Figure 2. Joseph Keppler, “The Bosses of the Senate,” 23 January 1889. Political corruption accompanied the explosive growth of the American industrial economy after the Civil War, and many in the U.S. Congress fell under the sway of big railroads and big oil. Library of Congress.
Meanwhile, the firms that ran the railroads, owned the mines and oilfields, and controlled the factories grew into enormous corporations and conglomerates of extraordinary power and reach. Their power overshadowed that of the government. In 1891, the Pennsylvania Railroad had 110,000 employees. The entire U.S army was less than a third that size. Federal government spending per capita was about $129, less than 10 percent of gross domestic product.
The speed and scale of change, and the failure of American social institutions to manage it, spurred Americans of all classes, regions, and political ideologies to question the status quo and agitate for alternative approaches. While grassroots protest and reform movements had been part of American civil society since before the Revolution, fast and ubiquitous national and transnational communications networks allowed reform ideas to gather force more rapidly and widely than before. News of strikes and protests crackled across telegraph wires in moments, students returned from abroad with radical new ideas, newspapers printed fiery speeches, and magazine editors filled pages with long-form investigative reporting on the excesses of the era. Cheaper printing, far-reaching networks of road and rail, and higher literacy rates expanded publishing and readership.
Farmers and laborers in the Midwest and West cursed the far-off bankers and corporate titans whose stranglehold on markets drove down crop prices and drove up shipping costs. They mobilized locally in the 1880s through organizations like the Grange, and nationally in the 1890s through the Populist Party, using modern media and charismatic leaders to voice their discontent with the modern order. A new wave of Democratic leaders seized the opportunity to broaden the Party’s regional constituencies and pushed for the adoption of key Populist Party principles into its 1896 party platform as well as nominating Bryan, populist firebrand and powerful orator, three times running.
Yet with a Congress under the sway of corporate “boodle” and a series of White House occupants more beholden to party bosses than to changing the status quo, much of the reform energy prior to 1900 emanated from outside national political institutions. Critiques of the industrial order ranged from moderate to radical. Some began to advocate for some regulation of the monopolistic companies that controlled disproportionate chunks of the national economy. Others thought the only solution was to break up the corporate giants altogether. The most ardent anti-monopolists advocated property reform and mandatory wealth redistribution.
Working-class people went on strike and mobilized into labor unions. Their middle-class allies joined them in crusading for workplace safety, workers compensation, and child labor laws. Socialists, communists, and anarchists argued that the entire capitalist system needed to be replaced. Some resorted to violence to express their fury at the system, resulting in a number of acts of domestic terrorism, including the 1901 assassination of William McKinley—the act that propelled Theodore Roosevelt into the President’s Office. Women, who didn’t get the right to vote in most states until the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, played prominent roles in many of these movements, from the anarchist fringe to the “respectable” middle.
The four candidates of 1912 resided at different places in this spectrum of reform. Roosevelt entered politics in 1882 when elected to the New York State Assembly, believing that more men of his class—educated, enlightened—needed to become involved in what he called “the raw coarseness and the eager struggle of political life.”14 Wilson, in contrast, spent the first three decades of his career in academia. While conservative when it came to social issues like race relations, his long tenure outside formal politics perhaps made him bolder when it came to bucking the party bosses; by the time he ran for president, he would argue for breaking up business monopolies. William Howard Taft was a good Republican Party man, winning a series of plum judicial and administrative appointments as a reward for his competence and amiability. Although sympathetic to Progressive causes, he was a quiet, unshowy sort of reformer.
The rise of Eugene Debs, on the other hand, attested to the great anguish and political discontent among the working people who suffered the most in the new industrial economy. By the early 1890s, Debs had given up working on the railroad and instead was working to represent the interests of railroad workers, becoming head of the powerful American Railway Union in 1893. The following year, workers at the Pullman Company went on strike to secure better wages and working conditions. Pullman was America’s leading manufacturer of railway sleeping cars, a critical cog in the railway machine. Debs organized a nationwide railway boycott of the Pullman cars in support. Workers in railway yards across the country refused to couple the Pullman cars to trains. Engineers refused to drive them. The entire national rail system ground to a complete halt.15
The railroad was so important to the functioning of the national economy that the federal government intervened. Democratic President Grover Cleveland sided with Pullman, not its workers, and dispatched U.S. soldiers to Chicago to restore the peace. Although Debs already had exhorted his members to keep the main trains running and mitigate the worst effects of the strike, the Cleveland administration still sent him to prison for blocking interstate commerce. He emerged a national celebrity and a hero of the workingman. A lifelong Democrat, he was so disgusted at Cleveland’s actions that he switched to the Socialist Party, first running for president on its ticket in 1904.
By this time, the many currents of protest and calls for reform had started to have significant policy implications. While many reform movements (particularly those led by native-born, middle-class women and men) had their origins in religious and voluntary organizations, it was clear that meaningful reform needed more than churches and charities, settlement houses and orphanages. Only larger, public entities could tackle the multiple challenges created by industrialization. Government needed to do more.
Figure 3. Eugene V. Debs, 1912. Debs’s leadership of the American Railway Union during the Pullman Strike of 1894 made him a working-class hero and decisively shifted his political allegiance from the Democrats to the Socialist Party. His 1912 Socialist candidacy was his third bid for the White House. Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress.
The initial push for a larger public role came in big cities, where such problems were most acute and painfully visible. Progressive reformers pushed to clean up corrupt local governments and establish professional civil service systems. Theodore Roosevelt burnished his reform credentials after being appointed to lead New York City Police Board in 1895, where he proceeded to clean up the corrupt institution and pass regulations dear to many reformers’ hearts, such as banning Sunday liquor sales. While the federal government remained largely on the sidelines, reformers within and outside state and local governments in the 1890s and 1900s enacted a range of measures from town planning to workers’ compensation to stricter child labor laws. Cities built infrastructure from bridges to parks, schools, housing, and water and sewer systems.16
The various efforts of middle-class reformers blended particular ideas about morality and correct behavior with a faith in large-scale organization and specialized “expertise.” American reform did not exist in isolation; similar movements and politics arose at the same time throughout the industrialized world, and in many instances American reformers took their cues and inspiration from European models. Often referred to as “Progressivism,” the reform impulse was not an organized political party nor was it a single ideology.17
With the ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the Oval Office, Progressivism became more central to the national political conversation. After a long succession of rather colorless chief executives who toed the party line, Roosevelt impressed those longing for reform with his forceful personality and willingness to buck the authority of the Republican Party’s conservative leadership. While some of his actions as president were bold—particularly when it came to conservation of natural resources—others left Progressives wishing for more. He did not hesitate use his bully pulpit to call Wall Street bankers and corporate titans on the