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- [00:09]
A
Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
- [00:13]
B
And I'm Juan Davalos. We're back with the Great American Story, A Land of Hope.
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A
We're going to tackle lectures 14 and 15 today in which Dr. Maclay covers the Progressive Era, which is a pivotal turning point in American political history.
- [00:25]
B
That's right. We study the Progressive Era a lot here at Hillsdale because it is a time when America really departed from. From the founding principles the progressives very explicitly reject. Well, you know, they claim that they are following the evolution of the principles of the founding, but they're really rejecting them.
- [00:44]
A
Well, and the founders wouldn't agree that there's an evolution in the principles. They would say, sometimes the way you enact the principles, sometimes they play out changes based on circumstances. But the principles remain the same, especially the principle of consent. That's necessary for rule by the people. The progressives say that people can't consent to modern society because it's too technologically advanced, too complicated, and therefore we need experts to set the order of life for the regular people.
- [01:09]
B
Right. The idea that a congressman is going to be able to understand the nuances of economic policy and all the technology
- [01:18]
A
that is developing foreign affairs.
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B
That's right. That's going to be impossible. So you need a new class of experts that are going to be part of agencies, and they're going to rule by science.
- [01:29]
C
Right.
- [01:30]
A
They won't be elected. You won't even know their names. You don't need to know their names because they will be impartial. As Juan said, ruled by science, not by their passions. We've solved that problem. Claim the progressives and society will become much more orderly, efficient and fair. And the two main advocates that we see in Dr. Maclay highlights, these two gentlemen are Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. And they shared a similar rejection of the founding principles, but they enacted their views in different ways. True thought, he would be the protector. He would serve as the leader of the experts and usher America into a new era of prosperity as the Industrial Revolution is taking hold and as society is advancing in terms of technology. He would be the man who protected the average American through his wisdom and his force.
- [02:16]
B
If you'd like to learn more about Progressivism, go a little deeper than what this course, the Great American Story goes into. We recommend that you go read Dr. Ronald J. Pastrido's book. Dr. Pastrito is a professor here at the college, and he's written a book on progressivism. Pastrida is probably one of the leading experts on progressivism in the country. The book is called America the Rise and Legacy of American Progressivism. And you can find the book at hillsdale. Edu course. That's Hillsdale. Edu Course. Go ahead and click on the Books tab and look for America Transformed.
- [02:54]
A
Now let's turn to Dr. Maclay with lectures 14 and 15 of the great American Story, A Land of Hope, the Progressive Era, parts one and two.
- [03:08]
C
Hello and welcome back. In this lecture we'll be discussing the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era is a term that historians have used for a long time to describe the period of time between the end of the Spanish American War and American entry into the First World War. It's a term we can't get away from. It serves a convenient purpose. It can mislead us a bit in implying that progressive ideas were not in circulation until the 1898 period and that they ceased to be influential after 1917. So as long as you don't take that too strictly, it's a useful term because it describes a particular set of ideas that do become dominated. It's a concentrated and very influential phase in the history of American reform movements. And it's a response in particular to the general disruptions, unsettlements, to go back to our earlier Lewis Mumford term, unsettlements, that industrialization had caused, that urbanization, that the consolidation of a whole continent into a new continental nation and the growth of concentrated wealth and power and disparities of wealth and power in the American populace. All of these were seen as immense problems coming out of the convulsion of modernization that America underwent in the years after 1865. And reformers were intent on using political power, political influence, even the presidency, to effect reforms of the system. They were concerned really with how to reconcile the American traditions of popular government and self rule with the new conditions of American society in which these dramatic concentrations of power could have the effect of overruling democracy itself and depriving American citizens of their birthright as citizens. Some of the predecessors of the Progressive movement who are important and I'm just going to pass over very quickly. Henry George, a journalist, wrote in 1879 a book called Progress in Poverty. Enormously influential book, in which, among other things, he proposed a single tax, a tax on land, as a panacea solution to the problems of structural inequality in the post Civil War industrial America. There was a rash of utopian novels imagining a perfected post industrial future. The leading one of which was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a book that was a social movement in Addition to being a popular book, the second largest selling book of the 19th century, and generator of bellamy clubs around the country, where foreign minded people gathered to talk about possible ways of restructuring the future. So the social gospel, which I've mentioned before in connection with foreign policy, a reform oriented dimension in which theologians began to think about how the Christian gospel could be applied as a blueprint for the reform of the industrial city. It wasn't only an urban problem. Farmers suffered greatly during the years after the Civil War because of the steady decline in commodity prices, which made it harder and harder for them to make a living. They were thrust into a new world in which, far from the isolated bucolic setting that farming had taken place in years previous to the industrial revolution in America, they were thrust into a world where they had to deal with railroads and financiers and distant sources of power that affected their ability to market their goods. In fact, they were finding themselves in competition with foreign markets and bankers and grain elevator operators and all kinds of figures that in a more bucolic earlier form of rural life, was not really part of their calculus. So farmers had to organize, find ways to organize. Farmers, being one of the least organized of human occupations, had to find ways to gather together. And the populist party was one of the ultimate products of that organizational effort. The populace put forward a presidential candidate in 1896, William Jennings Bryan, a two term former congressman from Nebraska. Bryan was an extraordinary figure. He was probably the most openly religious major national figure in our history. When he spoke, he preached and when he preached, he preached a gospel of the disfranchised, of those who were debt ridden, who were left behind in the pell mell growth of American society. He promoted causes like the free coinage of silver, which doesn't sound like a very sexy issue to us today, but was very powerful at the time because it was seen as a way to help debtors, help the poor, help those on the margins of society by significantly inflating the currency. When he was nominated, the notion of deviating from the gold standard and including silver as currency, coinage material was a theme in his address to the nominating convention. He said, you shall not press down upon the brow of labor the crown of thorns. Who does that remind you of? You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. And as he said this, he held his hands out in a crucifix like pose, offering a veritable image of Christ on the cross. I told you he was very religious. And the crowd went wild. Brian's tactics didn't play well everywhere there were gold Democrats, people who like Grover Cleveland, who did not favor the inflation of the currency, and they left the party and went to the Republicans. In the end, McKinley won pretty handily, a margin of victory over Bryan. We haven't seen the last of Bryan, but he was defeated on that occasion. Many historians regard this election, the 1896 election, as a turning point from the older America to the newer America. A kind of validation of the idea of America as a modern society. I think that may be true. I think that's a defensible position. But I think the most interesting thing was the rise of Bryan. Even though he was defeated. If Bryan had found a way of connecting with urban Catholic working class voters, he could well have won the election. His 6.5 million votes compared to McKinley's 7.1 million votes. It's not that great a margin. So there's a steadily rising tide of reform that Bryan's success was indicative of. However, he was not going to be the one to carry the mantle of reform through. That mantle would pass through to this thing called progressivism. What was progressivism? Well, the progressives were a middle class movement, unlike Bryan, who appealed to farmers, laborers and the like. These were doctors, lawyers, professionals in small towns and urban areas. They were not interested only in helping the poor, although they did strongly feel this impulse. Progressivism had a strong religious dimension to it, but they wanted to change the system, the system that had brought about these conditions. And they assumed as part of their theological and social outlook that the ills of society were not a product of human nature, of a flawed human nature. They were the product of bad systems of bad institutions that had the effect of forming people in the wrong kinds of ways. So they were very optimistic about the ability of intelligent reformers to remake the social world and basically to eliminate all the exigent evils that people had thought were part and parcel of the human experience. Progressivism started out in the municipalities and the states and then only later spread to the national level. There were progressive mayors in cities like Toledo, Ohio, and Dayton, Ohio. Ohio was actually one of the great centers of progressive reform. They were interested in things like regulating public utilities and electricity and water being brought under public ownership and control. By 1915, 2/3 of American cities had had publicly owned and operated water systems. Many systems had municipal transportation systems run by municipal governments, electrical power generation, similar kinds of utilities. All of these things reflected a quintessential progressive concept, and that is the notion of the public interest. There were private interests galore in a capitalist competitive economy. But who served the interest of the public? That was the question. And that was what they sought to do. That's what they sought government to do, to articulate, to identify and then to serve the public interest as opposed to private interests. There's a word that they like to use that we pretty much misuse these days, and that is the word disinterested. When we say somebody's disinterested, they say they're not paying attention, they're bored, whatever. That's not what the progressives meant. They meant that you were devoid of particular pecuniary or monetary interest in the outcome of a policy. You approached it in a neutral way, in a fair minded way, in a detached way, but in a concerned way. So disinterested was not a negative term. It was a very high and positive term. It's what was associated with those who sought to further the public interest. They were disinterested. This ethic of disinterestedness carried over into their view of politics and how government should be structured. Progressives distrusted politics. Politics they found to be disheartening. A series of public relations poses and vote grubbing and posturing and the making of public policy. In order to win elections and not to serve the public interest, they promoted ideas like the city manager system, which started in Dayton, Ohio and grew to many other cities and country. Many cities today that still have a city manager either in place of a mayor or in addition to a mayor. The city manager was a professional. The city manager wasn't elected, they were appointed. They were appointed on the basis of their expertise in public policy. Expertise is also a big word to go along with disinterestedness for progressive reformers. So they took a skeptical view of the ability of political institutions to effect reform. Another way of putting it is they had faith in democracy and in the people, but not much faith in democratic institutions. It's a somewhat paradoxical position, but it was their position. It worked well in some places. Maybe the most quintessential progressive area of the country was the state of Wisconsin, where progressive governor Robert La Follette and the distinguished University of Wisconsin was devoted to the idea that the universities would generate disinterested knowledge about public administration, about the effective, efficient and fair minded mechanisms of governance, and would propound the results of their scientific investigations in ways that through bureaus of municipal management and other such agencies would be filtered down into the way that state and city and local affairs were run. This was called the Wisconsin idea and it Was in many ways the pride of the state and marked the University of Wisconsin for many years to come. It became a source of all kinds of ideas about social reform, about institutional reforms like creating direct primaries. Something that seemed like a glowing and glittering new idea at that time. And now I think it seems very different as it's become institutionalized in American life. If there was a single place that was a showcase for progressivism, it was Wisconsin. Again. The progressives saw human nature as fundamentally good and evil, as the product of bad social systems that corrupted that good. And there was nothing irremediably wrong or sinful in the heart and soul of the individual person. There was no inherent limit to the improvability of the world. No problem was beyond solution. So they really rejected the Madisonian, indeed constitutional, idea of government. That ambition must be made to counteract ambition. Competition within a system designed to channel competition was the way to go. Instead, the best way to go would be to have authority vested to the highest degree possible in scientific intelligence administered by accredited, disinterested experts. Hence, the progressive emphasis on the transformation and renewal of the social and political world. Was keyed around the idea of social intelligence, that is, of scientific finding. That's concentrated in a person or an office and then administered to the body politic. As the brain, the intelligence of the individual administers the corporeal body of the individual person. External change, for them preceded internal change. It wasn't the conversion of souls that would then change society. It was the change of society that then would lead to the transformation of souls. No one expressed this better, although this is not a person who's known for his great and scintillating writing style. But no one expressed this better than the philosopher John Dewey, who was, in a way, the high priest of progressivism. In a book of his called Individualism Old and New, he said the following. The inner man is the jungle which can be subdued to order only as the forces of organization at work in externals are reflected in corresponding patterns of thought, imagination and emotion. The sick cannot heal themselves by means of their disease. And disintegrated individuals can achieve unity only as the dominant energies of community life are incorporated to form minds. Again, duty is not a model of vividness and clarity. But I think that's pretty clear what he's talking about. The disintegration of individuality, as he calls it, comes about because of a failure to reconstruct the self. Our conception of the self to meet the realities of an industrial, consolidated, concentrated, big organization of political, social and economic Life so rugged. Individualism, that notion to which so many Americans were attached, that was likely a thing of the past. Some problems with progressivism, I think, may already be occurring to you as I talk in this way. It had a tendency towards paternalism, towards a we know better ethos, which in some ways is antithetical to democracy, isn't it, to have the elites telling people what they should do? This manifested itself in the view of immigrants who came from backgrounds that were very different from the sort of standard issue Midwestern American progressive Protestantism that most of the progressives either espoused or were culturally attuned to. Italian immigrants like to have big families, they like to drink. They did all sorts of things that the progressives thought would be better dispensed with. So there's a kind of lack of regard for the settled ways of life of people who came from different traditions. A surprising number of progressives favored the concept of eugenics, which of course had not been at that time yet tainted by its association with Nazism and other radical movements to transform the human condition. But it did support certain practices that even then seemed noxious to some, like forced sterilization of those who were viewed as defective or unfit at population control and the like. It's an aspect of progressivism that is not always owned up to by those who favor the progressive tradition, but it was certainly part of it, and it's in tension with the religious element in the tradition. How do you reconcile this purifying impulse with the notion that all human beings have an inherent dignity that comes of their being created in the image of God? So progressivism had a fate of struggling with this dichotomy, trying to hold on to both sets of values at the same time. They were not socialists, that's important to say. They didn't seek to overthrow modern industrial capitalism or seize private property. Instead, they thought the system that needed to evolve needed to control the productive energies of modern industrial capitalism. There were two basic ways that they saw of doing that, and these found political expression. One was what I will call the antitrust path, and that was to try to break up combinations wherever possible to prevent institutions from becoming too big, to overwhelm the political system, to create monopolies and other forms of illegitimate and unhelpful concentrations of power, and to restore competition, but use the government to do that in an active way. That's the antitrust option. The second option I'll call the consolidationist option, which is to accept that bigness was the way of nature. It was the way that the forces of industrialism and capitalism and all these other isms were taking things. So the thing to do was allow that concentration to occur, but regulate it and use the government to do so, to make sure that monopolistic enterprises could gain from the efficiencies that they enjoyed by not being in competition with others, but not to take advantage of them, to squeeze their customers or otherwise abuse their power, their marketplace power. And as all of these things developed and these ideas began to circulate and be tried out, a question arose and became more and more insistent. And that was what was the status of the Constitution in this? Was it still the indispensable foundation of American life? Or had the new conditions of society and economy rendered it useless, passed it by, made it time for a change, time for something new, a 20th century constitution. We'll talk about that in our next lecture. Thank you.
- [26:07]
A
Hello Hillsdale College online courses podcast subscribers. This is Jeremiah and I am coming to ask you to encourage you to go see Revolutionary America, our new theatrical documentary showing in theaters only May 31 through June 2. You can go witness the founding of our nation a way you haven't seen it before on the big screen with surround sound, with professors you know and love, and some special guests, including narrator Tom Selleck. Go find a theater near you. Buy tickets in advance at Hillsdale. Edu Film. That's Hillsdale Edu Film to find showtimes or buy tickets in advance to our new documentary, Revolutionary America. See you there.
- [26:48]
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You know the Robertson family from the hit TV show Duck Dynasty. Now Hillsdale College offers you the unique opportunity to learn alongside the Robertsons as they dive deep into Hillsdale's online course, the Genesis Story. Every Friday on the Unashamed Podcast, the Robertsons will share their insights and perspectives, learning from Hillsdale professor of English Justin Jackson. Take a trip down south to Louisiana for this one of a kind learning experience we call Unashamed Academy. Visit unashamedforhillsdale.com and enroll today. That's Unashamed. F O R hillsdale.com to experience the Genesis Story alongside the Robertsons.
- [27:44]
C
Now let me talk a little bit about the getting outside the philosophy. Talk about some of the politicians in the progressive movement because they're fascinating, really. The movement, we could say, begins in 1901 with the assassination of McKinley and his succession into office by his vice president Theodore Roosevelt. Theodore Roosevelt, an interesting figure. He was an energetic, bumptious activist figure in American politics. McKinley's political advisor, Mark Hanna said after the assassination and the ascent to office of Theodore Roosevelt the following he said, I told William McKinley it was a mistake to nominate that wild man at Philadelphia. I asked him if he realized what would happen if he should die. Now look, that damn cowboy is President of the United States. And he was a cowboy. That was one of the things that Theodore Roosevelt had been. In 42 years of action packed achievement packed life on the planet, it would be tempting to talk at great length about Theodore Roosevelt. He's one of the most interesting characters in American history. Just say this much. He was born in New York City just before The Civil War, 1858, in a wealthy patrician family. He suffered from a weak Constitution as a young man and overcame his weakness, his asthma and other ailments through a rigorous program of physical culture, as they said, the 19th century, we would say, exercise, boxing, swimming, a whole regimen of building up his Constitution to make him a formidable physical presence. So he was a weightlifter, he was a gymnast, he was, as I mentioned, a boxer, wrestler, horseback rider, so on and so forth. And he had this resolve to use his energy and stamina always to accomplish things in the world, sometimes with a boyish enthusiasm that drove his opponents crazy. He was homeschooled in his early years. There's a garland for you, homeschoolers. He was clearly a prodigy when he went off to Harvard. He started writing a book on the naval War of 1812, which is still one of the standard texts on that subject. Amazingly, this is as an undergraduate at Harvard. He was an ornithologist who published studies of ornithology. He was an athlete, as I've said. It seemed like there wasn't anything he couldn't do, but what he wanted to do was politics. So he went into politics, had a sharp rise through the ranks, eventually became Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, and Vice President, then president. All this by the age of 42. He was an activist. He came into the presidency. He hated the vice presidency because you couldn't do anything as vice president. So he had a vigorous, expansive, activist view of his office once he became president. In a way, he brought back the power of the presidency from the dormancy in which it had lain ever since the humiliation of Andrew Johnson. The presidency had been a diminished office from Lincoln's time through to Roosevelt's. Roosevelt's brought back some of the luster and power and activist energy of the office, second to his activism. He was not deferential to the Constitution, and this is a characteristic of the progressive movement almost across the board. He said this in his first annual message to Congress. He signaled where he was going. When the Constitution was adopted at the end of the 18th century, no human wisdom could foretell the sweeping changes in industrial and political conditions which were to take place by the beginning of the 20th century. The Constitution's plan had been adequate for those earlier times, but the conditions are now wholly different and wholly different action is called for. He formulated a theory of the presidency he called the stewardship theory, which is a way of seeing the Constitution as a charter of enumerated prohibitions, not enumerated powers, and that as the steward of the presidency, he was permitted to do whatever was necessary for the well being of the people. This is Hamiltonianism on steroids. He proceeded to have a very active presidency and showed his desire to use power. When a possible strike of miners in 1902 as the winter approached, offered the prospect, the dismal prospect of a very cold winter in the United States, Roosevelt threatened to seize the mines and operate them himself, not personally, but operate them through his power as President of the United States. When he was asked if this would be unconstitutional, Roosevelt said, to hell with the Constitution. When the people want coal, now there's a slogan for you. It's perfectly consistent with the stewardship theory and with a view that the Constitution was a document that had served its purpose in the 18th century but was no longer adequate to the times. Roosevelt favored the consolidationist view of progressivism, and this actually was a view that grew stronger over the years, that antitrust was not generally the best way to take advantage of the combinations that industrialization and modernization had made possible. He has a reputation as a trust buster. This is largely unearned. He was perfectly happy with what he thought of as good trusts, that he did not fool around with them. But he said the government must be the senior partner in every business. That is a change from the most fundamental American conceptions of the relationship of government and business. So he went on. He was elected in his own right in 1904, gave additional power to the Interstate Commerce Commission, which was a kind of consolidationist reform set up to regulate the railroads. In Roosevelt's term, second term, under the Hepburn act, it began to regulate in earnest. Two other areas I'll just mention in passing about Roosevelt that he was interested in were consumer protection, pure food and drugs, meat Inspection act, responding to Upton Sinclair's novel the Jungle, about the conditions of meatpacking plants and conservation of natural resources. This may be the area in which Roosevelt's most admired today as a kind of proto environmentalist. We've fallen heir to the most glorious heritage a people ever received, he said. And each one must do his part if we wish to show that the nation is worthy of its good fortune. So he established the U.S. forest Service. He set aside an enormous amount of land for reserves, for preserves, for national forests and national parks, about 230 million acres of American land. He was said to be prouder of these measures than of anything else he ever did. And his friend Gifford Pinchot, the head of the Forest Service, was a very careful steward of the land, of the needs of the future. It needs to be said that the progressive view, the stewardship of the land, implied something that's a little bit different from modern environmentalism. That is that the importance of taking care of the land was to balance the beauty and sanctity of nature. That may be too strong a word, but that respect for natural beauty with human uses, the fact that nature was there to be used by human beings. Sacredness actually would be the wrong word to use to describe his view. It would be the right word to use, however, to describe some of his opponents, such as John Muir, the creator of the Sierra Club, who was really one of the heroes of modern environmentalism and who clashed with Roosevelt and Roosevelt's perspective over an episode involving the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, which became the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in California. The creation of the reservoir had the effect of providing water to the city of San Francisco. Pinchot said the delight of the few men and women who would yearly go to the Hetch Hetchy Valley should not outweigh the conservation policy. To take every part of the land and its resources and put it to use, it will serve the most people. That's the progressive view, Muir. The proto environmentalists fired back and called them temple destroyers with a content now there's sacredness, Temple destroyers with a perfect contentment for nature who instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the almighty dollar. Capital A capital D. So there you have a first round in a conflict that would mark much of the 20th century. The longer Roosevelt was in office, the more radical he became. Contrary to the usual pattern, he became an enemy of inherited wealth, sought more and more punitive or radical inheritance taxes. He began using terms like the malefactors of great wealth and the men who engaged in predatory behavior to describe his opponents in the business community. And finally, after he left office, he handpicked his successor, William Howard Taft, and went off on a year long hunting expedition in Africa, where he Took his usual energy to the taking of the lives of every animal under the sun in that part of the world. Taft to pass very quickly over him. Taft really was a poor choice for Roosevelt in the sense that Taft wasn't the Progressive at heart, although he was more of a trust buster than Roosevelt had been. And in the end, Roosevelt became dissatisfied with Taft, decided to run against him for the Republican nomination, failed in that, started a third party, the Bull Moose Party, the Progressive Party, and ran a campaign against Taft and against the Democratic Party nominee. Woodrow Wilson, who actually was a reluctant choice of the Democratic Party, took 46 ballots in convention at Baltimore to select him. He was a relatively inexperienced figure. He had been the president of Princeton University after being a professor of political science and briefly the governor of New Jersey, and then was catapulted to being the nominee of his party. Roosevelt split the Republican vote by his insurgency and ensured that Wilson would be elected, thus interrupting, at the very least, a long period of Republican dominance of the presidency over most of the later part of the 19th century. And that obviously a, in part figured into the aftermath of the Civil War. So what kind of a guy was Wilson? Wilson was an intellectual, he was a scholar, he was a political scientist by training, had a PhD from Johns Hopkins. And he, like Roosevelt, believed the Constitution was defective. He'd actually thought a lot more deeply and systematically than Roosevelt had about why it was defective and how it needed to be changed. And he would have preferred something closer to the British parliamentary system, in which the president was more a part of the legislative body as well as heading an executive branch. Above all else, he thought the American government should be built on a more fluid and organic evolving basis, instead of being tied to formal institutions and formal documents like the Constitution itself. He was influenced by Darwin, as almost everybody was at that time. Just as Darwin taught, the species were not fixed formal beings, but were constantly in motion, were constantly adapting to the changing circumstances of the environment in which they found themselves. So should institutions of government adapt. The notion of natural rights here going very close to the bone with the nation's founding, the natural rights doctrine that's implicit, explicit even in the Declaration of Independence, the notion of human equality, fundamental rights come not from government, but from nature or God, was something he rejected. Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand. We are not bound, we are not bound to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence. We are as free as they were to make and unmake governments. So his opposition to the institutions of the American Founding was much more systematic, much more thoroughly thought through than that of Roosevelt, who was not a very systematic thinker to put it mildly. Wilson favored the idea that the administration of government was something separate from politics. Question of elections and votes and how to earn them. The administration of government was a science. It could be determined scientifically the best ways of administering government and that could be turned over to the work of disinterested experts, city managers, municipal government bureaus and that kind of thing. A highly professionalized approach to governance. This is a classic example, maybe even the apex of progressive thinking. I wanted to say another word or two about the election of 1912 before we move on into talking about Wilson's administration because it was an extraordinary election and not only because Roosevelt's third party candidacy was the most successful in American history. Got more electoral votes than Taft did as the official Republican nominee. That is that this was in many ways an election that reflected a high tide of reform oriented sentiment in the United States and in the American electorate. It's very interesting that out of the major candidates, two of the three major candidates were progressives, both Roosevelt and Wilson. Taft had some progressive sentiments, but we're just going to count him as non progressive for this purpose. If you add in the surprisingly strong candidacy of Eugene Debs, who was a socialist candidate and earned almost a million votes, although no electoral votes, 11.5 million of the 15 million votes cast in that election went to strongly reform oriented candidates. And even Taft was not without his reform oriented aspects. So public sentiment in favor of reform, progressive ideas and candidates was extremely high. At this time. Wilson won easily 434 to 88 in the electoral College. That's a resounding margin. So he made use of, of this margin in pursuing an agenda that was extremely activist. Wilson was, even though he was very inexperienced on the national political stage, he had no experience on the national political stage. But he had arguably the most successful first term, the most impressive beginning of any president in American history. He moved quickly, putting his theories into action and trying as best he could to involve himself the way a parliamentary leader would in the conduct of legislation. He lowered tariffs, which was a campaign promise that he had made, and introduced a bill creating a federal income tax partly to offset the revenue lost because of the lowering of tariffs. This took the form of legislation drawing on the 16th Amendment to the Constitution. He created the Federal Reserve which would provide the country with a central banking system. For the first time since Andrew Jackson's destruction of the bank of the United States. The Federal Trade Commission was Strengthened by to strengthen the capacity for trust busting. Wilson had run as an antitrust candidate. His slogan for his reelection was the new Freedom, whereas Roosevelt's was the new nationalism. After not too long in office, the new freedom kind of faded away and Wilson himself became more and more of a consolidationist. But he did believe in antitrust. So the Federal Trade Commission, strengthened Federal Trade Commission was one result of that. So many other items in his agenda. Labor organizing advances, creation of a system of federal farmland banks, federal Highways act, child labor laws, eight hour workday for rail workers, a dazzling array of domestic reforms, including the ratification of the 16th and 17th amendments. The latter being a measure to establish that senators be chosen by the direct election of the people rather than by the respective state legislatures. All this seemed at the time to betoken a more streamlined, more responsive, more efficient, more democratic nation. And as I've said, it seemed more and more in tune with the new nationalism that had actually been Roosevelt's platform rather than Wilson. But in any event, triumphant progressivism was the watchword of the day. Two caveats though, as we close this discussion of progressivism. Two flaws in progressivism that I think deserve consideration and attending to. First, and I mentioned this in passing, Progressivism generally tended to be indifferent to the plight of minorities. In the case of African Americans living under a genuine state of hostility toward them. In the Woodrow Wilson administration, Roosevelt was not a crusader for social justice particularly, but his record in this regard is respectable. He spent some political capital bringing black leader Booker T. Washington to the White House, a move that actually raised the hackles of some within his party and certainly within the Democratic party. Wilson on the other hand, was a Virginian. He was a Virginian who supported, actively supported racial segregation and was sympathetic to the post bellum restoration of white rule in the south. He saw D.W. griffith's movie Birth of a Nation was one of the greatest things ever created in the world of cinema. These were not the only things we should need to know about Woodrow Wilson. He should of course be judged on the totality of his records and not just on a few things. But these few things also deserve to be considered as part of the totality. The second troubling thing about progressivism I've already talked about, but I want to conclude with it, and that is the progressives growing tendency to disparage the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in their readiness to endorse radical changes in the very structure of American governance. In a way, these two things, the insensitivity to the rights of minorities and the lack of commitment to the principles of the Declaration were part of one single problem. They're related to one another. One can well understand the impatience that men like Roosevelt and Wilson felt at times as they sought to address themselves to unprecedented problems, titanic problems that affected their era. But it was a perilous matter to launch into the reform of society by beginning with an overthrow of the chief pillars of that political establishment and of political continuity. GK Chesterton has an important principle with regard to this before you tear down a fence, be sure you first understand what the fence was put there in the first place to accomplish. So progressivism is at a high point. The high point is not destined to last. Like all such political movements, its day of comeuppance was kind of coming, and so was Woodrow Wilson's. We'll talk about that in our next lecture. Thank you.
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