Podcast Summary: The Progressive Revolution

Podcast: Hillsdale College K-12 Classical Education Podcast
Episode: The Progressive Revolution
Host: Scott Bertram
Date: May 1, 2025
Length: 52 minutes

Main Theme

This lecture-style episode explores the rise and meaning of Progressivism in American history from the late 19th century into the 20th century. Focusing on constitutional, political, and social transformations, the speaker (a Hillsdale College professor) examines how Progressivism responded to rapid changes—industrialization, mass immigration, urbanization—and fundamentally challenged the Founders’ philosophy and the original Constitution. The talk traces the concept’s origins, key figures, institutional shifts (especially the creation of the administrative state), and long-term impacts, including present-day implications.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Setting the Stage: Post-Civil War America and Radical Change

• The era between the Founding and Civil War was defined by constitutional crises—mostly about union and slavery—but postwar America faced a new set of problems: urbanization, industrialization, and mass immigration.
• Quote:

  “Henry Adams said, if you were born in America in 1850, the world you were born into was closer to the world of the year zero than it would be to the world of 1900...never had society changed so radically.” (03:00)

2. Defining Progressivism (or Failing To)

• Historians have struggled to precisely define Progressivism because it encompassed various figures, movements, and often contradictory ideas.
• A unifying thread: All progressives believed the Founding Constitution was too limited to address modern problems and needed to be overcome to empower the state.
• Quote:

  “One of the things you can say that does define progressivism...is that...we need to make the state, the government, more powerful...” (04:46)

• Some progressives had an almost utopian, “post-millennial” religious view that political reform could usher in near perfection.

3. Shift in Views of Human Nature and Reform Zeal

• The Founders were skeptical of human nature, drawing on Enlightenment and Calvinist roots; limits were needed because rulers could be as flawed as the ruled.
• 19th-century evangelical Protestant zeal and later secular reformers became more optimistic about perfectibility—feeding into progressive and even proto-socialist thought.
• Oscar Wilde’s vision in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” is cited to illustrate late 19th-century utopianism:

  “Once we have socialism...we'll be free to create ourselves in any way that we want.” (05:55)

4. Waves of Progressivism: The Crisis Ratchet

• The development of the American state is not a steady evolution, but occurs in “quantum” leaps—usually in response to crisis (economic, war, social unrest).
• Outlined in Charles Kessler’s book and Robert Higgs’s “Crisis and Leviathan,” each crisis allows a 'ratchet effect'—the state expands, and rarely retreats.
• Key Periods:
  • Progressive Era (1890s–WWI)
  • The New Deal (FDR, esp. 1937 as an inflection point)
  • The Great Society (LBJ)
  • Obama Era (Affordable Care Act after 2008 crisis)
• Quote:

  “War is the father of all things. War is more responsible for social, economic, cultural change than anything else in human history.” (08:23)

5. The Progressive Attack on the Founders’ Political Theory

• Progressives doubted the permanence of self-evident truths and natural rights, seeing rights as government-granted and circumstances as always changing.
• Belief that constitutional structures like separation of powers were outdated impediments.

6. From Newtonian Machine to Darwinian Organism

• Woodrow Wilson and others claimed the Constitution reflected outmoded, Newtonian physics; government should instead be seen as a Darwinian, evolving organism.
• Quote:

  "Government is not a machine...Government is an organism that needs to follow the laws that Darwin has discovered." (13:20)

7. Rise of the Administrative State

• The Interstate Commerce Act (1887) and its commission marked the first major delegation of legislative power to an independent body—setting a template for future regulatory agencies.
• Such agencies combined legislative, executive, and judicial power—contravening the Founders’ three-branch model.
• The “politics-administration dichotomy” (Wilson’s idea) aimed to insulate expertise from politics—though this is later called a founding “myth.”
• Quote:

  “They're making scientific, technical, engineering decisions...not questions that can be influenced by politics. Thus we need to insulate these administrators...” (25:54)

8. Problems: Regulatory Capture & Lawyer/Bureaucrat Dominance

• Agencies often end up “captured” by the industries they regulate (railroads, banks, etc.)
• Many decision-makers are lawyers, not experts, and may have strong ties to the political actors who created the agencies.

9. Transforming the Presidency

• Theodore Roosevelt (first “progressive president”): Expands the public and actual role of the presidency.
• Adopts a “stewardship theory”—presidents can do whatever needed unless the Constitution forbids it.
• Quote:

  “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal, right?” (34:50; attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to TR)

• Woodrow Wilson, as both academic and president, further advances these ideas, though using slightly different logic and means.

10. New Regulatory Institutions & Structural Changes

• Creation of the Federal Reserve and FTC; ratification of the 16th (federal income tax, 1913) and 17th Amendments (direct election of Senators).
• The income tax provides the financial means for a much larger state apparatus.
• World War I’s measures (draft, high taxes, economic controls, censorship) become more permanently embedded than Civil War precedents. This is a key distinction for 20th-century expansion.

11. Wartime as “Moral Equivalent” of Crisis

• War (WWI, WWII) used to justify broad new government powers; after war’s end, many powers/institutions persist (the “ratchet”).
• The Great Depression and future crises (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, COVID) function as the “moral equivalent of war”—justifying state expansion.

12. The New Deal as Climax

• FDR’s New Deal represents the inflection point, introducing the idea of government-guaranteed entitlements and shifting the function of the Bill of Rights.
• FDR uses the Founders’ rhetoric to justify expansion (“economic Bill of Rights”)—unlike Wilson and earlier progressives, who were more openly dismissive of the old Constitution.
• Quote:

  “We used to understand the Bill of Rights as protecting individual rights and liberties...Now we understand that the times call for an economic Bill of Rights, or a second Bill of Rights...” (49:51)

13. Legacy: Court Battles and the Administrative State

• Roosevelt’s attempt to pack the Supreme Court fails, but he fills it with “New Dealers” who end judicial resistance, paving the way for continued expansion.
• Echoed again today in debates about administrative agencies and the unitary executive.

14. Audience Q&A: Did Policy Cause the Great Depression?

• The professor affirms that many economic historians believe regulatory missteps (e.g. by the Federal Reserve) deepened or prolonged the Depression, ironically leading to even more government power.
• Quote:

  “Nothing succeeds like failure. And that's the way the ratchet works.” (53:02)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Basically, the progressives all came around to believe the Founders Constitution was too limited, it was too constitutional, it was too restricted to deal with these problems that the Founders could not have anticipated.” (04:54)
• “There was a kind of post millennial view that some of the more religious progressives had that in the 19th century we can achieve perfection.” (05:20)
• “The basis of the administrative state of the progressive state is the delegation of legislative power to an independent agency...” (21:27)
• “So Wilson says, you don't have to worry about this new class of administrators because they're going to be apolitical. We're going to hive them off and keep them insulated from politics. That was the founding myth, you could say, of the American administrative state.” (26:17)
• “The pattern of the 20th century is these recurrent crises that bring about occasions for building the new kind of state that we have in the 20th century.” (48:10)
• “Nothing succeeds like failure. And that's the way the ratchet works.” (53:02)

Important Timestamps

• [03:00] – The radical change from 1850 to 1900; Progressivism’s context
• [04:54] – The Founders’ Constitution seen as too limited
• [05:55] – Oscar Wilde’s utopian “Soul of Man Under Socialism”
• [08:23] – “War is the father of all things” and the role of crises
• [13:20] – Woodrow Wilson and the Darwinian view of government
• [21:27] – The Interstate Commerce Act and rise of the administrative state
• [25:54] – Politics vs. administration; Wilson's founding myth
• [30:12] – Theodore Roosevelt and the transformation of the presidency
• [34:50] – “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal” (TR, attributed)
• [49:51] – The shift from a classical Bill of Rights to an “economic Bill of Rights”
• [53:02] – “Nothing succeeds like failure...”

Overall Tone & Style

The speaker maintains an erudite but accessible tone, suitable for both educators and lay listeners interested in American history, law, and civics. The lecture draws extensively on examples, analogies, and quotations from political theory, legal scholarship, and presidential rhetoric, with a critical perspective on Progressivism and administrative state growth, consistently returning to classical/Founding principles.

Conclusion

This episode offers an in-depth account of how Progressivism fundamentally transformed the American constitutional order—both in theory and in government structure—by elevating the power and scope of the state in response to modern crises. The lecture provides rich context and critical analysis of how the “ratchet effect” of repeated emergencies has built the administrative state and steadily shifted America away from its Founding principles.