Chapter 28

By the turn of the twentieth century, a swelling middle-class reform movement known as progressivism arose to combat the ills of industrialization, urbanization, and machine politics. Progressives believed that government, made more efficient and democratic, could be used to curb the abuses of big business and improve everyday life.

Journalists called "muckrakers" exposed corruption and exploitation in vivid detail. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) shocked the nation with its depiction of Chicago's meatpacking plants, while Ida Tarbell dissected the Standard Oil trust and Lincoln Steffens chronicled corrupt city governments in The Shame of the Cities. Their exposés built public support for reform at the local, state, and national levels.

Progressives first attacked corruption closest to home, in the cities. Reform mayors such as Tom Johnson of Cleveland battled utility companies and streetcar monopolies, while some cities adopted commission and city-manager systems meant to run government more like an efficient business.

At the state level, Wisconsin's governor Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette pioneered the "Wisconsin Idea," using university experts to help regulate railroads and utilities. Progressives nationwide pushed direct democracy measures: the initiative, referendum, and recall, which let voters propose laws, approve them directly, and remove corrupt officials.

Social reformers like Jane Addams, who founded Chicago's Hull House settlement in 1889, worked directly in immigrant slums to provide education, childcare, and job training. Her example inspired a generation of women reformers to enter public life through social work.

Progressives fought to abolish child labor and to protect women workers through maximum-hour laws, a cause upheld in Muller v. Oregon (1908). The temperance and prohibition movements gathered strength, while suffragists led by Susan B. Anthony's successors intensified the long campaign for women's right to vote, which would culminate in the Nineteenth Amendment.

The assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 elevated Vice President Theodore Roosevelt, at forty-two the youngest president in history, to the White House. Energetic and combative, Roosevelt believed the presidency was a "bully pulpit" from which to champion the public interest against concentrated wealth.

Roosevelt's domestic program, the Square Deal, rested on "three C's": control of the corporations, consumer protection, and conservation of natural resources. His first major test came in the 1902 anthracite coal strike, when he broke precedent by threatening to seize the mines unless owners agreed to arbitration — a rare instance of a president treating labor even-handedly rather than automatically siding with management.

Roosevelt earned a reputation as a "trustbuster" by ordering antitrust suits against forty-plus corporations, most famously breaking up the Northern Securities Company, a railroad monopoly, in a 1904 Supreme Court victory. He distinguished, however, between "good trusts" that competed fairly and "bad trusts" that abused their power, preferring regulation to blind dissolution.

To rein in the railroads, Roosevelt pushed through the Elkins Act (1903), which outlawed secret rebates, and the stronger Hepburn Act (1906), which empowered the Interstate Commerce Commission to set maximum railroad rates — a major expansion of federal regulatory power.

Public revulsion at Upton Sinclair's grim account of the meatpacking industry in The Jungle spurred Roosevelt to push the Meat Inspection Act (1906), mandating federal inspection of meat shipped across state lines.

The same year, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, restricting the sale of adulterated or mislabeled foods and drugs. Together these laws marked the beginning of substantial federal regulation over consumer products, a role the government had never before assumed on a national scale.

An avid outdoorsman, Roosevelt made conservation a hallmark of his presidency. He worked closely with chief forester Gifford Pinchot to manage natural resources scientifically rather than exploit them recklessly, and he set aside vast acreages as national forests, parks, and wildlife refuges.

The Newlands Act (1902) funded western irrigation projects through the sale of public lands, encouraging settlement of the arid West. Roosevelt's conservation legacy included some 150 million acres of national forest and dozens of national parks and monuments, permanently reshaping how Americans thought about their natural heritage.

Roosevelt, honoring his pledge not to seek a third term, handpicked his loyal secretary of war, William Howard Taft, who easily won the election of 1908. Taft continued antitrust prosecutions even more vigorously than Roosevelt, but he lacked his predecessor's political finesse and gift for public leadership.

Taft's support for the Payne-Aldrich Tariff (1909), which progressive Republicans felt betrayed promises of lower rates, and his siding with conservatives in the Ballinger-Pinchot Affair over conservation policy alienated progressive Republicans and an increasingly disillusioned Roosevelt, setting the stage for a bitter party split in 1912.