Less than a thirty-minute drive from my home in Long Island there is a place called Sagamore Hill. That’s where Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt, the 26th president of the US, built his home and died in 1919. I have visited the place several times, but in a recent visit I spent more time reading the exhibit labels in the small museum that commemorates the illustrious life and career of TR. One of them caught my eye. It read:
“The Progressives’ campaign platform supported votes for women, old age and unemployment insurance, social security, the abolition of child labor and the regulation of industry. Roosevelt believed these reforms would achieve “industrial justice” and balance the average citizens’ needs with those of corporations.”
In a way, Roosevelt was an accidental president. Mistrusted by his fellow New York State Republicans, he was coaxed out of his governor’s job to run as the Vice-Presidential candidate of the Republican nominee William McKinley. McKinley won the election of 1900 but was shot and died in September 1901. That’s how Roosevelt became president. He won reelection in 1904 and despite his popularity he sat out the election in 1908 in favor of his chosen successor William Howard Taft. Finding Taft’s policies short in progressive causes, Roosevelt formed his Progressive Party, known as the Bull Moose Party, and challenged the Republicans under Taft in the 1912 election. Although the Democrat Woodrow Wilson won the election, Roosevelt’s party outvoted Taft by a considerable margin. That’s right. A whole lot of Republicans sided with Progressivism than main stream Republicanism in that election.
By 1900, Progressive sentiments had started to sip out of the Democratic Party and influence the political philosophy of many Republicans. Teddy Roosevelt was the most notable of these Republicans. His seven years in office were critical for the Progressive agenda not only for the reforms he managed to enact but also and most importantly for the influence his progressive ideas had on both parties, thus, setting the stage for important subsequent reforms all the way to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Roosevelt’s political philosophy can be found in a series of articles he wrote for The Outlook in which he defended what he called “the great movement of our day, the progressive nationalist movement against special privilege, and in favor of an honest and efficient political and industrial justice”. Roosevelt understood that democracy had to work for the average citizen and to this effect he argued for the priority of labor over capital interests, the control of corporate power and the protection of the less fortunate members of society. He believed that the country belongs to the people, and its resources, its business, its laws, its institutions should be utilized, maintained, or altered in whatever manner would best promote the general interest. He and other Progressives of his day were imbued with an egalitarian and communitarian ethos in the pursuit of the common good.
Roosevelt’s administration brought to life the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Meat Inspection Act to humanize work in the meat packing industry, the Pure Food and Drug Act to protect consumers, and the United States Forest Service. With the creation of national parks, bird reserves, game preserves and national forests he protected the natural environment in an area covering 230 million acres. He actively prosecuted antitrust cases, while his advocacy for labor unions, a federal income tax, and an eight-hour work day bore legislative fruits in subsequent administrations. All in all, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to reform laissez-faire capitalism and make it kinder and more responsive to workers and the country’s interests.
Equally remarkable was TR’s balance of his devout religious feelings with his public views. In 1907, reacting to the emblazonment of money with the motto “In God We Trust,” he wrote, “It seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements.”
The force of the Progressive ideas was such that during the years following TR’s presidency major reforms were voted with remarkable bipartisan support. Even, FDR’s New Deal, ferociously resisted at first by conservative Republicans and business interests, was adopted as a matter of acceptable political sense by Republican presidential aspirants, like Thomas Dewey, and Republican Presidents, like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
All that started to change in the 1970s. First, Southern Democratic Senators revolted against the reaffirmation of voting and civil rights for Black Americans. They undermined the Democratic social agenda and then effectively switched to the Republican Party. Second, the economic model of equitable sharing of economic gains between capital and labor started to shift toward the winners take all mentality where profit maximization was pitted against labor compensation.
Third, conservative thinking started to view government as a burden that had to be reined in. Government’s purpose was no longer to ensure fairness and unity but rather sit back and let self-reliance and individualism play out. Adult and child poverty, drug abuse, suicides of despair, crime-infested neighborhoods, job losses to globalization, and social decay became acceptable collateral damage to the working of unfettered capitalism.
To be sure the notions of self-reliance and gritty individualism play very well with a considerable portion of the population. It is also fair to say that they are conflated with racial stereotypes that suggest that it is mostly minorities that benefit from an activist government. This belief is exemplified in the refusal of conservative states with sizable minorities of color to expand Medicaid to provide health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.
This brief historical perspective shows that Progressive movements have been viewed with as much suspicion and resistance in the past as they are now. But the historical record shows that it was the Progressive reforms and their focus on the common good that turned the 20th century into America’s century. And as for its feared radicalism, TR’s words are still relevant:
“Fundamentally it is the radical liberal with whom I sympathize. He is at least working toward the end for which I think we should all of us strive; and when he adds sanity in moderation to courage and enthusiasm for high ideals he develops into the kind of statesman whom alone I can wholeheartedly support.”
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