In the wake of the Panic of 1893, people across the world cried out for reform. They were tired of the corruption and inequalities that defined the Gilded Age. Over the next 20 years, major changes were seen across Europe and the Americas: expansions of democracy and technocracy alike; new business regulations; the emergence of the social welfare state; and more. “Progress” was the buzzword of the age, and it set the tone for an extraordinary new century.
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Full Transcript
This episode is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Brooking.
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On May Day, 1894, an estimated 10,000 protesters marched into Washington, DC. They were led by an eccentric businessman named Jacob Coxey and an even more eccentric labor leader named Carl Browne. They came to deliver their proposed legislation to Congress: a “Good Roads Bill” that would invest $500 million in infrastructure projects and create much-needed jobs in the process. (The equivalent today would be about $18 billion.)
The United States was in the midst of a severe economic downturn. During the previous year, a number of developments converged to create a meltdown, including the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the collapse of the Philadelphia & Reading Railroad, and a number of economic problems coming out of Argentina. In April 1893, the U.S. Treasury announced the value of its gold had fallen below its mandated holding requirements. Loans across the country began to default. And soon enough, depositors began withdrawing their savings in a national run on the banks.
The Panic of 1893 lasted about three months, as the stock market plummeted and over 300 banks collapsed. But the economic depression caused by the liquidity crisis would last years. It was the worst downturn in the history of the country up to that point. Economic output fell 6.5%, millions of Americans lost their jobs, farmers faced foreclosures, and bloody strikes ensued – including the infamous Pullman Strike (shout out Chapter 66).
So, when Coxey and Browne set out on their march, they attracted a good deal of support. As Jon Grinspan of the National Museum of American History put it:
“…Coxey and Browne were leading a ‘ragamuffin pageant’ of unemployed workers, spiritualists, women dressed as goddesses, thoroughbred horses, collies and bulldogs from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., waving peace flags and Browne’s (confusing) religious banners. The marchers camped outside of small towns along the way, surviving on donations of bologna and coffee and playing baseball with local supporters.”
As they made their way to the nation’s capital, journalists began following Coxey’s Army, writing up reports that captivated readers across the country. Soon, several other “armies” formed to make the trek as well, though none made it as far as Coxey and Browne.
Upon arriving, they went up to Capitol Hill. Browne – wearing a buckskin cowboy outfit – antagonized the police until they chased him through the crowd. He was eventually thrown to the ground and beaten. While that was happening, Coxey climbed the steps of the Capitol building to read his bill to the crowd, but he too was stopped and arrested. The police then started clubbing the crowd until they dispersed. In all, the confrontation lasted about 15 minutes. The two leaders each received a 20-day sentence to a local workhouse for the crime of “trampling Congressional shrubbery.”
But the episode reflected a broader shift in American politics. Voters were fed up with the status quo of the Gilded Age.
That November, more than 11% of the electorate chose a candidate from the People’s Party – an economic populist party – for Congress. A populist and bimetallist named William Jennings Bryan won the Democratic nomination two years later after telling his party’s convention delegates, “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.’”
Indeed, across the industrializing world, the masses were crying for reform. They had gone from the Panic of 1873 to the Long Depression to the Panic of 1893 and they had had enough. At the close of the 19th Century, the public demanded a greater say in the workings of government, a curb on the power of corporations, more economic stability, and more opportunities for upward mobility. But they weren’t Luddites – they liked the scientific, technological, and economic progress that the Industrial Revolutions had made possible. Now, with the 20th Century upon them, they sought social and political progress to match it.
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This is the Industrial Revolutions
Chapter 70: The Progressive Era
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That’s right, listeners, I’m back!
As I’m sure you noticed, it’s been a while since I last released an episode – nearly two years, in fact. And yes, much of it was because we had a little one back in 2024 and I was in full-time dad mode. But just as I was getting ready to get back to podcasting, I got some big news: My wife’s company went through a bit of a reorganization and – long story short – they ended up moving us across the country again, this time to Los Angeles. Now, I love LA, so I was definitely excited to return, but it also meant I needed to extend the hiatus to focus on house hunting, moving, and settling in here. And between the work the new house needed, and finding new doctors and such, and continuing to raise a now-toddler, the podcast return just kept getting pushed back.
But now most of that’s done, and the kiddo is entering preschool, so here we are, starting the second half of the Second Industrial Revolution. Kind of a nice half-way point in the podcast, isn’t it? Plus, for our first chapter back, I’m giving you a super-long one to enjoy.
Moving forward, I’m hoping to go back to releasing one episode per month, though I can’t guarantee that. But I’d say over the next year or so I’ll probably be able to knock out five or six chapters, knock on wood. My new goal is to wrap up the Second Industrial Revolution by June 2028.
Next, for you Patreon subscribers, I’m basically going to make this chapter a freebie and restart your generous donations upon the release of Chapter 71.
Still, I want to take a moment to thank all you wonderful patrons. Special shout outs go to Fran Connolly, Patrick Greene, Eben Palazzolo, and new patrons Aleksandr Guljajev, Kathryn Kennedy, Hubert Skrzyński, Sean Southern, and Wakkas, as well as John Bartlett, Harriet Buchannon, Jeppe Burchhardt, Tara Carlson, Britt Cleaver, Aaron Hertes, Eric Hogensen, Alonso Ibañez, Naomi Kanakia, Sebastian Kiessling, Paul Krasin, Jeremy L, Kyle Laskowski, Brian Long, Mac Loveland, Martin Mann, J.J. Marx, John Newton, Tomoharu Nishino, Emeka Okafor, Theodor Richter, David Roberson, Joshua Shanley, Kristian Sibast, Ray Squitieri, and Ross Templeton. Thank you.
One last admin note: I do have a correction for you. New listener Steve Wheeler from Manchester, England, caught an error from way back in Chapter 5. I said the Quarry Bank Mill was built in Salford. Now, the modern city of Salford is much smaller than the old Salford Hundred, as it was called (a division of the old county of Lancashire). But even still, the Quarry Bank Mill was built just south of the Salford Hundred in Cheshire. So, thank you, Steve, for catching that.
Okay now, on to the show!
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Part 1: Democracy and Reform
As we have discussed before – particularly in Chapter 40 – the forces of liberalism and industrialization had upended Europe’s traditional power structure. The landed gentry was declining in economic significance as the capitalist class was rising. As they did, these capitalists invested in political efforts to expand the franchise, giving them a greater say in the functions of the state.
But the process would not stop there. As industrial cities took off, a growing class of wage earners emerged as well. And they wanted the vote too.
Of course, the powers-that-be were hesitant to go that far. As the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, put it in 1866: “The great danger of democracy is, that it places supreme power into the hands of those who may be misled by hunger into acts of folly or of the wrong.” When economic downturns came, he feared, the people would turn to tyrants promising them relief.
Yet, without the vote, Salisbury believed those same masses might still bring about tyranny in the form of violent revolution. And to many of his contemporaries, this was an even greater danger than an elected despot. Plus, a political party that extended the franchise could benefit in subsequent elections by winning the votes of the new voters. Ergo, leaders around the world gradually made concessions to expand democracy.
I told you a little bit about how this happened in Germany under the imperial chancellor, our old friend, Otto von Bismarck, back in Chapter 67. And in Chapter 66, I recounted the story of how general strikes in Belgium helped bring about universal male suffrage there.
In Switzerland – where something like direct democracy had been taking place on a local level for centuries – the constitution was revised throughout the 1800s to guarantee greater popular input through national referenda. And a general strike in 1918 led the Swiss to vote through a system of elected representation to the federal government.
Up in Denmark, the Constitution of 1849 not only ended absolute monarchy in the kingdom, it also introduced a degree of democracy. Constitutional reforms gradually expanded Danish democracy, culminating with universal suffrage in 1915. It was similar in Norway, where roughly half the male population could vote thanks to the 1814 Constitution, and where it would become universal by 1913. Finland’s first election – open to most adult citizens – took place in 1907. The same happened in Austria that very same year, after the franchise was gradually extended beginning in 1896.
In the United Kingdom, the Reform Acts of 1832, 1867, and 1884 continued extending the franchise until 60% of men had the right to vote. And thanks to the efforts of suffragettes like Emmeline Pankhurst, there would be near-universal suffrage by 1918.
And throughout this period, the UK allowed greater autonomy to its settler-colonies. Home rule, as it’s called, was extended to New Zealand in 1852, Canada in 1867, and Australia in 1901, each of which adopted systems of government that were more democratic than that of the mother country. But, critically, home rule was not extended to Ireland.
Yet, suffrage had expanded on the Emerald Isle. Following the Third Reform Act, roughly one out of two Irishmen could vote. And, unsurprisingly, they started electing MPs who called for land reform and home rule. But this would jeopardize the financial position of the British gentry, which controlled extensive land holdings in Ireland.
So, when Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone came out in support of Irish Home Rule, those aristocrats who supported the Liberals jumped ship, turning instead to the Conservative Party. To make up for it, the Liberals moved to the left on a number of issues to court working class voters, like increased factory regulation, increased secularism, and increased access to education. Well, this gradually led more bourgeois voters to join the Conservatives, and to the Liberals’ further adoption of even more populist policies – to court even more working-class voters – in turn.
At the same time, another important party was forming. In February 1900, delegates from about half of Britain’s trade unions convened – along with members of the Fabian Society (shout out Chapter 65) and smaller Social Democratic organizations – to form the Labour Representative Committee. Together, they would put up candidates for Parliament and steer legislation on behalf of working-class Britons. Six years later it was renamed the Labour Party – the same party currently leading the UK’s government.
Still, with the Liberal Party moving to the left, it needed to maintain a working relationship with Labour, and for years the two parties cooperated to avoid vote-splitting in competitive constituencies.
One of the characters who best embodies the shifting tides of British politics in this period was a young politician by the name of Winston Churchill. The grandson of a Duke on his father’s side and of an American banker on his mother’s side, Churchill had served in the army before working as a journalist in South Africa during the Boer War. A staunch imperialist, he opposed Irish Home Rule and was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in 1900. But, opposed to the Tories’ protectionist trade policies, he moved to the Liberal Party in 1904.
Churchill was an ambitious politician and found himself serving in various posts for the Liberal government from 1908 until 1922. During those years, he was instrumental in crafting the reformist policies of “New Liberalism”, but he also often had to deal with labor unrest across the country. As the years went on, he became more and more unnerved about the growth of socialism, leading him to abandon the Liberals and rejoin the Conservative Party in 1924.
Salisbury, Churchill, and many other politicians of the Second Industrial Revolution feared that the expansion of democracy would lead politics into the realm of class warfare. But the actual results of the trend were more complicated. As our old friend, Eric Hobsbawm put it:
“Increasingly politicians were obliged to appeal to a mass electorate; even to speak directly to the masses or indirectly through the megaphone of the popular press... Gladstone introduced mass electioneering in Britain (and perhaps to Europe) in the campaign of 1879... as the men who governed wrapped themselves in rhetoric, the serious discussion of politics retreated to the world of intellectuals and the educated minority public which read them.”
In other words, politics was turning into a bit of a show and – like in a show – those practicing politics were aiming at hearts more than minds. And the dangers of this phenomenon soon became apparent in France.
The Third Republic had maintained a robust democracy since the end of the Franco-Prussian War. Monarchism slowly died away as a serious political thought. Throughout the 1880s and ‘90s, socialist candidates picked up more and more seats. Still, moderate and center-right parties managed to hold onto the reins of power most of the time.
Then, many working-class French voters began to gravitate toward the politics of grievance. It could be seen with the League of Patriots and its leader, Georges Boulanger, an army general and politician who promoted revenge against Germany. Running in multiple districts at a time, Boulanger attracted supporters from among disgruntled Parisian laborers, conservative Catholics, veterans, and monarchists alike. As a broadside supporting his candidacy put it, “Make way for he who will rid you of this herd of parasites, living off your sufferings, betraying your trust, and who have done nothing for you, except for sending your children to die far away without any profit for France, which they left disarmed!”
Accused of plotting a coup to overthrow the government, Boulanger fled the country in April 1889. His movement dried up within the year and he would take his own life in 1891. But the proto-fascism he represented would live on.
In September 1894, a French intelligence asset inside the German embassy discovered a torn-up memorandum outlining a recent French arms deal, addressed to the German military attaché. It appeared someone inside the French military was sending state secrets to the hated Germans, and the French Minister of War launched an investigation to discover the source of the leak. He was soon given the name of an ideal scapegoat.
Captain Alfred Dreyfus was born into a prosperous Jewish family in Alsace in 1859. His father, a successful textile manufacturer, moved the family to Switzerland during the Franco-Prussian War. With Alsace taken by the German Empire, the Dreyfuses eventually settled in Paris and Alfred decided to pursue a military career. After graduating from the Ecole Polytechnique, he became an artillery officer and made his way through the ranks, eventually serving in the General Staff headquarters.
Initially, it was the Alsatian connection that made him a target of the investigation – his original home was now part of Germany after all. But it did not take long before the military tapped deep-seeded antisemitism to advance its prosecution. Dreyfus was court martialed and swiftly found guilty of treason. After an elaborate ceremony in which he was demoted and dishonorably discharged, he was sent to a French penal colony called Devil’s Island.
Just a couple years later though, the French intelligence service realized that another man – an army major – was the real culprit. But the army refused to investigate him and sent the major to Tunisia instead. Eventually, word got out, and the scandal became the most memorable and polarizing event in the history of the Third Republic. Progressives rallied behind the cause of freeing Captain Dreyfus. Conservatives rallied behind the beleaguered army. In 1898, our old friend, the novelist Emile Zola, published an explosive open letter to the French President titled simply “J’accuse!”, in which he accused the government of antisemitism. For a while, Zola was forced to flee the country to avoid arrest for slandering the army.
Eventually, the case was reopened, but the military tribunal refused to reverse the verdict. Instead, Dreyfus was pardoned by the President. In 1906, the military finally exonerated him and restored his commission. Dreyfus would serve in the First World War, defeating the Germans, and rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
The Dreyfus Affair illustrated some major pitfalls of liberal democracy as it expanded to the public at large – namely, (A) the challenge of protecting the rights of those belonging to minority groups, and (B) maintaining clearheaded governance and justice when the passions of the nation are excited by opportunistic vote seekers and the popular press. (Or whatever media are being consumed.) Indeed, as democracy spread throughout Europe, politicians would increasingly invoke the antisemitic attitudes of the voters they represented.
In the Americas, meanwhile, the philosophy of Positivism was making waves up and down the hemisphere. Leaders across the two continents made a big deal of promoting “progress” – both scientific and otherwise. More often than not, though, this notion of “progress” did not include democracy.
But there were some exceptions. Argentina had not had a functioning democracy by the late 19th Century. Yet in 1910, President Roque Sáenz-Peña announced his plans to give all male citizens the right to vote. To ensure fairness, elections would be conducted by secret ballot and organized by the judiciary. In 1916, his law took effect and free elections – well, actually, compulsory elections – were held. Sáenz-Peña’s National Autonomist Party, which had ruled with an iron fist since 1880, was handedly defeated.
In Uruguay, on the other hand, democracy had been part of the constitution since the 1830s. And going into the 1900s, the ruling Colorado Party came up with some pretty interesting ideas to improve it. In addition to extending the franchise to women, they worked to limit the power of the president and place many of his executive functions into the hands of an elected, 9-member Council of Administration. And this council would include members from both the majority and minority parties. Albeit, this system did collapse under some enormous strain before too long.
Another country in the Americas with a long tradition of democracy was, of course, the United States. But here too, the Progressive Era brought about efforts to improve it.
One of the most notable reforms was the direct elections of U.S. senators. Since 1789, the Constitution had given the state legislatures the power to appoint federal senators. (This was a result of the Great Compromise at the Constitutional Convention and the debate about whether the federal government would be a compact of the people or a compact of the states. Ultimately, they decided, the people would elect the House and the states would elect the Senate. Anyway…)
While there had been occasional calls for reforming the Senate, it really gathered steam in the 1890s, as newspapers and Populist politicians began deriding the body as a “rich man’s club”, where members could essentially buy their way in and use the office to serve their own interests, rather than the interests of the nation. In the first decade of the 20th Century, the legislatures of Oregon and Nebraska decided to delegate their power to choose senators to the voters of their states.
The House of Representatives tried five times to put through a constitutional amendment giving the power to elect senators to the people. But, surprise surprise, it died in the Senate each time. Yet the upper house could not hold out forever. In 1912, Congress finally approved this 17th Amendment – ratified by the states the next year – which specified that the two senators from each state would be “elected by the people thereof.”
Another democratic reform was the codification of the primary election. During the Gilded Age, party machines would maneuver their delegates at conventions to nominate their candidates for office. As a result, voters felt like they were choosing between candidates who only made it onto the ballot thanks to agreements made in smoke-filled rooms. In 1904, after years of battling his party on the issue, progressive Republican Governor Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin – better known to us Wisconsinites as “Fighting Bob” – finally pushed through the adoption of the direct primary in his state. Alabama soon followed, and Pennsylvania adopted an even more wide-reaching law for primaries in 1913.
And the Wisconsin law was passed thanks to another progressive device of democracy: the Referendum. It had been used occasionally before to get the public’s input on particularly thorny issues, like the prohibition of alcohol, here and there. But it became more and more popular as the Progressive Era went on. An even more radical version of it – the initiative – came onto the scene as well. It would allow voters to put a referendum on the ballot themselves if they gathered enough signatures for it. In 1902, Progressive activist William S. U’Ren successfully got the Oregon legislature to adopt this procedure, and the “Oregon System” spread to several other states, mostly in the western U.S.
By 1908, Oregan voters had also approved another reform into their system: the recall election. This would allow voters to force out an elected official who turned out to be corrupt or out-of-step with public opinion. It could also be used to allow voters to overturn an approved law or unpopular judicial decision. While a very popular idea in early American history, the recall had never actually caught on before. And while referenda, initiatives, and recalls have never made it all the way up to the federal level, these devices did gradually spread across the country for state and local matters.
But Americans did not believe that more democracy was always the best way to fight Gilded Age corruption. In fact, in some ways (it seemed), democracy was responsible for that corruption. As the Saturday Evening Post put it in 1905, “the people have come to see that parties are to a great extent the tools of the unscrupulous men who make of politics a profession.” Policymakers, it seemed, were better at playing the game of politics than they were at actually making policy.
In September 1900, the city of Galveston, Texas, experienced a devastating hurricane. With the city in ruins, the state legislature decided it was more important for Galveston to rebuild efficiently than it was for them to rebuild democratically. They authorized the city to scrap its elected government for a five-member commission to run things, with each commissioner overseeing a municipal department like fire, police, or housing. They would administer the city with a non-partisan and business-like approach.
The “Galveston Plan” – as it was known – soon grew in popularity and spread to other local governments across the country. More and more, they would hire city managers to run these cities with the talent of a CEO, rather than leave those responsibilities to the elected mayors. Unelected commissions were increasingly set up to oversee public functions that were previously overseen by elected municipal councils. To reformers, it was a great way to root out the corruption of the cities and instill some policy expertise. “Fighting Bob” La Follette even adopted this thinking when he established the so-called “Wisconsin Idea”, in which professors at the University of Wisconsin would help craft legislation, advise the governor, and serve on state commissions.
By this point, the American franchise had long included working-class white men. How (or if) it would be extended further was a matter of contentious debate.
Technically, Black men had had the right to vote since the 1870 ratification of the 15th Amendment. But though that amendment explicitly forbade the denial of the franchise based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, that did not stop many states from ignoring it after the collapse of Reconstruction. From 1890 until 1910, state after state – mostly in the South, but not exclusively – passed laws to effectively prevent the Black vote. These included poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, and outright voter intimidation by white vigilantes. By the end of the Progressive Era, Black voter participation had fallen to statistically insignificant numbers.
Black leaders, meanwhile, were divided on how to respond. Booker T. Washington argued that African Americans should not seek the vote at all – at least not for the time being – and that they should focus on vocational education and employment instead. As he put it in one speech, addressing the issue of the right to occupy the same spaces as whites, “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.” In other words, only by gradually building up wealth could Black families ever come to realize their civil rights.
W.E.B. Du Bois, on the other hand, believed the enforcement of civil rights was the only way to build up Black wealth. After all, what good was building wealth if white terrorists could swiftly destroy it without consequence, as they had done in the infamous Tulsa Massacre of 1921, as well as in many other places, many times before and after. To secure civil rights, Du Bois argued that Black Americans needed a sort of intellectual vanguard to be their voice – a liberal arts-educated elite that he called the “Talented Tenth.” These learned men and women, he believed, would show white America just how much Black America was capable of achieving. The vote would follow.
At the end of the day, though, both Washington and Du Bois struggled to see their ideas translated into any widescale, tangible results. Expansion of the American franchise was almost entirely redirected toward the cause of women’s suffrage – a topic I will be returning to in another episode.
In the wake of the Panic of 1893, American voters increasingly chose progressive candidates for office – most notably for that highest of offices, the presidency.
It took time though. William Jennings Bryan was easily defeated by the more conservative William McKinley in the 1896 and 1900 elections. But in 1900, McKinley did balance his ticket by choosing the progressive governor of New York – our friend from last time, Teddy Roosevelt – as his running mate. And when an anarchist assassinated McKinley in 1901, Teddy stepped up to the top job.
At the age of 42, Roosevelt was the youngest American president to date, and he had the energy of a tornado. In addition to advancing his imperialist ambitions for his country, set about enacting major progressive reforms. Among other things, Roosevelt introduced new regulations to the rail industry and the meat industry. He worked to break up big corporations using the Sherman Antitrust Act. He signed the Antiquities Act and used to it establish “national monuments” for the conservation of nature. He even intervened in a labor dispute between union miners and mine owners in Pennsylvania by bringing both parties to the White House to hash out an agreement. (In the process he put forward a new idea, that the government should treat capital and labor equally, rather than simply serve the interests of capital.)
In all of these ways, Roosevelt was trying to use the power of government in a way that had not been seen in American history before. He was trying to give Americans what he called a “Square Deal” – basic actions that would simply make life fairer and better for everyone.
Upon winning the election of 1904, Roosevelt – feeling more jubilant than strategic – promised the nation he would not run again in 1908. So, when 1908 came around, he begrudgingly kept this promise and backed our other friend from last time, War Secretary William Howard Taft.
That year, the Republican Taft defeated progressive Democrat Bryan, who tried running for the White House a third time. And though he was, at heart, a conservative, Taft led during a 4-year period that advanced way more progressive reforms than the 7+ years under Roosevelt.
Yet Roosevelt’s own views were evolving. In a 1910 speech, he outlined a program he dubbed “New Nationalism.”
“The New Nationalism puts the national need before sectional or personal advantage. It is impatient of the utter confusion that results from local legislatures attempting to treat national issues as local issues. It is still more impatient of the impotence which springs from overdivision of governmental powers, the impotence which makes it possible for local selfishness, or legal cunning hired by wealthy special interests to bring national activities to a deadlock. The New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It demands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representative body shall represent all the people rather than any one class or section of the people.”
For the first time in American history, a major statesman was calling for the consolidation of power in the federal government to advance (what was becoming known as) social justice. As the economy became more national with the railroads, the national government was now becoming responsible for everything affecting the economy. That meant it was up to the feds to guarantee workplace safety, to protect consumers from the false claims of advertisers, to protect the natural environment, to help fund education, and more.
That being said, Teddy was not in favor of socialism. Like many progressives of the era, Roosevelt believed progressive action was needed to deflate the socialist movement. Like how a vaccine uses a little bit of the virus to prevent the full-blown disease, social reform was needed to protect the existing order from social revolution.
But this was a lot more than Taft was ever going to do. So, Roosevelt decided to return to the national stage. And after losing the Republican Party’s nomination for president to Taft, he decided to start his own party. Officially called the “Progressive Party”, it was better known as the “Bull Moose” Party because the eccentric Teddy had referred to himself as a Bull Moose. And it adopted a platform that included proposals like women’s suffrage, campaign finance reform, anti-corruption measures, the abolition of child labor, a minimum wage (and a “living wage” at that), workers’ compensation and other forms of social insurance, a national health service, a progressive income tax and an inheritance tax, securities regulations, and more.
This set up one of the most fascinating and talked-about elections in American history – the presidential contest of 1912. There were four notable candidates and they all had progressive bona fides. There was the Bull Moose himself, who had probably done more to advance a progressive ideology than any other American. There was the Republican, Taft, who had overseen major regulatory advancement against the corporate powers of the nation. Then there was the Democrat, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, an academic who went from President of Princeton University to Governor of New Jersey. Though he was a visceral racist and unwilling to go as far as Roosevelt, Wilson did have a progressive track record as governor and promised a presidency of reform. And finally, there was the Socialist, our old friend Euguene V. Debs. The labor leader and IWW co-founder didn’t have much of a chance, but he stayed in the national conversation by raising tons of money through the channels of the labor movement and by crisscrossing the nation, delivering rousing speeches to huge audiences.
Progressives were divided but, more importantly, the Republican Party was divided. So, in the end, the victory went to Wilson. And though his campaign promised a more business-friendly approach than Roosevelt’s, his presidency would see much more progressive reform than Roosevelt’s had. In fact, many of the policies he adopted seemed to come right out of the Bull Moose Party platform.
As Wilson explained in his inaugural address:
“We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost…the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it has fallen pitilessly the years through. The groans and agony of it all had not reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and most familiar seat… The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who had used it had forgotten the people.”
Among other things, Wilson would go on to cut tariffs on food imports, enact an income tax, introduce the Federal Reserve System to stabilize the banking sector, set up the Federal Trade Commission, establish the eight-hour workday, tax companies extra if they employed child labor, and provide workers’ comp for federal employees.
Now, not all of these reforms stood the test of time. Many of the labor laws, in particular, were eventually softened or overturned by the Supreme Court, which was soon led by the conservative Chief Justice William Howard Taft. (Yup, the only president to later serve on the highest court.)
Still, over the course of about 20 years, the United States had undergone a major ideological shift – one that would eventually make the New Deal possible. More and more, it was believed that the government had a responsibility for the social welfare of its constituent citizens.
And it came at a critical time because – as Roosevelt and other progressives feared – the calls for revolution were indeed growing louder. And, in some places, this danger was already pushing governments toward the development of the welfare state.
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Part 2: Labor and Welfare
Ever since the 1840s, when the Lowell Mill Girls organized for a 10-hour workday law (shout out Chapter 33!), the Massachusetts legislature had been under pressure from organized labor to limit the number of weekly working hours in the state’s textile industry. By the 1870s, the state had begun enacting such reforms incrementally.
And by the early 20th Century, AFL-affiliated unions were lobbying for more such reforms. Thus, in 1911, the legislature adopted “An Act relative to the employment of women in mercantile, manufacturing, and mechanical establishments.” The law would reduce the number of hours women and children could work in the mills from 56 hours per week to 54. It took effect on New Year’s Day 1912.
In the days that followed, workers waited to see how the mill owners would respond. The employers did not want to pay their employees 56 hours-worth of wages for 54 hours of actual work. The employees, while appreciative of the opportunity to have fewer hours, were not willing to take a cut to their weekly pay, as it was already too modest.
The trouble began in Lawrence, Massachusetts, where workers began walking out on January 11th and 12th, as employers announced pay cuts there. The conditions in Lawrence were already horrendous. Working families in the city were malnourished and packed into squalid tenement buildings. Most mill workers were teenage girls, and more than a third of them died by age 25. If you were a baby born into a working family in Lawrence, the odds you would survive to the age of 6 were roughly 50/50. So even a small reduction of pay was viewed as a death sentence.
The AFL-affiliated United Textile Workers did not support a strike. But they were caught off guard by the organizing efforts of the much more radical union in town – the Industrial Workers of the World. Whereas the UTW primarily represented skilled laborers (who were typically native-born and, of course, men), the IWW served as a voice for the bottom-rung of the workforce – women, children, and immigrants. And they successfully persuaded these workers – from a myriad of ethnic and language backgrounds, no less – to go out on strike.
Since its founding in 1905, the IWW had been in a bitter competition with the American Federation of Labor, which did not share the Wobblies’ ideology of revolutionary syndicalism (shout out Chapter 65!). Whereas the AFL advocated for a “fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work”, the IWW called for the “Abolition of the wage system” which they viewed as “wage slavery.”
Within days of the initial walk-outs in Lawrence, a strike committee was formed by the IWW and affiliated socialists. They demanded a 15% raise for a 54-hour week and double-pay for overtime. In a proclamation they declared:
“We hold that as useful members of society and as wealth producers we have the right to lead decent and honorable lives; that we ought to have homes and not shacks; that we ought to have clean food and not adulterated food at high prices; that we ought to have clothes suited to the weather and not shoddy garments.”
In other words, subsistence-level wages were not enough. They worked hard, and so they wanted some of the good things in life too. This sentiment had recently been summed up by a popular picket-line sign that read “Bread for all, and Roses too!” Indeed, the Lawrence textile strike of 1912 would eventually come to be known as the “Bread and Roses Strike.”
As the writer James Oppenheim had put it in a poem a year before…
“As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.”
The Bread and Roses Strike would soon become one of the most notorious in American history. In the dead of winter, mill owners blasted picketing strikers with fire hoses. The strikers responded by throwing ice. That led the governor to call in the state militia and police who attacked the strikers with clubs. Several strikers, including a young Syrian boy, were bayoneted over the course of the 2-month work stoppage. Again, these were mostly women and children.
As all this was happening, it appears that one of the mill owners paid a local undertaker to frame the strikers by planting dynamite around Lawrence. When he was caught, he faced a fine but no jail time.
At one point, the police shot into a crowd of strikers, killing an Italian worker named Anna LoPizzo. Yet her death was blamed on two of the IWW leaders – despite their being more than 2 miles away from the scene – and they were subsequently arrested and tried for murder. (They were eventually acquitted.)
Workers started sending their children to the homes of supporters in New York and Philadelphia to keep them safe. But this was seen as an embarrassment to the mill owners, who demanded the police stop these employees from putting their kids on the trains. In late February, as a hundred children were getting ready to go south, the police began clubbing the children and their mothers, hauling them off to jail. One woman even miscarried as a result.
But as reports of these events spread across the country via the news wires, the tide began to turn for the workers. Public support for their cause skyrocketed, and Congressional leaders started launching investigations of the conditions in Lawrence. Finally, in mid-March, the mill owners acquiesced to most of the strikers’ demands.
It would be the high point for the IWW. But in the years to come, many bosses willingly engaged with the AFL, believing it was better for them to organize the workforce, rather than the Wobblies. And, due to their opposition to the First World War, the federal government was able to successfully suppress the IWW before the end of the decade. Even the gains at Lawrence were quickly lost, since the IWW didn’t bother enforcing the mill owners’ concessions. (Remember, they believed in strikes for their potential to lead to revolution, and not for securing contracts.)
While there were many strikes during the Progressive Era, they typically weren’t as violent as they had been during the Gilded Age. Mines were probably the most common worksites for stoppages, from Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Nevada and Utah. But like in Lawrence, many strikes were taking place in cities, increasingly led by women, immigrants, and socialists.
Among them was the New York Shirtwaist Strike of 1909.
As millions of immigrants flooded into New York City during the Second Industrial Revolution, Manhattan became a hub for the garment industry. Many of the immigrants were Jews fleeing the Russian pogroms, and one of the few trades they had been allowed to practice in the Old World was tailoring. Many of them formed small, informal shops out of their tenements, supplying the growing fashion brands of the time. Eventually, some were able to scale their businesses, establishing factories and filling them with wage-earning workers.
In the summer of 1909, garment industry strikes were taking place throughout the city. Increasingly, they were coming out of the factories producing shirtwaists – what we today would call blouses. When some 200 workers – mostly women – walked off the job at Rosen Brothers, demanding a 20% pay bump, management called in strikebreakers to physically attack the picket lines. But the workers held their ground and, eventually, management caved.
Well, that created a ripple effect in the industry throughout the city. More strikes at other shirtwaist factories followed, as did bloody confrontations and arrests. That November, Local 25 of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union voted to begin a general strike.
Gender played a key role in this strike. Most of the workers were women, and many of their brothers in the labor movement had strong doubts about the efficacy of the strike. But it attracted the support of the Women’s Trade Union League and many wealthy women’s rights advocates. Among the latter group were Anne Morgan (daughter of our old friend, J.P. Morgan) and our old friend Alva Vanderbilt, although she was now Alva Belmont, having divorced Willie K and then remarried. As they saw it, they could help the women get a better deal at work, and the working women could help them all get the right to vote.
Having the wealthy women as allies was a godsend to the workers – at least at first. They were able to raise tens of thousands of dollars for the strike fund, challenge the roles of police and judges through the channels of influence, and even get stories written about women from respectable families being arrested on the picket line. It was not a good look for the employers.
But it wasn’t long before the cracks started to appear in the alliance. Many of the city’s Jewish immigrants brought with them to New York – or, soon after arriving, developed – overtly socialist beliefs. And, of course, many of the women striking came from those Jewish families. This scared the rich ladies – Anne Morgan even went on to release a statement lamenting the movement’s leaders for preaching “fanatical doctrines of socialism.” As wealthy women pulled back their support, the strike’s momentum waned, and the union accepted a negotiated truce with the employers in February 1910.
As a result of the agreement, one of the strike’s very minor issues was left unaddressed. That issue was workplace safety and – just over a year later – many of the workers paid a heavy price for it.
On March 25, 1911, tragedy struck at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company’s factory in Greenwich Village. Like they often did, one of the cutters on the 8th floor violated the factory’s “No Smoking” policy and threw his cigarette butt and/or match into a waste basket full of scrap cloth and paper. It caught fire and then the fire spread rapidly. The building’s design – with open space floors flanked by stairwells – made it a bit like a chimney and, sure enough, the fire raged up the stairwells, setting the 9th and 10th floors ablaze.
Efforts were made to put out the fire, but they couldn’t keep up with the pace of it spreading. A few buckets of water and sand were insufficient. They had fire hoses in the stairwells but, apparently, they didn’t work when the valve was turned on. Firefighters called to the scene could not blast their fire hoses on the street high enough to reach the flames. The fire escapes were mostly inaccessible, and when some 20 workers managed to reach one fire escape it collapsed, sending them falling about a hundred feet to the ground and killing them.
The way the building was designed should have afforded most of the workers the opportunity to escape unharmed. But management had made several modifications. One exit from the factory floor was partitioned so that workers had to leave one-at-a-time, showing their bags to a security guard who would check for any stolen fabrics or other items on their way out the door. They also made sure the workers had to leave through a side entrance so that folks on the street would only see well-dressed managers and customers walking through the nicer front door and lobby. On top of that, the large doors to the factory floors were often locked, and they opened inward because the stairwells were too narrow for them to open outward, which created a bottleneck as workers stampeded toward the exit.
In the end, many of the 8th floor workers were able to escape. Some of the 10th floor workers were able to climb to the roof and cross over (via a ladder) to a window in the building next door. But many workers – especially on the 9th floor – were either consumed by the fire or jumped to their deaths. As one reporter on the scene put it, “I learned a new sound that day, a sound more horrible than description can picture—the thud of a speeding living body on a stone sidewalk.” In all, 146 workers perished, most of them being poorly-paid teenage girls from Jewish and Italian families.
The Triangle Factory Fire was perhaps the greatest industrial tragedy in American history. The factory owners were arrested and tried for manslaughter. They were acquitted in that case, but they were later found liable for wrongful death in a civil trial.
Within three months of the fire, the state created a new Factory Investigating Commission. It issued subpoenas for records and testimonies, hired inspectors and sent them to factories across the state, and eventually expanded its scope to investigate a myriad of health and safety issues at worksites. They also enlisted the help of volunteers to research and submit their own findings. Among them was young social scientist and worker’s rights lobbyist named Frances Perkins – the future U.S. Labor Secretary during the New Deal.
The Commission found some truly shocking things and, in 1913, a whopping 25 new bills were passed into state law to improve working conditions. The state’s Department of Labor was reorganized. Automatic sprinklers – which had been in use for decades in New England textile mills – became required in high-rise buildings. Fire drills became mandatory at large shops. Safer machines were required in many factories, as was improved sanitation, as were enhanced protections of women and children on the job. Of course, the business community cried a very loud “foul” at the new regulatory environment, but most of the reforms remained in place with minimal disruption to business. And in the years to come, more workplace safety legislation started getting passed throughout the country.
These New York investigations were not the only investigations into worksite conditions during the Progressive Era. In fact, a socialist newspaper in Chicago had hired a young writer to investigate the city’s meatpacking industry just a few years earlier.
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. His parents were both children of wealthy Southern families, though his father had trouble holding down a job as alcoholism gradually took control of his life. As a result, the young Upton was quite familiar with the disparities of wealth in Gilded Age America.
Eventually, the family moved to New York, where Sinclair studied at City College and later Columbia University. He paid his way through school writing pulp fiction and eventually decided to pursue literature as his career, though he struggled to find success with his early work.
In the early 1900s, Sinclair came in contact with a succession of writers who introduced him to the ideas of socialism. He began exploring such themes in his writing, and by 1904, he was recruited by Fred Warren – editor of the Chicago weekly, Appeal to Reason – to investigate the “wage slavery” to be found in city’s Union Stock Yards. (Shout out Chapter 57!) There he spent seven weeks working undercover, gathering material for a fictional series published in Appeal to Reason. In 1906, the series was turned into a novel, The Jungle.
Centered around a Lithuanian immigrant family, The Jungle was a pretty over-the-top depiction of working-class industrial life. The social and economic situations are virtually hopeless for the struggling family, which is gradually reduced to homelessness, violence, addiction, prostitution, and more. Only by embracing socialism – Sinclair implies – can they hope to have a fulfilling life. But despite the fictional narrative, The Jungle is loaded with nonfictional anecdotes from Sinclair’s observations in the Yards, where dangerous working conditions really did have an adverse effect on the health and safety of the labor force.
But while said conditions did alarm readers, what really outraged them were the revelations of just how gross the meat was coming out of the Yards. Sinclair relayed stories of meat that had spoiled, but – rather than throw it out – the companies would treat it with chemicals to make it look and smell acceptable to buyers. The packing houses were infested with rats; the workers, lacking restrooms, relieved themselves on the floors; and now and then a worker would become injured on the job, falling into a vat or something. So, by processing the meat after picking it up off the floor, the finished products were contaminated with rat droppings, human bodily fluids, and even human body parts. As Sinclair famously quipped of the book, “I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
With our old friends from the Yards, Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour, controlling a near monopoly on many American meat products, pretty much everyone who ate American meat had been exposed. Meat consumption within the U.S. plummeted by about 50%, while several European countries temporarily banned American meat imports. And for one of the book’s readers, it had at last provided the ammunition he needed to bring about some of the country’s first consumer protection laws.
Harvey Washington Wiley was born in an Indiana log cabin in 1844. After serving in the Civil War, he went to medical school and later got a job teaching chemistry, eventually landing a position at the new Purdue University in 1874. (Shout out Chapter 62!) After a stint in Germany where he gained experience studying sugar, he began working for the U.S. government, researching issues of food adulteration and preservatives. Assembling his so-called “Poison Squad” of researchers, Wiley discovered case after case of food producers selling products that were either falsely advertised (like ground chicory being sold as ground coffee) or loaded with toxic chemicals (like formaldehyde in milk or arsenic in children’s candies). And he began pushing Congress to adopt health regulations for the national food supply.
Critically, Wiley was able to find allies in the private sector. As I mentioned in Chapter 58, the Heinz company was all-to-willing to advocate for food safety legislation, knowing they had the capital means to comply with such rules, which many of their smaller competitors did not. Wiley could convince them to make important changes (such as using vinegar as a much safer preservative for ketchup), while they would pay lobbyists to advance Wiley’s program. And with the publication of The Jungle – and the thousands of angry letters politicians were receiving from their carnivorous constituents – Congress was finally ready to act.
Though he thought Upton Sinclair a dishonest “crackpot”, President Teddy Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Federal Meat Inspection Act into law later that same year. The first act effectively established the Food and Drug Administration (the FDA), with Wiley as its first Commissioner. For the first time in any meaningful way, the federal government would take on the role of consumer protection.
And, ultimately, that was to Roosevelt’s advantage, as it fit in very nicely with the “Square Deal” he had already promised the American people.
Though he was not necessarily opposed to big business, Roosevelt did believe that some big business had problems of fraudulent and/or predatory behaviors. Thus, big business needed to be under state supervision. As he put it, “the State not only has the right to control them, but is duty-bound to control them whenever the need of such control is shown.” In other words, the laissez-faire approach of the Gilded Age had to end.
But while the Square Deal had increased the power of the state in terms of consumer protection, antitrust enforcement, environmental conservation, and even labor relations, it never went so far as to make the state responsible for social welfare. Nor did President Wilson’s “New Freedom” platform. Such programs like public pensions, subsidized health care, and state-enforced unemployment insurance were still outside the norms of Classical Liberalism.
But on the other side of the pond, an ideology known as “New Liberalism” was emerging.
Classical Liberalism developed during the age of royal absolutism where monarchs governed as they saw fit. Under these ancien regimes, power and opportunity was concentrated in the hands of the landed gentry, royal charters granted monopolies to guilds and mercantilist corporations, and there was little separation between church and state. Chafing under such regimes, liberals sought personal liberty from those institutions of power, especially from that of the state.
But as liberal regimes took hold across the western world in the 19th Century, the balances of power shifted. Constitutions were adopted, the gentry lost its relative influence to the rising industrial class, and free trade and commerce began to take root. As democracy gradually expanded within these regimes, the state was no longer seen as the impediment to liberty that it used to be. With the people increasingly choosing their own governments, the state was increasingly viewed as the embodiment of the nation – the embodiment of the people. The threat of state tyranny now paled in comparison to the threats of capitalist over-reach and Proletarian poverty.
In his landmark 1902 book, Liberalism: An Attempt to the State the Principles and Proposals of Contemporary Liberalism in England, the politician Herbert Louis Samuel explains this updated version of the ideology as such:
“...it is the duty of the State to secure to all its members, and all others whom it can influence, the fullest possible opportunity to lead the best life. When we speak of Progress, we mean by progress the enlargement of this opportunity. When Liberals advocate Self-government, it is because Self-government is regarded as a means towards this end.”
These economic and philosophical realignments coincided with the British political realignment I mentioned earlier. As the UK’s Liberal Party shifted to the left, bourgeois voters increasingly left them for the Tories, forcing the Liberals to depend more and more on the working class. And following the Liberals’ landslide victory in the 1906 election, they adopted a program that reflected their New Liberalism.
Over the next eight years, Liberal leaders including Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Herbert Henry Asquith, David Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill designed and executed numerous social welfare policies. They subsidized free meals, health inspections, and scholarships for working-class schoolchildren. They began paying out the first public pensions to the elderly poor. They passed numerous bills providing workers’ compensation. Health insurance became mandatory and partially subsidized by the state. Certain minimum wages were adopted. Work-placement centers and juvenile courts were established. Public housing construction became mandatory in districts with housing shortages.
To help pay for it all, the income tax was made progressive, the estate tax was increased, and most controversially a 20% land value tax was introduced, inspired by the ideas of our old friend, Henry George. It was part of what became known as “The People’s Budget”, which would effectively help redistribute wealth from rich to poor. The land value tax would end up being such a blow to the gentry that the House of Lords bitterly fought the program, though it eventually passed. As a result of the Lords’ delays, though, the Liberals would strip the upper house of much of its power within a couple of years.
A similar process was playing out during these same years down in Uruguay, where President José Batlle y Ordóñez pushed for a major social overhaul of the republic.
The scion of a prominent Uruguayan family, Batlle received a comprehensive university education before embarking on a career in journalism. He founded a couple different publications which he used to put forward his reformist ideas. He began taking political offices and, in 1903, won the presidential election. In addition to the political reforms I mentioned earlier, he also initiated cultural reforms to secularize Uruguay. And come his second term, he sought social and economic reforms too.
Like the British Liberals, Batlle was not exactly a socialist, but he was attuned and sympathetic to the plight of the working class. His administration recognized the rights of labor unions to organize and strike, required health and safety inspections of tenement buildings, introduced various workplace safety regulations, invested in universal public education and public health, nationalized certain natural monopolies, and provided a myriad of public assistance programs. He fought for an eight-hour workday, limits on child labor, public pensions, and reforming the tax system from one based on regressive excise taxes to progressive income taxes.
Batlle’s project came to be known (derisively, at first) as the “Utopia in Uruguay” – a model of progressivism with a strong ethos of social equality. Following his second presidency, the government began enacting workers’ comp laws, minimum wages, public works projects, and more. To this day, Batlle is perhaps the country’s most important historical political figure, and his legacy lives on in the country’s egalitarian culture.
But while Uruguay embraced this “Batllismo”, it was the progressive philosophy of Positivism that was booming across much of Latin America.
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Part 3: Order and Progress
I introduced our old friend, Auguste Comte, and his philosophy of Positivism back in Chapter 55. As you may remember, he believed that mankind was reaching a new stage of development in which scientific learning – including in the social sciences – would not only serve as the foundation for understanding truth and morality, it would also unleash an age of industrial-scale human progress. In the late 1840s, he expanded on this idea, developing what he called the “Religion of Humanity.” This is perhaps the first example I know of in which someone explicitly sought to replace the old religions of the world with that supposed-universal religion we call Humanism. (Shout out Chapter 18!)
Among the evangelists of Comte’s new religion were the Brazilians Miguel Lemos and Raimundo Teixeira Mendes, brothers-in-law who in 1881 founded the Positivist Church of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, also known as the Humanity Temple.
Now, the Positivist church would never hold the sway that the Roman Catholic Church did in Brazil, but it was massively important among the founders of the new Brazilian republic. Indeed, it was Teixeira Mendes who designed the country’s flag with the words “Ordem e Progresso” stretching across the globe in the center – taken from Comte’s motto “Love as principle and order as the basis; progress as the goal.” And there were more heterodox adherents of Positivism that didn’t buy into the religious aspects of it, such as Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, an army officer who taught Comte’s ideas (including anti-militarist ideas) to his students at the Brazilian military academy.
In the aftermath of the deadly Paraguayan War (shout out Chapter 52), a greater ambivalence of traditional society began to take root in Brazil. Positivism spread within the army, and with it a growing skepticism of the nation’s monarchy. Then on November 15, 1889, Army Marshal Deodoro da Fonseca led a coup overthrowing Emperor Pedro II and establishing the First Brazilian Republic.
But Positivist efforts to improve Bazilian society largely fell flat. The provisional government that followed enacted economic reforms aimed at deflating a financial bubble that had been growing under the previous regime. But these made the problems worse, leading to runaway inflation and eventually a nationwide economic collapse. Meanwhile, aggressive public health campaigns were seen as coming at the expense of civil liberties, as health inspectors were directed to enter working-class homes without warrants to find the foci of infections. In Rio, an urban renewal process played out much the same way it had in Paris under Baron Haussmann (shout out Chapter 51!), with beautification efforts displacing thousands of poor families. And efforts to centralize political power within a national executive largely failed to displace the regional oligarchs who had wielded power during the days of the monarchy.
Positivists themselves were torn by these issues, with their desires to improve the public good coming into conflict with their desires to advance liberalism. By 1904, as the provisional military governments made way for democratically-elected ones, Positivism was quickly fading into the history books of
Brazilian politics.
But at the same time, Positivism and its obsession with progress were gaining traction up in Venezuela.
Following the fall of the Spanish Empire, Venezuela became part of a new country called Gran Colombia, which also included the modern-day states of Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, and parts of Peru and Brazil. But despite the efforts of its hero and eventual dictator, Simón Bolívar, to build a strong, independent nation, Venezuelan elites opposed the centralized government of this super-state. In 1830 they broke off from Gran Colombia to form the State of Venezuela.
What followed was decades of on-again, off-again civil war, driven by the country’s local warlords – the Caudillos. Fighting for their regional self-interests, they created an environment that was often characterized as anarchy in Venezuela. After a particularly chaotic period, a liberal Caudillo named Antonio Guzmán Blanco seized power by force in April 1869. In all, he would serve three non-consecutive terms as president for thirteen of the next seventeen years.
As president, Blanco took extraordinary powers – essentially ruling as a dictator – as he sought to modernize Venezuela. He successfully suppressed his rivals’ coup attempts, introduced some financial reforms, made childhood education free and compulsory, and oversaw a massive boom in the country’s coffee export sector.
Blanco also reformed the Central University of Venezuela, creating new departments and stacking them full of Positivist professors, who had been growing in prestige since the early 1860s. With this, he had established a new intellectual elite which passed its Positivism on for generations.
But influenced by the anarchy of Venezuela’s 19th Century history, these professors didn’t see their philosophy so neatly aligning with liberal ideals. They adopted Émile Durkheim’s view “that it is the individual who is born out of society, and not society which emerges from the aggregate of individuals that make it up.” Therefore, the needs of the society must come before the needs of the individual. And in Venezuela, freedoms and democracy were the ideals of individuals who kept following Caudillos to wage war against their government. What their country needed was enlightened despots. And going into the 20th Century, the Positivist elite would get behind a man they believed would bring the order necessary for progress.
Juan Vicente Gómez Chacón was born in a village near the border with Colombia in 1857. He came from a local indigenous family which owned land in the area. A cattle rancher, Gómez became involved in politics in 1892, getting behind a caudillo named Cipriano Castro. Their movement was suppressed and they were both exiled to Colombia for several years. Then, in 1899 – the same year Blanco died – Castro led his army into Caracas to overthrow the liberal government. He installed himself as dictator and made a name for himself as a vicious, self-enriching tyrant.
But when Castro went to Paris for medical treatment in 1908, his government was overthrown in a coup led by his (until-then) loyal vice president, Juan Vicente Gómez.
The new dictator would hold the reins of power – often informally while out of office – for the remainder of his life. Gómez led a staunchly anti-liberal, anti-leftist regime and one of history’s most brutal police states. But unlike his mentor and predecessor, he made a point of it to play nice with the Western powers. When oil was discovered in Venezuela, Gómez made huge concessions to foreign oil companies so they would start drilling. It created enough revenue for him to construct new roads for the oil interests and to pay back Venezuela’s debts. In exchange, the Western powers allowed Gómez to enrich himself and his allies, propping up his regime.
But it achieved what the Positivists were hoping for: A stable government (finally), a balanced budget, and some economic development.
It was not unlike the regime of Porfirio Díaz up in Mexico.
José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori was born to a working-class family in Oaxaca in 1830. Over the course of his life, he watched Mexico ride a political roller coaster. Antonio López de Santa Anna ruled as practically a monarch while losing much of the country’s territory to the United States. Juan Álvarez established a liberal republic. There was civil war. And his mentor, President Benito Juárez, introduced constitutional reforms and led the campaign to defeat the French when Napoleon III tried to conquer Mexico. As a military commander, Díaz played a major role in the victory over France.
But after the war, Díaz and Juárez had a major falling out, as Juárez just kept clinging to the presidency. Eventually, he would lead a rebellion against Juárez’s successor and serve a term as president himself. But despite his rise to power, calling for a single presidential term limit, he ended up running again in 1884. And then, by gradually dismantling Mexican democracy, he just kept serving as president – essentially as a dictator – for the next 26 years.
But this period, known as the Porfiriato, also saw major economic developments, as Díaz surrounded himself with advisors and cabinet members known as the “Científicos” – Positivist intellectuals who brought a technocratic approach to public policy. Together, Díaz and the Científicos centralized the military (ending Mexico’s own caudillo problem in the process). They liberalized the economy and brought in foreign investments to help build new railroads, dig new mines, establish new plantations, and even set up some new industrial factories.
They also introduced controversial land reforms, privatizing communal indigenous lands, and selling off huge tracts to foreign investors. But it led to a lot of the same problems we saw in Venezuela – it led to a lot of corrupt, self-enriching within the regime, and transferred a huge amount of the country’s wealth to foreign interests. Worst of all, it trapped many Mexicans in debt peonage. Along those same lines, many Yaquis – indigenous Mexicans who opposed the reforms – were literally sold off as plantation slaves. And with many Mexicans disconnected from the lands they once worked, the country became primed for one of the century’s first major revolutions, which finally toppled the Porfiriato in 1911.
Of course, the Positivist approach to public policy – technocracy, let’s call it – could be seen in the United States too. I already mentioned how Fighting Bob organized his Wisconsin Idea along these lines. And the trend of elected officials delegating their responsibilities to expert managers was increasingly seen in local governments across the country.
The push and pull between democracy and technocracy is a great example of the shifting concepts of what “progress” meant in the Progressive Era. Indeed, ideological realignments along these lines were taking place across the globe.
In France, the conservative Prime Minister Jules Méline not only created a slew of new social welfare schemes, he also argued that protectionist tariffs were needed to keep wages high. As he explained it in 1891:
“It cannot enter any one’s head further to reduce the pay of our workers, which in certain branches of production is already manifestly inadequate. On the contrary, we have to bend all our efforts to raising wages. To do this, we have to maintain the prices of our products at a profitable level by thwarting the excessive inroads of foreign competition. That is how customs duties are linked to the social question itself in its most acute form.”
Free trade had been championed by liberals (and even many socialists) for decades. But increasingly, industrialists and workers alike were starting doubt its supposed net benefits.
It was similar in the United States trade where opposition to immigration was growing. Many labor unions – including those with significant numbers of German, Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrant workers – were concerned that super-poor newcomers would undercut the wages for which they bargained. Like with French and German protectionists, they wanted to limit their exposure to foreign (or until-recently-foreign) competition. And although it started off focused on excluding immigrants from East Asia, it didn’t end there. By 1924, the unions joined forces with more xenophobic blocs of the population in passing the Johnson-Reed Act, which created significant new immigration quotas that favored western Europeans.
The same went for prohibitionism. A weird alliance of conservatives, socialists, evangelical Christians, African Americans, women’s rights advocates, and others pushed for laws banning the sale and consumption of alcohol. We’ve discussed this a bit in the past, but its worth noting how support for prohibition increased going into the Progressive Era. Polling didn’t really exist back then, but it’s likely that most of the increased support was thanks to the incredible lobbying and grassroots coalition-building efforts of the “dries”, as they were called. The “wets”, meanwhile, were never really able to make a coherent or sympathetic argument for the status quo of rampant drunkenness.
Now, going back to the days of Francis Cabot Lowell, the United States was generally not a free-trade country – and for the same reason why it was not yet a dry country. The federal government relied too much on the taxes they raised from tariffs and from the sale of alcohol. But these were regressive taxes – and there was a progressive solution: the income tax.
Yet, as we discussed back in Chapter 62, the Supreme Court had ruled income taxes unconstitutional. Even though a federal income tax really only existed during the Civil War era, there was a small income-related provision in an 1894 tariff which triggered the court’s response. Thus, in the aftermath of the decision, politicians felt their hands were tied.
But as frustrations over drunkenness and income inequality grew, so too did support for an income tax. The Democratic Party updated its platform in 1908, calling for a constitutional amendment allowing one. The next year, the newly-elected president – William Howard Taft – himself called for a number of new progressive taxes as well as amending the constitution to allow for an income tax. Shortly thereafter, a coalition of Democrats and progressive Republicans in Congress managed to pass it as the 16th Amendment.
Despite a determined effort by the country’s industrialist elite to oppose it, support for the 16th Amendment continued to grow during the ratification process. Prohibitionists supported it, of course, as did socialists and other populist parties, for obvious reasons. Progressive Republicans increasingly supported it, knowing that the rising military costs of the growing American Empire necessitated it. And folks across the country – feeling the pains of many new tariffs introduced over the past half century – wanted a fairer vehicle for the nation’s revenue.
It was finally ratified in February 1913. The next newly-elected president, Woodrow Wilson, then signed the Revenue Act of 1913 into law later that year. It created new tax brackets for incomes of over $3,000 and $5,000, while significantly lowering tariff burdens.
Something even more Americans could get behind was antitrust action. Like with the income tax, the Supreme Court had largely curtailed such efforts by gutting the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1892. But by 1909, the winds had started to change. That year, the Justice Department sued Standard Oil.
As we discussed in Chapter 61, the oil trust established by John D. Rockefeller had controlled a huge majority of the national petroleum market since at least the early 1880s. It continued to dominate in the market in the decades that followed. And even though its market share had peaked in 1904 and was now starting to decline – thanks in part to new oil wells discovered in Texas and Oklahoma – most Americans still scorned it as an unfair monopoly.
In a 12,000-page filing, the government laid out how Standard Oil had used its market dominance as leverage over the railroads, getting lower rates and driving down costs – thus, making it difficult for competitors to match prices. What’s more, the trust also set up dummy companies to disguise their practices, getting around the law. Upholding the lower courts’ decision, the Supreme Court ruled in 1911 that Standard Oil constituted an “unreasonable” monopoly and ordered it be broken up. Over the next couple of decades, the trust was divided into about 3 dozen different companies, which would eventually become known by such names as Exxon, Mobile, Chevron, Gulf, Texaco, Marathon, Conoco, and Phillips 66, among others.
Congress also took on a more active approach to antitrust reform. The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 empowered the government, through the new Federal Trade Commission, to better regulate mergers and acquisitions. It also banned a host of specific anticompetitive behaviors related to price fixing and corporate governance. But unlike the Sherman Antitrust Act, it was not to be used to stifle union activity, making the law one of the first major legislative victories of the labor movement.
The spirit of progressive reform was particularly evident in the many growing cities of the Second Industrial Revolution. We talked about the early efforts to modernize cities back in Chapter 51. These efforts – to alleviate concerns like pollution, health, noise, crime, and poverty – continued into the 20th Century.
Now, I’ll be returning to this topic in a future episode, but I do want to take a moment to discuss one city in particular: Paris.
Going into the late 1800s, Baron Hausmann’s protégé – the engineer Alphonse Alphand – continued modernizing the infrastructure of the City of Lights. Under Alphand’s leadership, underground gas lines expanded throughout the city, even going into new apartment buildings for the new gas stoves there. He experimented with new forms of pavement to replace cobblestone in the streets, which allowed for quieter traffic, improved drainage, and the introduction of automobiles. He improved the sewers and added lots of new green spaces.
And though he died in 1891, such infrastructure modernization continued after his death, culminating with perhaps the most significant project of La Belle Epoch: the construction of the Paris Metro.
Now, there had been proposals for subways in Paris going back to at least the 1850s. But, as we also discussed back in Chapter 51, it was never super-practical in the days before mass electrical power generation and distribution, and it was really only London which ever bothered building a steam-powered underground railway.
With the introduction of electric power, though, the proposals began to (…um…) pick up steam. (Irony unintended.) Several were considered by the local government in Paris during the 1880s and 90s. One line was approved in 1896 but – as seen in the traffic congestion during the city’s Exposition Universelle in 1900 – one line was not enough. The city then made a plan for nine more lines, for which it would dig the tunnels and build the stations. The Paris Metropolitan Railway Company (known better by its French initials, the CMP), was contracted to provide the tracks, signals, cars, etc., and to operate the lines. By 1902, they got to work. Unlike most major cities, which were building their subways piecemeal, this would be a systematically planned rail network. (And if you’re wondering, yes, that did make the construction of the Paris Metro a bit slower.)
The politics were messy as well. Not only was the French government wary of allowing the historically radical city of Paris to build its own railway, many Parisians were wary of who would get to ride it. As a result, Paris chose to keep its metro system within the city center, not allowing the working-class communities of the inner, industrial suburbs to access it. This would alleviate concerns among the Paris elite that the Metro would invite crime into their neighborhoods.
The inequity was eventually addressed thanks to a second rail company that sought its own underground network in Paris. The North-South Underground Electric Railway Company of Paris – better known as the Nord-Sud – began building its own lines to and from the suburbs in 1910.
Over the next couple of decades, the CMP and the Nord-Sud built out their competing networks. The Paris Council would collect a portion of the revenues from both systems (and eventually compelled their merger).
The Paris Metro had a definite positive impact on the city. By moving underground and reducing the need for horse carriages (and later cars), the Metro greatly reduced street pollution, noise, and traffic congestion. It allowed people to travel further and quicker for work. It allowed visitors to get around easier. And unlike many rail networks of the age, the city of Paris considered it a public utility. They took an active hand in governing it, allowing the city to include it in a more comprehensive urban planning program than would have been seen in the 19th Century. It seemed like unmistakable evidence of progress in the Progressive Era, keeping Paris growing beautifully in its Belle Epoch.
But progress, for lack of a better word, takes many forms. And technological progress was delivering yet another mode of transportation to the market. Though it had some drawbacks compared to the new subways the world was building, it also had some enormous advantages to rail transport. Its widespread adoption would change manufacturing principles forever. And it would prove to be one of the most important inventions ever made: the automobile – next time on the Industrial Revolutions.
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