American Heritage History of the United States by Douglas Brinkley

Author:Douglas Brinkley [Brinkley, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/United States/Colonial Period
ISBN: 9781612308579
Publisher: New Word City, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

Roosevelt’s Reforms

As defined by historians, the Progressive era embraced three U.S. presidents: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson, all of whom would oppose one another for the presidency in 1912, while Governor Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who was if anything the most Progressive of all, would denounce the entire trio. In any case, the Progressive movement was bigger than any one leader, and there were reform movements in many states and cities led by men like Albert B. Cummins in Iowa, Hiram W. Johnson in California, Judge John Burke in North Dakota, James M. Cox in Ohio, and others.

The ideas of the Progressives were popularized by a subset of crusading journalists, including such noted scribes as Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair, whose 1906 novel The Jungle had exposed many middle-class Americans to the horrors of the urban poor. Sinclair and his fellow reform-minded journalists quickly created a boom in the exposé industry, uncovering the rot under every rock in U.S. society, from child labor to unsafe working conditions to unregulated food and drug products. Concerned that their efforts were going too far, President Roosevelt dubbed these crusading reporters “muckrakers,” like those workers John Bunyan had described in his seventeenth-century opus Pilgrim’s Progress. “The men with the muckrakers are often indispensable to the well-being of society,” Roosevelt noted, “but only if they know when to stop raking the muck, and look upward to the celestial crown above them, to the crown of worthy endeavor.” Many muckrakers were, in fact, guilty of sensationalizing the news in order to aid their quest for social justice, but without them, the public likely would not have become informed and incensed enough about the nation’s social problems to demand broad reforms. Aiding the muckrakers was celebrated jurist Louis D. Brandeis, who had quit his corporate law practice and proclaimed himself “the people’s attorney” after the brutal response to the Homestead Steelworks strike of 1892. His devotion to “sociological jurisprudence,” in which the law took into account the circumstances of the aggrieved, took Progressivism beyond the political arena and into the courts.

In truth, Progressivism needed a more broad-based advertisement than the human dynamo that was Theodore Roosevelt. His personality was so large that it overwhelmed the whole notion of Progressivism, to the point that some still think of it as whatever Roosevelt supported, which was hardly the case. In action, the president was usually prudent and slow to wield the big stick no matter how loudly he had spoken - and when he did, it was more often with a smack on the wrist than a full body blow.

One example of the president’s tendency to follow rough talk with gentle actions toward business occurred in 1902, when Roosevelt approved a case under the Sherman Antitrust Act against Northern Securities, a railroad holding company he saw the need to break up. Although that and subsequent moves would earn the president the badge of “trustbuster,” in truth he was more than a little circumspect when it came to the prosecutions.

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