Progressivism

In 1915, Benjamin Parke De Witt's influential The Progressive Movement summarized the three universal goals of Progressivism as the eradication of corrupt and special interests from government, the restructuring of the machinery of government to replace control by the few with control by the many, and an increase in the functions of government to remedy social and economic ills. Yet since this early description, scholars of Progressivism have formulated such a variety of alternative definitions that most now reject the idea of a single Progressive movement with easily identifiable characteristics, instead emphasizing the multiple understandings of the term progressive movement during the period still commonly labeled the Progressive Era—1890 to 1920. In these years, individuals calling themselves Progressives undertook a wide variety of reforms, many of which today may seem contradictory. While some worked for greater democracy through the initiative, referendum, and recall, others sought to disfranchise African Americans and immigrants with registration laws, literacy tests, and poll taxes. Some focused on the federal level, working for tariff reform, antitrust laws, and Prohibition, while others felt that local change was paramount and worked to alleviate urban problems through restructured municipal governments and settlement houses. What these reformers shared, however, was that they all confronted a rapidly changing society, marked chiefly by rising urbanization and immigration, an increasingly industrial economy, and the emergence of large-scale business conglomerates and trusts.

Even discussions about the seemingly basic question of the identity of the Progressives have not resulted in consensus, with different scholars identifying middle-class professionals, businesspeople, workers, and farmers as the key bases of support. Most early works, written by contemporaries who viewed themselves as Progressives, defined Progressivism as a democratic uprising of “the people” against “the interests.” Critics would later fault this understanding as simplistic at best. By the 1950s, the predominant interpretation by historian Richard Hofstadter in The Age of Reform claimed that Progressivism was a movement of urban, middle-class professionals anxious about their own declining social status. Hampered by their moralism and nostalgia for an idealized past, they were ultimately unable to cope realistically with the challenges of modernity. Although this interpretation has been widely critiqued over the past half century, Michael McGerr's 2003 overview of the period echoes these sentiments, arguing that middle-class Progressives arrogantly sought to transform society by remodeling all social classes in their own self-image. Other scholars, however, identify the Progressives quite differently. Some insist upon the conservative nature of Progressivism, suggesting that businessmen exerted their influence on political processes, advocating “reforms” that in reality served their own selfinterests. Others disagree, claiming that real support for Progressive changes came from workers and/or farmers. Yet recently many have moved away from such debates, instead portraying Progressivism as more of a discourse of malleable terms used with different meanings by different people. James Connolly's 1998 study of Progressivism in Boston, for example, demonstrates that both middle-class Yankee and working-class, predominately Irish, politicians furthered their own agendas by using the same rhetoric about a unified public mobilized to defeat a corrupt few.

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