The Age of Reform

civil war 1861-1865
industrial continental expansion, political conservatism civilwar-1890
aggrarian uprising in populism 1890s, bryan campain 1896
progressive movement 1900-1914
age of reform 1890-WWII
new deal

The populist and progressive movements took place during a rapid and sometimes turbulent transition from the conditions of an agrarian society to those of modern urban life.

American democracy, down to about 1880, had been not only rural but Yankee and protestant in its basic notions, and such enclaves of immigrants as had thus far developed were too small and scattered to have a major nationwide impact upon the scheme of its civic life. The rise of industry, however, brought with it what contemporaries thought of as an "immigrant invasion", a massive forty-year migration of Europeans, chiefly peasants, whose religions, tranditions, languages, and sheet numbers made easy assimilation impossible.

Out of the clash between the needs of immigrants and the sentiments of the natives there emerged two thoroughly different systems of political ethics. 1) one, founded upon indigenous yankee-protestant political traditions, and upon middle class life, assumed and demanded the constant, disinterested activity of the citizen in public affairs,argued that political life ought to be run, to a greater degree than it was, in accordance with general principles and abstract laws apart from the superior to personal needs, and expressed a common feeling that government should be in good part an effort to moralize the lives of individuals while economic life should be intimately related to the stimulation and development of individual character. 2) the other system, founded upon the European backgrounds of the immigrants, upon their unfamiliatiry with independent political action, their familiarity with hierarchy and authority, and upon the urgent needs that so often grew out of their migration, took for granted that the political life of the individual would arise out of family needs, interpreted political and civic relations chiefly in terms of personal obligations, and placed strong personal loyalties above allgiance to abstract codes of law or morals. It was chiefly upon this system of values that the political life of the immigrant, the boss, and the urban machine was based.

Agrarian Myth and commercial reality: myth that the life of rural farmer was holy. In reality they were like everyone else running behind increasing profits. Shift from self-sufficient farming to commercial farming.

Between 1815 to 1860 the character of american agriculture was transformed. The independent yeoman, outside of exceptional or isolated areas, almost disappeared before the rentless advance of commercial agriculture.
The cash crop converted the yeoman into a small entrepreneur and the development of horse-drawn machinery made obsolete the simple old agrarian symbol of the plow.
In a very and profound sense, then, the united states failed to develop a distinctively rural culture. If a rural culture means an emotional and craftsmanlike dedication to the soil, a traditional and pre-capitalist outlook, a tradition directed rather than career-directed type of character, and a village community devoted to ancestral ways and habitually given to communal action, then the prairies and plains never had one. What differentiated the agricultural life of these regions from the practices widespread in European agriculture was not simply that it produced for a market but that it was so speculative, so mobile, so mechanised, so progressive so thoroughly imbued with commercial spirit.

europe had less land, more labour. america had this reversed. abundant land, less people to work on it. In europe thus, need for machinery was not urgent. in america, it was.

The characteristic product of American rural society was not a yeoman or a villager, but a harassed little country businessman who worked very hard, moved all too often, gambled with his land, and made his way alone.

The frontier of the market?: Homestead act. promise of Cheap land. Trimph of speculative capitalistic forces. Speculators, engrossing immense tracts of land under the privilege of unrestricted entry, which was not abolished until 1888, did far more damage to rural sociery in the west than merely transmitting free land to farmers at substantial prices. They drove immigrants to remote parts of the frontier; they created 'speculators' deserts' - large tracts of uncultivated absentee-owned land- and thus added to the dispersal of the population, making the operation of roads and railroads far more costly than necessary; they refused to pay taxes, thus damaging local government finances and limiting local improvements; they added to all the characteristic evils of our rural culture while they built up land prices and kept a large portion of the furm population in a state of tenancy.

The folklore of populism: Populism was the first modern political movement of practical importance in the united states to insist that the federal government has some responsibility for the common weal; indeed it was the first such movement to attack seriously the problems created by industrialism.

dominant themes in populist idealogy were, the idea of a golden age; the concept of natural harmonies; the dualistic version of social struggles; the conspiracy theory of history and the doctrine of the primacy of money; free silver.

The populist looked backward with longing to the lost agrarian eden, to the republican america of the early years of the nineteenth century in which there were few millionaires and, as they saw it, no beggars, when the laborer had excellent prospects and the farmer had abundance, when statesmen still responded to the mood of the people and there was no such thing as the money power.

Two nations. Wealth owners, wealth producers. On the one side are the allied hosts of monopolies, the money power, great trusts and railroads corporations, who seek the enactment of laws to benefit them and impovesidh the people. On the otehr are the farmers, laborers, merchants, and all other people who produce wealth and bear the burdens of taxation.

History as conspiracy: Feeling that farmers, workers were opressed deliberately, consciously, continuously. Certain audiance, particularly, those who have attained only a low level education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shit out from access to the centers of power that they feel themselves compeletely deprived of self-defence and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those whol wield power.

It was not enough to say that a conspiracy of the money power against the common people was point on . It had been going on ever since the Civil war. It was not enough to say that it stemmed from wall street. It was international. a menifesto of 1895, signed by fifteen outstanding leaders of the People's party, declated: "As early as 1865-66 as conspiracy have kept the people quarreling over less important matters while they have pursued with unrelenting zeal their one central purpose".

From Pathos to Parity: Third parties have often played an important role in our politics, but it is different in kind from the role of the governing parties. Major parties have lived more for patronage thant for principles; their goal has been to bind together a sufficiently large coalition of diverse interests to get into power; and once in power to arrange suggiciently satisfactory compromises of interests to remain there. Minor parties have been attached to some spacial idea or interest, and they have generally expressed their positions through firm and identificable programs and principles. Their function has not been to win or govern but to agitate educate generate new ideas and supply the dynamic element in our political life.

Free silver
The Golden age and after: Relatively fewer (cuz urban population increased) but larger, more efficient, and more mechanized farms produced an increasing part of their total produce for the home market, and less for the foreign market, under far stabler and more advantageous conditions of transportation and finance than had prevailed in the past. True, the farm community was not expanding nearly as rapidly as it once had. But this slower and saner pace of expansion was itself a factor in rural well-being. And the surplus rural population found in the fast-growing cities and expansive safety net.

sherman act
The status revolution and progressive leaders: The plutocracy and mugwump type: Populism had been overwhelmingly rural and provincial. The ferment of the progressive era was urban, middle-class, and nationwide. bull moose movement 1912. After 1900, populism and progressivism merge. Certainly progressivism was characterized by a fresh, more intimate and sympathetic concern with urban problems-labor and social welfare, municipal reform, the interest of the consumer. However, those achievements of the age that had a nationwide import and required congressional action, such as tariff and financial legislation, railroads and trust regulation, and the like, were dependent upon the votes of the Senators from the agrarian regions and were shaped in such a way as would meet their demands.

Up to about 1870, united states was a nation with a rather broad diffusion of wealth, status, and power, in which the man of moderate means, especially in the many small communities, could command much deference and exert much influence. The small merchant or manufacturer, the distinguished lawyer, editor, or preacher, was a person of local eminence in an age in which local enimence mattered a great deal. In the post civil war period all this was changed. In 1840 there were no 20 milionairs in entire country, in 1910 there were 20 milionairs sitting in senete.

In a strictly economic sense, these men where not growing poorer as a class. Their wealth was being dwarfed by comparison with the new enimences of wealth and power.
Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Goulds, Carnegies, Rockefellers, Morgans.

The alienation of professionals: Conditions varied from profession to profession, but all groups with claims to learning and skill shared a common sense of humiliation and common grievances against the plutocracy. From mugwump to progressive: The progressive leaders were the spiritual sons of mugwumps.
It was during last years of McKinley's administration and the early years of Roosevelt's that such frighteningly large organizations as the United sttes stell corporation, standard oil, consolidated tobacco, amalgamated copper, international mercantile marine company, and the american smelting and refining company were incorporated.
A token of a major shift in the american economy and american ilfe from an absorbing concern with production to an equal concern with consumption as a sphere of life, this trend gave mass appeal and political force to many progressive issues and provided the progressive leaders with a broad avenue of acces to the public.

The Progressive Impulse: The Urban Scene: The city with its immense need for new facilities in transportation, sanitation, policing, light, gas, and public structures offered a magnificent internal market for american business.
In the city the native yankee-protestant american encountered the immigrant. Between the close of the civil war and the outbreak of the first world war the rist of american industry and absence of restrictions drew a steady stream of immigrants, which reached its peak in 1907. Enlish, Irish, scandinavians, germans, peasantry of southern eastern europe, swarms of poles, italians, russians, eastern europeans jews, hungarians, slovaks, czechs. The native was horfified by the ocnditions under which the new american lived, their slums, their crowding, theri alien tongues and religion. In east and midwest, boston, chicago, cleveland, new york, philadelphia, pittsburgh, st. louis ,natives were considerably outnumbered by foreign-born and their children.
In politics, then, the immigrant was usually at odds with the reform aspirations of the american progressive. Together with the native conservative and the politically indifferent, the immigrants formed a potent mass that limited the range and the achievements of Progressivism.
While the boss, with his pragmatic talents and his immediate favors, quickly appealed to the immigrant, the reformer was a mystery. Often he stood for things that to the immigrant were altogether bizarre, like women's rights and sunday laws, or downright insulting like temprerance. His abstractions had no appeal withing immigrant's experience-citizenship, responsibility, efficiency, good government, economy, businesslike management. The immigrant wanted humanity, not efficiency, and economics threatened to lop needed jobs off the payroll.

Muckracking: the revolution in journalism: Progressive mind was characteristically journalistic mind.
The papers made news in a double sense; they created reportable events, whether by sending Nelly Bly around the world or by helping to stir up a war with spain.
The publishing firm was so large an enterprise and sold its product for so little that it became intensely dependent upon advertising and credit, and hence vulnerable to pressure from the business community. And that's how muckracking ended The struggle over organisation: organisation and individual: The central theme in progressivism was this revolt against the complaint of the unorganized against the consequences of the organization.
The state and the trust: Only in limited numbers did men aspire to go into business but men in any segment of combinations of capital were concerned as to whether the enormous combinations of capital were at all compatible with a free society.
If big business sought favoritism and privilege, then the state must be powerful anough to be more than a match for business.

From progressivism to New Deal: Participation in war put an end to progressive movement.
To the discomfort of the old-fashioned, principled liberals who were otherwise enthusiastic about his reforms, F.D.R. made no effort to put an end to bossism and corruption, but simply ignored the entire poblem. In the interest of larger national goals and more urgent needs, he worked with the bosses wherever they would work with him
The new opportunism: while it has usually been the strength of reformers that they arouse moral sentiments, denounce injustices, and rally the indignation of the community against intolerable abuses. Such had been the alignment of arguments during the progressive era. During the New Deal, however, it was the reformers whose appeal to the urgent practical realities was most impressive-to the farmers without markets, to the unemplored without bread or hope, to those concerned over the condition of the banks, the investment market, and the like.