Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  All the same, it would be a mistake to suppose that business, however profoundly it had shaped and now coloured the day-to-day operations of American life, was the key to progressivism. Nor could the industrial working class, however active, muster the power necessary to dominate the epoch. That privilege belonged to the new middle class.

  This class had emerged as, numerically, the chief beneficiary of the great transformation of American society. America’s rapid development under the impact of industrialism and urbanization implied an equally rapidly developing need for professional services. The need for a new order was generally felt, and implied the recruitment and training of new men, and new women, to administer it. Society was now rich enough to pay for their services. Hence in the last decades of the nineteenth century there was a mushroom growth among the professions. Doctors and lawyers, of course; but also engineers, dentists, professors, journalists, social workers, architects. This was the age of the expert: he was given a free hand, and at times a respect, such as he has seldom enjoyed since. Business itself went professional: one of the heroes of the age was Frederick W. Taylor, prophet of ‘scientific management’ and the inventor of time-and-motion study; the Harvard Business School was founded in 1908. Each new technical marvel – the telephone, the phonograph, the motor-car, the aeroplane (the Wright brothers made the first powered flights of a heavier-than-air machine in 1903) – increased the faith that there was a sound technical answer to every problem, even to the problem of government. When a devastating hurricane and flood wrecked the port of Galveston, Texas, in 1901, the local businessmen proclaimed the regular authorities incompetent to handle the task of reconstruction and handed the city’s government over to a commission of experts – a pattern that was to be widely followed in the next few years.

  This may stand very well for what was happening generally. The new class, conscious of its power and numbers and rather too confident in its ability, was anxious to get hold of American society and remake it according to plan. All round were problems that needed solving – crime, disease, bad housing, drunkenness, political corruption – and the new class thought it knew what to do about them. It was still very American in its outlook, very traditional: just as the experts themselves had taken advantage of a society open to the talents to rise, so they wanted their disadvantaged fellow-citizens to rise also; and the democratic individualistic ideology made it seem perfectly legitimate to bid for political power, that is, for votes: to go down into that arena was simply to carry out one’s civic duty. Motives did not need to be examined too closely, since they were self-evidently virtuous. What was new, and important at least to the experts, was the tool-kit they brought to their tasks: their improved spanners, so to speak. It was in the spirit of Edison, the most representative figure of the age, that the new middle class set out to apply their spanners to such various contraptions as the trusts, the state and city machines of the old political parties, and the new urban wastelands. Behind the zeal of these technocrats lay an older tradition, betrayed in the word they used to describe the philanthropic centres they established in the slums, ‘settlements’: to them the cities were wildernesses, the inhabitants alien savages and the new settlers were bringers both of superior techniques and superior ideas, like the settlers of old – like the Puritans who sailed to Massachusetts with guns and Bibles.

  It is thus possible to see in the very approach of these progressives certain limitations, a certain inexperience, which were likely to impede their quest. The most serious difficulty, however, lay elsewhere, in the composition and structure of this new class.

  For one thing, it was not wholly new. The trans-Mississippi West might be only half-tamed, the big cities might be as raw as mining towns, but the progressives themselves were not. They were mostly of old American stock, brought up on the old pieties, which their new expertise only veneered. It is astonishing, for instance, how many of them believed in the prohibition of alcoholic drink: in totally forbidding, that is, its manufacture, sale and purchase. Many were also passionately anti-socialist, anti-immigrant and anti-working class. True, they were also anti-big business, and fought many doughty battles against such concerns as the Southern Pacific Railroad, which at the beginning of the twentieth century ruled California as its private fief and was eventually forced, by California progressives, to retreat. But the progressives were too conservative in their instincts, too parochial in their outlook, ever to propose, let alone carry out, fundamental changes in the American system. The boldest thought which they evolved was Herbert Croly’s suggestion, in The Promise of American Life, 4 that the aims of Thomas Jefferson could now best be achieved by the means of Alexander Hamilton – centralized national institutions and a co-operation between business and government. Had Mr Jefferson lived to encounter this remarkable proposition, he would no doubt have expostulated that this distinction between ends and means was false; and there were plenty of living Jeffersonians to repudiate Croly’s thesis. But the trouble was that although Croly was not very radical, no one had anything better to propose, so the progressive movement continually threatened to run out of ideas or, worse still, to lapse into reaction; for there is not much of a step between fighting the innovations of big business and fighting all innovations whatever. Three times were the progressives saved, nationally, from sterility: in 1912, by the split in the Republican party; in 1915, by President Woodrow Wilson’s need to launch a new programme to secure his re-election; in 1917, by the entry of the United States into the First World War. But none of these things did much for progressivism at a local level, and they did not save it for long nationally.

  Still, it cannot be denied that the progressives were an impressive generation, as intelligent, high-minded, energetic and good-hearted as any in American history. If their achievements were limited and flawed, they were real; they greatly assisted the adaptation of America to the requirements of modern government; and they laid the foundations, intellectual, personal, ideological – even organizational – of that liberalism which, after 1933, was to become one of the chief creative forces in American politics and society. This is not small praise.

  The event which launched the progressive adventure was the murder of President McKinley in 1901, by Leon Czolgosz, a lunatic of the Booth and Guiteau type. Poor McKinley was an even more innocent victim than Lincoln and Garfield: he incurred his fate only because he was head of state at a time when a small number of adolescent revolutionaries had decided that the assassination of heads of state was the right way to bring in the millennium. They killed the President of France, the King of Italy, the Empress of Austria and McKinley. His death horrified the respectable, for he was succeeded by his Vice-President – ‘that damned cowboy’ as Mark Hanna called him. McKinley had been the embodiment of party regularity; Roosevelt, though he had always been a loyal party man, as befitted a professional politician (the Rough Riders episode had been a mere interlude in his career), was unpredictable, for he was energetic, brilliantly intelligent and young (at forty-three, the youngest man ever to assume the Presidency). He had got to be Vice-President in part because, as Governor of New York, he had created such difficulties for the corrupt Republican bosses in that state that they had insisted on kicking him upstairs. Now that he had risen rather higher than they had wanted they were understandably apprehensive.

  Roosevelt was indeed a portent. He was the ablest man to sit in the White House since Lincoln; the most vigorous since Jackson (whom in some ways he resembled); the most bookish since John Quincy Adams. His short-sighted eyes, blinking through pince-nez, might give the idea of a scholar, and he had much of the necessary aptitude, being the author of several solid works of history, including one best-seller, The Winning of the West, which did its bit to fix the popular legend of America to scholarly foundations. But the robust and philistine society in which Roosevelt grew up had little time for mere intellectuals, as many fine minds, such as Henry James 5 and Henry Adams, were to complain, and Roosevelt was by nature too viol
ently self-assertive to be content with the fairly gentle rivalries of academic life. He was still a child when he took the decision to turn himself into a man of action. By dogged exercise he built up his skinny, sickly frame. All his life he eagerly followed whatever pursuit seemed likely to prove his manliness. He boxed, he wrestled, he swam, he carried a revolver with him wherever he went, even into states where it was illegal, even when he was President, which dismayed law-abiding persons such as the President of Harvard. At various times he was a rancher, a big-game hunter in Africa, an explorer in South America, a soldier in the Spanish-American War (he accounted for his decision to volunteer by saying that he wanted to have to explain to his children why he had fought, not why he hadn’t). The bitterest disappointment of his life was that he was not allowed to fight in the First World War: he never forgave President Wilson for stopping him. His neurotic compulsion to flex his muscles explains several of the odder episodes in his public career and makes him in some respects an unattractive figure. But on the whole his contemporaries shared his values, and as they expected politics and politicians to be entertaining if possible they revelled in his incessant showing-off and in his pungent gift of speech: as for example when he compared investigative journalists to Bunyan’s man with a muck-rake, and thus gave a new word to the language. 6 At all moments between McKinley’ s death and his own, eighteen years later, he was probably the best-loved man in America.

  Although the intricacies of his individuality are fascinating and almost endless, in the last resort he is best understood in conventional terms. Like Disraeli, another flamboyant performer, he had more substance than his show suggested, and the substance was of a fairly normal kind (he could not have gone so far otherwise). He was intensely ambitious, and he knew that it would be unwise to trust to his luck and brilliance alone, so he served a long apprenticeship in the routine politics of New York Republicanism, an apprenticeship which taught him all he needed to know about party politics and gave him a solid grounding in the art of administration too (‘the bulk of government is not legislation but administration,’ as he remarked in later years). He wanted to be President, but he had no programme of Presidential action: he relied on circumstances to show him what needed to be done. Above all, he was content with the goals that the American political system suggested. Not for him dictatorial or Messianic fantasies. He did not even defy tradition to the extent of running for a third term in 1908. He stridently asserted the excellence of being American; he was awed by the glory of being President; and he believed, as a Christian gentleman with a comfortable unearned income, that he owed it to his countrymen to do something in their service. At bottom he was perfectly safe, from the Hanna point of view; only he brought a flair to politics which was new. Between his insurgent appearance and ‘regular’ reality it is no wonder that he was able to work the political system beautifully.

  His first care was to secure his nomination for the Presidency, as Republican candidate in his own right, in the 1904 election; his next, to win that election (which he did, triumphantly: he gained 336 electoral votes and had a majority of 2.5 million over the Democratic candidate). But the interest of his first term as President scarcely lies in these predictable manoeuvres. Roosevelt knew, as well as any other party-political pro, how the patronage system could be exploited by a sitting President to look after his personal interests; there really is no more to be said. It was in other ways that he showed himself to be a President of a new kind, or rather, of an old kind revived.

  He kept his ear cocked to catch the cries and shifts of public opinion (an assiduously cultivated relationship with newspaper reporters helped). Thus, the first crisis of his administration was the anthracite coal strike of 1902. It was not much different from any of the other major strikes which had dotted the history of the previous twenty-five years, but Roosevelt sensed that since on the whole people sympathized with the miners, who worked in dreadful conditions for miserable pay, he could help himself by helping them. So he intervened dramatically, sending federal troops to the mine districts of western Pennsylvania, ostensibly to protect the mine-owners’ property but really to see fair play for the miners, and summoning both sides to Washington, where he helped them to come to an agreement which gave the strikers much of what they wanted. The contrast with Cleveland’s behaviour during the Pullman strike could not have been more marked. Roosevelt’s prestige soared, and was further helped by the Northern Securities case, which occurred at about the same time. J. P. Morgan, in his usual fashion, had negotiated an agreement between the competing railroad barons of the far North-West, one which bid fair to eliminate wasteful competition between the lines in that region. A holding company, Northern Securities, was set up to carry out the arrangements. To Morgan’s astonishment Roosevelt challenged the bargain in the name of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which had previously been used effectively only against labour unions. The President forced the dissolution of the new company. His action made little economic sense, but the unpopularity of big business was such that this sort of ‘trust-busting’ action gained Roosevelt further increments of enthusiastic support. He helped himself again by beginning work at last on the trans-isthmian canal. A squalid intrigue, from the disgraceful details of which most Americans were happy to avert their eyes, engineered a revolt in Colombia which gave birth to a new country, Panama; which then agreed that the United States might build the canal through its territory on spectacularly favourable terms: the USA was allowed to create a colony from sea to sea, the Canal Zone, through the middle of the new republic. Roosevelt got the credit for actually starting what had been talked of for so long, and nobody minded that in the process he had proclaimed the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine: he asserted that the United States had a right to do what it liked to, with or in Latin American countries, so long as it could plead its own interests or an ill-defined duty to police the western hemisphere on behalf of the civilized world. Roosevelt clothed this imperial arrogance in stately words for public consumption; in private he revealed his attitude more sincerely when he talked irritably of his wish to spank those wretched little republics.

  These various decisive actions were not lost on intelligent observers. The President of Princeton University, Dr Woodrow Wilson, who had made his academic reputation twenty years earlier with a book on what he called Congressional government, now began to feel that he had underrated the modern Presidency. He wrote a new book, Constitutional Government in the United States (1908), in which he remarked of the President that

  He can dominate his party by being spokesman for the real sentiment and purpose of the country, by giving direction to opinion, by giving the country at once the information and the statements of policy which will enable it to form its judgements alike of parties and of men… Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him, no combination of forces will easily overpower him. His position takes the imagination of the country. He is the representative of no constituency, but of the whole people. When he speaks in his true character, he speaks for no special interest. If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible; and the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its President is of such insight and calibre… A President whom it trusts can not only lead it, but form it to his own views.

  No such bold claims for the Presidency had been heard since the days of Andrew Jackson; yet they did but lay bare the significance of Theodore Roosevelt’s leadership, unveiling the role which all ambitious twentieth-century Presidents would seek to play, and the scope which existed for playing it. Wilson’s words were indeed prophetic, and some of the prophet’s friends began to feel that he ought to be given his turn at the job he described. The analysis was clearer about Roosevelt than he had so far been about himself. But it contained a trap, for it outlined a programme for modern Presidents which was tempting yet, as many of them have found out (including Wilson himself), extraordinarily diffi
cult to realize. And in 1908 the vision was perhaps premature, for Congress was still there, and still, apparently, as much in command of the government as ever. Like the President, its members sensed that rewards were now to be won by gratifying the taste for reform, and they did not mean to let Roosevelt monopolize them.

  The railroad problem, for example, had become intolerable to almost everyone, and Congress at last began to tackle it seriously, passing the ineffective Elkins Act against rebates in 1903 and the Hepburn Act of 1906, which gave the Interstate Commerce Commission broad powers to fix maximum and minimum railroad rates, extended its jurisdiction to cover the Pullman and other sleeping-car companies, empowered it to inspect the accounts of railroad companies and made its orders binding until a court had reviewed them (and afterwards, if the court sustained the commission). This act was a characteristic triumph of the Progressive Era. Travellers were tired of paying high fares for places on unsafe trains (railroad accidents were not so frequent or so spectacular as steamboat explosions in the old days, but there were far too many of them). Western farmers felt as bitter as ever about their innumerable grievances. Other shippers, such as oil and coal companies, disliked the chaos of rates brought about by totally free competition. The railroads themselves disliked the system under which they operated. They did not want to give rebates to extortionate giants like Standard Oil (which Theodore Roosevelt liked to denounce, thereby helping to make Rockefeller’s trust the universal whipping boy of the age). They disliked having to undercut each other in the quest for traffic, for even if undercutting ruined a rival, it often came near to ruining the undercutter too. They did not even much appreciate their unpopularity, which was, they felt, undeserved. The late William H. Vanderbilt, the Commodore’s son, had got into fearful trouble in 1883 for saying ‘the public be damned!’ (he was forced to sell all his railroad shares to Morgan), but had he not been right? Why should the railroads provide unprofitable lines and trains which the public would not pay for? No doubt their safety record was appalling (and railroad men disliked getting killed or maimed as much as anyone else) but how, given the competitive world, could the lines earn enough money to service their debts, pay their shareholders, maintain their equipment, pay their workers’ wages and improve safety? They felt they were being ruined by undercutting, rebates and free passes.