Several years ago, a colleague tried to persuade me to work with him on a major historical encyclopedia. I begged off, explaining that I had just signed a contract with Hill and Wang to write a one volume history of the Progressive Era, a project that would consume nearly all my scholarly energies for the next few years. Undaunted, he replied, “Do we really need another book on the Progressive Era?” I assured him that we did, and quickly shifted the conversation to other subjects. I did not admit that exactly the same thought had gone through my head when the publisher approached me. Each generation may need to write its own history, but several excellent narratives and texts covering the period had recently appeared, on top of an already voluminous literature (1). What else was left to say?

As I mulled the matter over, it occurred to me that historical scholarship on this period in the last twenty-five years or so has developed on two largely separate tracks. One group of historians continues to explore the politics of the era, while another looks at how workers, immigrants, African Americans, women, and others lived, worked, and experienced social change. The two groups deal with different questions, use different sources, and (most tellingly) periodize history differently. Political studies of the Progressive Era begin anywhere between the early 1890s and 1900 and end at the start or the conclusion of World War I. Social histories commonly cover all or most of the era of industrialization, beginning after the Civil War and ending at the start of the Great Depression. A book that combined these different approaches, I concluded, might really have something new to say about the Progressive Era.

Yet to conceptualize the period as “The Progressive Era” is to define the era by its politics. I wrestled with this issue and concluded that I should nonetheless use the term in the title because historians routinely use it and readers recognize it more readily than any other. But I added a disclaimer in my introduction: “I do not mean to imply that reform dominated all aspects of life in these years or that everything that happened in the period, or for that matter everything done under the banner of reform, constituted positive change.” In these years “corporate managers violently suppressed strikes; millions of rural and urban Americans lived in poverty; lynching of African Americans soared while white Southerners completed the segregation and disfranchisement of black citizens.” By no modern definition can these aspects of the period be called “progressive” (2).

In setting out to write a largely social history of a political era, I confronted two vast bodies of historical writing, each with its own historiographical debates. What themes and interpretations dominate these respective literatures? What are the connections between them? And what did I learn in my effort to fuse them in a single volume?

Progressive-Era Politics

Progressive-era politics has always been difficult to define. The period witnessed a wide range of reform movements at the local, state, and national levels addressing issues as diverse as railroad and corporate regulation; child labor restriction; establishment of juvenile courts, adult probation, and parole; systematic city planning; campaigns against alcohol and prostitution; and initiative, referendum, recall, party primaries, and direct election of U.S. senators, to name but a few. The very diversity of issues has fueled debate, as historians looked at one aspect or another of progressivism and declared it prototypical. The historiography of the period has debated at length the social origins and backgrounds of progressive politicians, reformers, and supporters of reform. Were they middle-class, old stock Protestants, members of new professions, farmers, urban workers, small businessmen, even corporate managers? What motivated such people to engage in or support one reform crusade or another? Why did progressive reform generate such energy and enthusiasm in this era, and what ideas and values underlay the reform persuasion?

These questions produced so many different answers that historian Peter G. Filene, in a 1970 article entitled “An Obituary for ‘The Progressive Movement,’” argued that the concept of a Progressive Era was too diffuse and vague to have any meaning, and that historians should discard the term (3). Most rejected Filene’s plea. In 1983 Arthur Link and Richard L. McCormick skillfully and succinctly synthesized the vast scholarship on progressivism, demonstrating that the era’s reform spirit flowed from a core ideology which informed a plethora of political and social issues and causes. Their way of understanding progressive reform and politics is now generally accepted. But many social historians, as we will see, take issue with Link and McCormick’s view that “progressivism was the only reform movement ever experienced by the whole American nation” (4).

Even as these debates raged, other historians articulated a framework for understanding the politics of the era by emphasizing the organizational transformation of America in these years from a traditional and localistic to a modern, economically integrated society. Robert Wiebe, in The Search for Order, 1877-1920, argued that this was an era of bureaucratic rationalization in which a nation of “island communities” became a modern society. Wiebe highlighted the importance of new middle-class professionals and managers in creating a rationalist, bureaucratic culture, and he explained progressive reform as a series of movements aimed at building the social and political infrastructure of a modern society. Organizational historians like Wiebe tended to see progressive reform as a manifestation of social modernization, an inevitable playing out of the forces of change set loose by industrialism and corporate capitalism (5). Subsequent writing about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America has relied heavily on this framework.

Prominent in Wiebe’s new middle class were a group of women professionals—academics, physicians, social workers—and club women engaged in volunteer work on a wide range of social crusades. Allen F. Davis’s pioneering book, Spearheads for Reform, published the same year as Wiebe’s (1967), demonstrated the central role in progressive reform of settlement house residents in a few key cities. Since then, the rise in popularity of women’s history has stimulated a massive literature on women settlement house residents and the club women to whom they were so closely tied. Studies of the remarkable women associated with Jane Addams’s Hull House, Lillian Wald’s Henry Street Settlement, and the United States Children’s Bureau, for example, have enriched our understanding of the scope and organizational methods of progressive reform, and the gendered qualities of the movement. Women entered reform for different reasons than men and led the era’s campaigns to protect children and working women. Attention to gender, therefore, has yielded significant new insights into the politics of the three decades before passage of the nineteenth amendment in 1920 (6).

One other aspect of recent scholarship on the politics of the Progressive Era warrants attention. Historians who have studied twentieth-century American political behavior see the Progressive Era as the start of a century-long decline in voting rates and citizen identification with political parties. Administrative and regulatory agencies, which barely existed before the Progressive Era, virtually constituted a new branch of government by the end of World War I. Stricter voter-registration laws, designed to prevent corruption, made it more difficult for Americans to vote. These and other changes encouraged a shift of power to well-organized interest groups, which could influence executive and regulatory agencies and shape public opinion (7).

Although I had been aware of the complexity of the historical debates on progressivism since I first studied them in college and graduate school in the 1960s, I did not fully appreciate how vast and diverse the literature on progressive reform and politics really was until I had to write my own version of them for A Very Different Age. Because I wanted to devote the bulk of my book to the social history of how ordinary people experienced change, I planned only a single chapter on progressive politics. How, I wondered, was I going to take account of all the different groups associated with progressive reform; the politics of reform on the local, state, and national levels; urban, agrarian, governmental, regulatory, and social welfare reforms; the settlement houses and the club women; Wiebe’s new middle class; the muckrakers; and the social survey movement, all in thirty pages?

Ultimately, I decided that the best way to understand progressive politics was as a set of ideas that framed the discourse of American politics, the way people thought about and debated political issues. Challenging the dominant laissez-faire and social Darwinist ideas of the Gilded Age, progressive intellectuals, reformers, politicians, and journalists of diverse backgrounds argued for an activist government that would restore individual autonomy and preserve democracy in an age of industrial concentration. Progressives lost at least as many battles as they won; conservative opponents of change remained powerful in many places. But progressives determined the language of political debate and set its agenda, defining the terms within which competing players argued their positions on corporate regulation, labor, conservation, welfare, women’s rights, representative government, and the other great issues of the day.

Adapting to Change:
The Social History of Progressive America

In the early 1970s, the primary thrust of American historical writing shifted from a focus on politics to a focus on the lives of ordinary Americans. The age of industrialization, when work and family life changed so dramatically, seemed especially ripe for this kind of analysis. Social histories of industrial workers, white collar workers, professionals, immigrants, women, children, African Americans, farmers, and others have illuminated how different kinds of people adjusted to the opportunities and rigors imposed by industrialism. These social histories typically have examined one group in one place, allowing for richly textured and nuanced case studies. Critics of social history complain that it has fragmented and particularized the American past, leaving no unifying themes.

In A Very Different Age, I attempted to overcome these criticisms by showing that Americans in very different circumstances shared common aspirations for economic security, autonomy, and social status, and by connecting people’s daily lives with the politics and reform of the era. I organized the book into chapters devoted to somewhat overlapping social groups: small businessmen and corporate managers, industrial workers, immigrants, rural people, African Americans, white collar workers, and professionals. I determined to portray the great variety of human experiences in this era within common themes that cut across various social groups and geographical regions.

Most historians writing before the 1970s had portrayed working-class and poor people as victims of industrial capitalism, nativism, and racism. In general, social historians have highlighted the way in which ordinary people made choices and thereby became active agents in their own lives and in the shaping of American history. Rather than accept oppressive conditions, permanent impoverishment, or declining economic security and social status, for example, industrial workers and farmers commonly moved from place to place. Peasants and artisans in Europe and elsewhere left for America; African Americans left the rural South for southern cities and for the North; sharecroppers went from one landlord to another; and children of Midwestern farmers went further west to buy land. Workers changed jobs constantly, causing continuous turnover on the new assembly lines and in mechanized textile mills. Factory workers, domestic servants, agricultural wage workers, unskilled laborers, and others limited their pace of work, frustrating the foremen and scientific managers who struggled to speed up production (8). Through these unorganized actions, as well as through organized strikes and protests, industrial workers, sharecroppers, and domestic servants contested the power of corporate managers, landlords, and mistresses.

Urban working-class men who enjoyed relaxing at a saloon also fought for autonomy in their leisure time against middle-class temperance advocates. They resisted efforts by civic leaders to restrain their boisterous use of parks and public spaces (9). Young women flocked to city dance halls, spurning reformers’ efforts to protect them from such “unwholesome” influences. Families achieved economic security by placing the family’s collective need for income above individual interests and preferences, commonly defying child labor and mandatory schooling laws. Nor was this struggle for autonomy and security limited to those on the bottom. Craftsmen struggled to protect themselves from mechanization and de-skilling, while factory foremen tried to protect their authority to supervise workers from encroachment by new personnel managers and efficiency engineers (10).

The social history of the last three decades in many respects fills in gaps left by Robert Wiebe’s organizational synthesis. By focusing on the making of a bureaucratic culture and institutions, Wiebe naturally concentrated on those who fit most readily into the emerging order. Social histories, although not inconsistent with Wiebe’s framework, have allowed us to understand how millions of Americans resisted the new order in their daily lives, or how they bent the opportunities of the new industrial/corporate order to their own purposes.

Connecting Political and Social History

These social histories also shed light on the politics of the era in a variety of ways. For example, political historians have pointed to the development of agricultural extension services through state universities and governmental agencies as a major accomplishment of the Progressive Era. But many farmers rejected this assistance, arguing that increasing crop yields would only lower farm prices (11). Many scholars have hailed the advent of child labor and mandatory schooling laws, but some social historians have shown that working-class families who kept children from school so that they could earn money were pursuing a rational strategy of survival in an industrial society that provided no social safety net (12). Several have argued that such progressive innovations as the organized playground movement and the efforts of settlement houses to provide wholesome clubs for young women and men constituted unsuccessful attempts at social control (13). Rural people, accustomed to community control of small local schools, resisted progressive efforts to centralize and rationalize public education, just as many urban workers resisted temperance (14). In these ways, social historians cast doubt on Link and McCormick’s assertion that “Progressivism was the only reform movement ever experienced by the whole American nation.”

More fundamentally, understanding people’s daily lives enables us to understand what politics really meant to them. Moving from job to job or from place to place were political acts as well as economic strategies, and understanding the informal modes of resistance fleshes out our appreciation of the politics of industrial capitalism. While progressive politicians asserted that Americans had lost their individualism and personal autonomy in the era of giant trusts, many ordinary Americans did not feel nearly so powerless as reformers portrayed them, or so deprived of an imagined individualism and autonomy now lost. Having never exercised significant political power, many workers, immigrants, and farmers had difficulty understanding the threat to democracy which reformers talked about with such passion. Southern African Americans disfranchised by politicians who called themselves progressives could hardly view reform as a struggle to re-empower American citizens. In short, social historians have nudged us beyond the “sound bites” of progressive political rhetoric to a fuller picture of the ways Americans of all kinds experienced politics and social change in this “very different age.”

Endnotes

1. Two recent chronological narratives are both devoted largely to this era. These are Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987); and Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1991), although Painter begins in 1877 and Dawley ends with the New Deal. For well written textbooks on the Progressive Era, see John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992); and John Milton Cooper Jr., Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990).

2. Steven J. Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998).

3. Peter G. Filene, “An Obituary For ‘The Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 20-34.

4. Arthur Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983), 9.

5. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

6. Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). Other notable examples of this literature on women and progressive reform include Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1992); Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Elisabeth Israels Perry, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

7. See especially, Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970); Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Paul Kleppner, Who Voted? The Dynamics of Electoral Turnout, 1870-1980 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1982); and Paul Kleppner, Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893-1928 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987).

8. See, for example, Stephen Meyer III, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908-1921 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981); Tamara K. Haraven, Family Time and Industrial Time (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); I. A. Newby, Plain Folk in the New South: Social Change and Cultural Persistence, 1880-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Jacqueline Dowd Hall, et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press 1987); Douglas Flamming, Creating the Modern South: Millhands and Managers in Dalton, Georgia, 1884-1984 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington, D.C., 1910-1940 (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

9. Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

10. David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, The State and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Daniel Nelson, Managers and Workers: Origins of the New Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975).

11. David Danbom, The Resisted Revolution: Urban America and the Industrialization of Agriculture, 1900-1930 (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1979); and William L. Bowers, The Country Life Movement in America, 1900-1920 (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974).

12. See, for example, John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); John Bodnar, Workers’ World: Kinship, Community, and Protest in an Industrial Society, 1900-1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); and Eileen Boris, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

13. See Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will; Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981); and Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

14. William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); William A. Link, The Paradox of Southern Progressivism, 1880-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Wayne E. Fuller, The Old Country School: The Story of Rural Education in the Middle West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

Additional Resources

Anderson, James D. The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Barrett, James R. Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894-1922. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Benson, Susan Porter. Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Brody, David. Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Chandler, Alfred Dupont. The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1977.

Couvares, Francis G. The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City, 1877-1919. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Cumbler, John T. Working-Class Community in Industrial America: Work, Leisure, and Struggle in Two Industrial Cities, 1880-1930. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979.

Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880-1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Dubofsky, Melvyn. Industrialism and the American Worker, 1865-1920. 2nd ed. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1985.

Gilman, Carolyn and Mary Jane Schneider. The Way to Independence: Memories of a Hidatsa Indian Family, 1840-1920. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1987.

McMillen, Neil R. Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Porter, Glenn. The Rise of Big Business, 1869-1920. 2nd ed. Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1992.

Sklar, Martin J. The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Strom, Sharon Hartman. Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.

Zunz, Olivier. Making America Corporate: 1870-1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Steven J. Diner is a professor of history and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University at Newark. His writings include A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (1998) and A City and Its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (1980).