Progressive Era

The word “progressive” gets bandied about these days. It’s become popular with Democratic candidates, even when it’s not clear what they mean by it. It’s an insurance corporation featuring bizarre commercials.

From 1890-1920, it was an era unto itself: the Progressive Era. These thirty years marked a time of activism in the United States. From the local up to the national level, across all social classes and regarding all different sorts of issues, Americans sought reform.

President Theodore Roosevelt led one part of the charge by bringing a suit to dissolve the Northern Securities Company in 1902. Never before had the government interfered in such a brazen way with business interests. J.P. Morgan (who helped create the company) was shocked and called the attack ungentlemanly.

Federal law, at the time, didn’t have the power to reign in things like monopolies or stock manipulation in the business world. Bad behavior was dealt with privately. As J.P. Morgan said to Roosevelt following the suit, “if we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up.”

Why should the government have a say? The idea pervaded that great men would make society better if they could build their great things (railroads, factories, banking enterprises) unhindered. If this process made a select few extremely wealthy, that was “their just reward and carried the blessing of a Higher Power”, as Walter Lord puts it in The Good Years.

That’s not theoretical, by the way. John D. Rockefeller was known to have said “God gave me my money.”

The suit against Northern Securities Company didn’t radically change any of these views. What it did was to show that the law could be used to improve a situation. It encouraged the idea of a “moral standard” which – if upheld – could make life fairer.

This is a picture of Clara from 1910. She doesn’t look particularly happy in this one but I love it anyway. Except for the giant bow, it could just as easily be me as a little girl, or one of my daughters.

One thing I appreciate about being a parent is that though my entire workday be dull, repetitive, or filled with dead-ends, it takes only five minutes with my girls to change my attitude. Children refresh.*

At some point after pick-up, my daughter will say “oh, mom!” and go on about something new or exciting that happened. She passed her swim test. So-and-so has the same shirt as she does.

It doesn’t have to be anything consequential for her excitement to infect me. Soon I’m telling her about something good I had for lunch. I rack my brain to come up with an anecdote from the day to entertain her.

Reading about the Progressive Era for the post this week gave me the same sense of well-being. A sort of positive energy seemed to flow through people then. Some pushed for popular government, others for better working conditions in factories and still others to conserve the country’s forests.

There were women campaigning for votes. There was a movement that would turn social work into a profession. Just two years before this picture of Clara, in 1908, Lewis Wicks Hine was hired by the National Child Labor Committee to take pictures of his own, documenting the horrors of child labor.

Little as these people had in common, they were alike in seeing the nation, not as a place where everybody went his own way regardless of the plight of others, but as a place where people had a common destiny, where their fortunes were interlocked, and where wise planning, wise statesmanship could devise new instruments of satisfaction for all men.

Frederick Lewis Allen The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900-1950

We’ve still got some want-to-be robber-barons around, yes, but this period in history strengthened our laws and oversight. Pharma bro’s in prison, the Theranos founder is likely on her way and the S.E.C. (not created until 1934) has Elon Musk on speed dial.

There was a time when one of the most important financiers in the country, George Baker, could declare, “It’s none of the public’s business what I do…I owe the public nothing!” I don’t think that statement would be well-received in 2019. No Charitable Giving department would know what to make of it.

In fact, this George Baker began to engage in philanthropy in the 1920s, joining God-gave-me-my-money-Rockefeller. I’m inclined to think that – generous as those donations proved – both did so because they were advised that they should. I think the ethos of the Progressive Era began to hold leaders to a higher ‘moral standard’.

Perhaps since Flo the Progressive Commercial lady has forever destroyed the word “progressive” we could bring back “Square Deal” instead? Square Deal II 2020?

*sometimes