Progressivism and the Republican Roosevelt 1901-1912

1
Progressivism and the Republican
Roosevelt1901-1912
2
Progressive Roots

• Well before 1900, politicians and writers had
  begun to pinpoint targets for the progressive
  attack.  Henry Demarest Lloyd assailed the
  Standard Oil Company in 1894 with his book Wealth
  Against Commonwealth.  Jacob A. Riis shocked
  middle-class Americans in 1890 with How the Other
  Half Lives which described the dark and dirty
  slums of New York.
• Socialists and feminists were at the front of
  social justice

3
Raking Muck with the Muckrakers

• Popular magazines, Muckrakers, began to appear in
  American newsstands in 1902.  They exposed the
  corruption and scandal that the public loved to
  hate.
• In 1902, New York reporter, Lincoln Steffens
  launched a series of articles in McClure's titled
  "The Shame of the Cities" which unmasked the
  corrupt alliance between big business and
  municipal government.
• Ida M. Tarbell published a devastating but
  factual depiction of the Standard Oil Company.
• David G. Phillips published a series, "The
  Treason of the Senate" in Cosmopolitan that
  charged that 75 of the 90 senators did not
  represent the people but they rather represented
  railroads and trusts.
• Some of the most effective attacks of the
  muckrakers were directed at social evils.  The
  suppression of America's blacks was shown in Ray
  Stannard's Following the Color Line (1908).  John
  Spargo wrote of the abuses of child labor in The
  Bitter Cry of the Children (1906).

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Political Progressivism

• Progressive reformers were mainly middle-class
  men and women.
• The progressives sought 2 goals  to use state
  power to control the trusts and to stem the
  socialist threat by generally improving the
  common person's conditions of life and labor.
• Progressives wanted to regain the power that had
  slipped from the hands of the people into those
  of the "interests."  Progressives supported
  direct primary elections and favored "initiative"
  so that voters could directly propose legislation
  themselves, thus bypassing the boss-sought state
  legislatures.  They also supported "referendum"
  and "recall."  Referendum would place laws on
  ballots for final approval by the people, and
  recall would enable the voters to remove
  faithless corrupt officials.
• As a result of pressure from the public's
  progressive reformers, the 17th Amendment was
  passed to the Constitution in 1913.  It
  established the direct election of U.S. senators.

5
Progressivism in the Cities and States

• States began the march toward progressivism when
  they undertook to regulate railroads and trusts. 
  In 1901, the governor of Wisconsin and
  significant figure of the progressive era, Robert
  M. La Follette took considerable control from the
  corrupt corporations and returned it to the
  people.
• Governor of California, Hiram W. Johnson helped
  to break the dominant grip of the Southern
  Pacific Railroad on California politics in 1910.
•  

6
Progressive Women

• A crucial focus for women's activism was the
  settlement house movement.  Settlement houses
  exposed middle-class women to poverty, political
  corruption, and intolerable working and living
  conditions.
• Most female progressives defended their new
  activities as an extension of their traditional
  roles of wife and mother.
• Female activists worked through organizations
  like the Women's Trade Union League and the
  National Consumers League.
• Florence Kelley took control of the National
  Consumers League in 1899 and mobilized female
  consumers to pressure for laws safeguarding women
  and children in the workplace. 
• Caught up in the crusade, some states controlled,
  restricted, or abolished alcohol.
•  

7
TR's Square Deal for Labor

• President Roosevelt believed in the progressive
  reform.  He enacted a "Square Deal" program that
  consisted of 3 parts  control of the
  corporations, consumer protection, and
  conservation of natural resources.
• In 1902, coal miners in Pennsylvania went on
  strike and demanded a 20 raise in pay and a
  workday decrease from 10 hours to 9 hours.  When
  mine spokesman, George F. Baer refused to
  negotiate, President Roosevelt stepped in a
  threatened to operate the mines with federal
  troops.  A deal was struck in which the miners
  received a 10 pay raise and an hour workday
  reduction.
• Congress, aware of the increasing hostilities
  between capital and labor, created the Department
  of Commerce in 1903.

8
TR Corrals the Corporations

• Although the Interstate Commerce Commission was
  created in 1887, railroad barons were still able
  to have high shipping rates because of their
  ability to appeal the commission's decisions on
  high rates to the federal courts.
• In 1903, Congress passed the Elkins Act, which
  allowed for heavy fines to be placed on railroads
  that gave rebates and on the shippers that
  accepted them. (Railroad companies would offer
  rebates as incentives for companies to use their
  rail lines.)
• Congress passed the Hepburn Act of 1906,
  restricting free passes and expanding the
  Interstate Commerce Commission to extend to
  include express companies, sleeping-car
  companies, and pipelines.  (Free passes  rewards
  offered to companies allowing an allotted number
  of free shipments given to companies to
  encourage future business.)
• In 1902, President Roosevelt challenged the
  Northern Securities Company, a railroad trust
  company that sought to achieve a monopoly of the
  railroads in the Northwest.  The Supreme Court
  upheld the President and the trust was forced to
  be dissolved.

9
Caring for the Consumer

• After botulism was found in American meats,
  foreign governments threatened to ban all
  American meat imports.  Backed by the public,
  President Roosevelt passed the Meat Inspection
  Act of 1906.  The act stated that the preparation
  of meat shipped over state lines would be subject
  to federal inspection. 
• The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was designed
  to prevent the adulteration and mislabeling of
  foods and pharmaceuticals.
•  

10
Earth Control

• The first step towards conservation came with the
  Desert Land Act of 1887, under which the federal
  government sold dry land cheaply on the condition
  that the purchaser would irrigate the soil within
  3 years.  A more successful step was the Forest
  Reserve Act of 1891.  It authorized the president
  to set aside public forests as national parks and
  other reserves.  The Carey Act of 1894
  distributed federal land to the states on the
  condition that it be irrigated and settled.
• President Roosevelt, a naturalist and rancher,
  convinced Congress to pass the Newlands Act of
  1902, which authorized the federal government to
  collect money from the sale of public lands in
  western states and then use these funds for the
  development of irrigation projects.
• In 1900 Roosevelt, attempting to preserve the
  nation's shrinking forests, set aside 125 million
  acres of land in federal reserves.
• Under President Roosevelt, professional foresters
  and engineers developed a policy of "multiple-use
  resource management."  They sought to combine
  recreation, sustained-yield logging, watershed
  protection, and summer stock grazing on the same
  expanse of federal land.  Many westerners soon
  realized how to work with federal conservation
  programs and not resist the federal management of
  natural resources.

11
The "Roosevelt Panic" of 1907

• Theodore Roosevelt was elected as president in
  1904.  President Roosevelt made it known that he
  would not run for a 3rd term.
• A panic descended upon Wall Street in 1907.  The
  financial world blamed the panic on President
  Roosevelt for unsettling the industries with his
  anti-trust tactics.
• Responding to the panic of 1907, Congress passed
  the Aldrich-Vreeland Act in 1908 which authorized
  national banks to issue emergency currency backed
  by various kinds of collateral.

12
The Rough Rider Thunders Out

• For the election of 1908, the Republican Party
  chose William Howard Taft, secretary of war to
  Theodore Roosevelt.  The Democratic Party chose
  William Jennings Bryan.
• William Howard Taft won the election of 1908.
• In Roosevelt's term, Roosevelt attempted to
  protect against socialism and to protect
  capitalists against popular indignation.  He
  greatly enlarged the power and prestige of the
  presidential office, and he helped shape the
  progressive movement and beyond it, the liberal
  reform campaigns later in the century.  TR also
  opened the eyes of Americans to the fact that
  they shared the world with other nations.
•  

13
Taft  A Round Peg in a Square Hole

• President Taft had none of the arts of a dashing
  political leader, such as Roosevelt, and none of
  Roosevelt's zest.  He generally adopted an
  attitude of passivity towards Congress.

14
The Dollar Goes Abroad as a Diplomat

• Taft encouraged Wall Street bankers to invest in
  foreign areas of strategic interest to the United
  States.  New York bankers thus strengthened
  American defenses and foreign policies, while
  bringing prosperity to America.
• In China's Manchuria, Japan and Russia controlled
  the railroads.  President Taft saw in the
  Manchurian monopoly a possible strangulation of
  Chinese economic interests and a slamming of the
  Open Door policy.  In 1909, Secretary of State
  Philander C. Knox proposed that a group of
  American and foreign bankers buy the Manchurian
  railroads and then turn them over to China.  Both
  Japan and Russia flatly rejected the selling of
  their railroads.
•  

15
Taft the Trustbuster

• Taft brought 90 lawsuits against the trusts
  during his 4 years in office as opposed to
  Roosevelt who brought just 44 suits in 7 years.
• In 1911, the Supreme Court ordered the
  dissolution of the Standard Oil Company, stating
  that it violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of
  1890. 
• Also in 1911, the Courts handed down its "rule of
  reason" a doctrine that stated that only those
  trusts that unreasonably restrained trade were
  illegal.

16
Taft Splits the Republican Party

• President Taft signed the Payne-Aldrich Bill in
  1909, a tariff bill that placed a high tariff on
  many imports.  With the signing, Taft betrayed
  his campaign promises of lowering the tariff.
• Taft was a strong conservationist, but in 1910,
  the Ballinger-Pinchot quarrel erased much of his
  conservationist record.  When Secretary of the
  Interior Richard Ballinger opened public lands in
  Wyoming, Montana, and Alaska to corporate
  development, he was criticized by chief of the
  Agriculture Department's Division of Forestry,
  Gifford Pinchot.  When Taft dismissed Pinchot,
  much protest arose from conservationists.
• By the spring of 1910, the reformist wing of the
  Republican Party was furious with Taft and the
  Republican Party had split.  One once supporter
  of Taft, Roosevelt, was now an enemy.  Taft had
  broken up Roosevelt's U.S. Steel Corporation,
  which Roosevelt had worked long and hard to form.

17
The Taft-Roosevelt Rupture

• In 1911, the National Progressive Republican
  League was formed with La Follette as its leading
  candidate for the Republican presidential
  nomination.
• In February of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, with his
  new views on Taft, announced that he would run
  again for presidency, clarifying that he said he
  wouldn't run for 3 consecutive terms.
• The Taft-Roosevelt explosion happened in June of
  1912 when the Republican convention met in
  Chicago.  When it came time to vote, the
  Roosevelt supporters claimed fraud and in the end
  refused to vote.  Taft subsequently won the
  Republican nomination.