"More and more each year we have felt about us the pressure of tremendous forces," Amos Pinchot, a prominent Progressive, wrote in a 1912 pamphlet called "What's the Matter with America." "Our country is going through a terrific period of unrest. Something is wrong... Where starts the mighty river of discontent that is destroying our respect for government, uprooting faith in political parties, and causing every precedent and convention of the old order to strain at its moorings?"
Between the assassination of William McKinley, in 1901, and the nomination of Warren Harding, in 1920, there were four straight Presidential elections without a major candidate who, by the standards of the day, would have been considered conservative. On the political spectrum of their time, the Progressives were in the center, not on the left. They had no respect for the leading Democrat during the first part of the era, William Jennings Bryan. The Progressives were modernizers, social-science enthusiasts, technicians. They generally preferred big, new, national institutions to small, traditional, local ones. They were liberals, not radicals, and they felt threatened by left-wing agitation, of which there was vastly more then than there is now.
Back then, capitalism had generated a wave of miraculous changes in everyday life--railroads, electric lights, telephones, automobiles--and raised the over-all standard of living, but it had also opened up a large gap between rich and poor and caused a great deal of suffering, social unrest, corruption, and dislocation. Companies based on new technologies were acquiring monopoly power.
The Progressives were also moralists. They loved the idea of purifying things that were unclean, corrupt or tainted. And their legacy was an alternative structure of government agencies (the Federal Reserve Board, the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration), universities, professions, news organizations, foundations, and so on.
All this sounds familiar, right?
Doris Kearns Goodwin, the author of "The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism," tells about how a super-aggressive President and press were able to take on these problems, marshal public opinion, and restore the balance between market and state.
In the book's preface, Goodwin writes, "It is my greatest hope that the story that follows will guide readers through their own process of discovery toward a better understanding of what it takes to summon the public to demand the action necessary to bringing our country closer to its ancient ideals."
Source: The New Yorker, November 18, 2013