political reform movements generally associated with the movement but also closely related efforts to extend middle class values to other sectors of society. In McGerr's analysis, a spectrum of moral regeneration efforts like prohibition movements are part of this general trend. McGerr also argues that the Progressive desire to enforce social control was a wellspring of the increasing Jim Crow legislation of the period. In McGerr's analysis, the great foe of the Progressive movement was not its apparent traditional enemies but the emerging consumer oriented mass culture which he sees as ultimately draining the vitality of Progressive appeal.

McGerr's basic model is cogent but several aspects of his analysis and presentation are incomplete to the point of being misleading. The basic model is not particularly novel; the dualistic view of Progressivism as a middle class bid for reform and control is, I think, widely accepted. Despite the fact that this book is about one of the great political reform movements in American history, there is almost nothing about politics per se in this book. This obscures one of the key sources of the Progressive movement. The Progressives of whom McGerr writes were inspired in part by the feeling that their class was playing a diminishing role in American political life. Confronted by a powerful plutocracy and growing urban working class (much of it recent immigrants from non-English speaking nations), many middle class Americans saw erosion of their traditional political leadership by wealthy capitalists and urban political machines. In this context, Progressivism was an effort to recapture political leadership. Perhaps because there is a lot of prior literature celebrating the Progressives, McGerr tends to emphasize their flaws and the limitations of the Progressive impulse. This may be giving a distorted view of their real achievements. For example, the Progressive emphasis on compulsory education and their success in educational reform was a distinctive feature not seen in other industrializing nations. Over the course of the 20th century, these reforms and their subsequent extensions proved to be an extraordinarily fruitful policy success. Even in areas where the Progressives had difficulty making progress, they set the agenda for subsequent generations of reformers.

McGerr errs also, I think, in emphasizing the role of the emerging consumer culture as the downfall of Progressivism. To do so is to markedly underestimate the power of the entrenched interests, particularly business interests, opposing the Progressives. The expansion of Federal power achieved by the Progressives, though relatively modest by our standards, was an impressive achievement. Establishing the idea that government could be a countervailing force in public life was an important precedent for later reformers.

Finally, if you're looking for a narrative overview of the Progressive movement, this is not the book.

In McGerr's view, progressivism was a broad based Victorian middle class movement dedicated to extending its way of life - sober, abstemious, moderate, associative, protective, hard-working, modern, consumerist if guiltily so - both upward to a profligate and individualist capitalist elite and downward to an unruly and dissipated working class.

Its work was only partially successful - antitrust, regulation, healthcare, communal associations - and ultimately done in by its own contradictions. Progressives, moderates by temperate and nature, could not embrace the extremism inherent in its boldest initiatives. This became apparent in the bold initiatives undertaken by the Wilson administration for World War I, greatly extending government reach in private and commercial affairs.

This is a rich and nuanced interpretation of the era. Jaklak sez check it out.

The Progressive Era, notes a review, was "essentially a middle-class revolution fueled by a belief in the sanctity of the home and the need for equality between the sexes. The era's vehement campaigns against drink, prostitution, and divorce and its grappling with class conflict and racism were as much about personal happiness and health as they were about social progress." Another review on this page notes the era's egalitarian expansiveness, and faults Professor McGerr for accentuating the era's middle-class matrix.

I think the middle-class contextualists are right, but they don't go far enough. Progressively fighting drink, drunks, and sex were atavistic throw-backs to 19th Century Protestant wars against degenerate urban Catholics. Old anti-saloon leagues were painted over with a veneer of progress, and were pushed forward in the 20th Century as Prohibition. Prohibition & progressiveism were really about putting hyphenated papists back in their place, and their place was with other sub-normal enemies of the people that capitalism had let off the boat. The progressive project was hygiene & purity. It was eugenics.

Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and other progressive purists wanted a clean America. Cleansing Catholic corruption from saloons was a start, but real progress meant cleansing America ethnically: broom the cheap drinkers as well as the drink. Clean the slums. Alter and improve subhumans in their hovels so they couldn't reproduce & recapitulate their pathologies. Battle for the Lord at Armageddon with the weapons of Darwin and Galton. If McGerr discussed the Progressive Era's final solution to a tainted America, I missed it.

Here are random notes from the book, trivial pieces & parts in lieu of the story about eugenic progress that McGerr probably should have told:

By 1918, a government handbook listed almost three thousand mostly new agencies engaged in the mobilization, including the Alimentary Paste War Service Committee and the Chalks and Crayons War Servie Committee. (284)

(T)he Food Administration set priorities, promoted production, urged conservtion, and attempted to set prices. Its director, ... Hoover esposed the characteristic progressive critique of the nation's individualist heritage. "We have gone for a hundred years of unbridled private initiative in this country," he said, "and it has bred its own evils and one of these evils is the lack of responsibility in the American individual to the people as a whole...." (285)

Faced with so much popular hesitation about intervention, the Wilson administraiton had an obsessive fear of anything even approaching disloyalty -- and a blunt determination to root it out. "Woe to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way ...," Wilson warned in June 1917. Congress backed up the President's threat with a battery of legislation -- the Alien Act, the Alien Enemies Act, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, the Selective Service act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act -- that gave the federal government sweeping powers to fine and jail anyone obstructing the war effort in any way. The Sedition Act, for instance, made illegal "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United Statyes government or the military." ... (E)ffectively threatened the mailing privileges of any journal that even seemed to "impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination."

Meanwhile, the government used its new authority to go after ostensibly radical individuals and organizations. ... Another court condemned the labor leader and socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana, to ten years in jail. Federal proceedings in chicago, Kansas City, and Sacramento sent nearly two hundred members of the radical labor union, the International Workers of the World, to jail.

The government's efforts in turn encouraged local officials and private citizens to join in purging disloyalty. Around the country, a quarter of a million members of the American Protective League opened mail and bugged telephones to spy on suspected traitors and reported the results to Washington. ... "In spite of excesses such as lynching," editorialized The Washington Post, "it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country."

As the Wilson administration made sure Americans would not be exposed to dangerous views, the government also tried to determine just what informaion and ideas the people would encounter. ... (S)aw the war as a critical opportunity to advance the progressive agenda ... (290 - 291)

Herbert Hoover's Food Adminstration similarly urged Americans to restrict their appetite for pleasure. Hoover himself passionately deplored the apparent waste and indulgence of the nation's eating habits. ...

So the Food Adminstrations Education Division exhorted the people to choose "meatless and "wheatless" days. An avalanche of advertising drove home the message "FOOD WILL WIN THE WAR - DON'T WASTE IT." Half a million volunteers went door to door asking every man, woman, and child to sign pledge cards vowing support of the Food administraiton and conservation. A special pledge card for children, "A Little American's Promise," vowed:

At table I'll not leave a scrap
Of food upon my plate.
And I'll not eat between meals but
For supper time I'll wait.
I make the promise that I'll do
My honest, earnest part
In helping my America
With all my loyal heart.

Toddlers who could not sign a pledge card had their own rewritten nursery rhymes:

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!
The cook's using wheat where she ought to use corn ...

Before long Hooverize became a verb meaning "to save or economize." ... In all,, the Food Administration effectively mobilized what it called the "compelling force of patriotic sentiment in the name of thrift."

For all the emphasis on voluntary conservation, the progressives were always willing to achieve their objectives at least in part through compulsion. (293 - 294)