by Hugh Brogan
In short, there was pressure from all sides to reform the conditions in which the railroads operated, and the Hepburn Act was Congress’s response. After a long and bitter debate in the Senate the Act was passed by a majority of seventy-one to three. It had sailed through the House easily, and finally been approved there by a vote of 346 to seven.
This law and the manner of its passage was characteristic of all the important legislation of the Progressive Era. As its lopsided majorities should suggest, it was generally acceptable, a compilation of compromises, rather than radical. It had only needed months of struggle for passage because the reformers initially wanted more than they could get; because the irreconcilable conservatives, though few, were good fighters; and, above all, because the railroads, though in principle in favour of reform, disliked in practice the concessions that reform required of them, especially the degree to which they lost independence to the ICC. The Act, as passed, was full of loopholes, some of which would be closed by later laws. It was a useful and important beginning, that was all. But the ballyhoo which surrounded it convinced everyone that something wonderful had occurred. Had not the President stumped the country in support of the bill for months? He had, and whipped up a storm of public concern. He had worked hard to persuade Congress in other ways, cultivating Democrats and Republicans with fine impartiality, using the patronage freely, and knowing just when to stand firm, just when to offer a compromise. Those Congressional majorities suggest that his labours were somewhat unnecessary and that he did not altogether deserve the credit for the measure which he greedily appropriated. Some sort of bill was due. But the episode served to bolster the growing myth of Presidential power, and thereby to strengthen real Presidential influence. Soon Roosevelt would be gruffly defending himself against charges of executive usurpation, just like Andrew Jackson before him.
Similar observations might be made, in all respects, of the other big laws of the Roosevelt years. All of them did something to increase the regulatory powers of the federal government; most of them were of more help to the consumer and the industrialist than to the industrial worker; none of them was very radical, and all of them passed Congress by huge majorities. Next to the Hepburn Act, and passed in the same year, came the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Both benefited from the enormous uproar created by the publication of The Jungle, a novel by Upton Sinclair, the most famous of the muckrakers, who exposed the miserable condition of the workers in the Chicago stockyards and the grossly insanitary conditions in which meat was slaughtered and canned for sale there. Sinclair was more interested in the workers than in poisoned meat, but as he said, ‘I aimed at the public’s heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach.’ Americans did not appreciate being sold poisoned food, and let their Congressmen know; Theodore Roosevelt himself was appalled, especially as official reports came in to confirm Sinclair’s findings; the largest firms of meat-packers, whose chief interest was in the export of meat to Europe, where strict sanitary regulations were enforced, were delighted at the prospect of disciplining the multitude of their smaller competitors – something they had been trying to do for decades. So the Meat Inspection Act went easily through Congress. It laid down rules for the sanitary operation of slaughterhouses and canning factories, and set up a federal inspectorate to enforce them – another accretion of power to Washington. The Pure Food and Drug Act, the pet project of Dr Harvey Wiley of the Department of Agriculture, forbade the sale of adulterated products in inter-state commerce, and gave Wiley, as head of a new bureau of food and drug inspection, power to make sure the law was obeyed (but when it seemed that the bureau was going to ban saccharine, which Roosevelt took in his coffee, the obstreperous chemist was soon cut down to size). This Act, too, was supported by the big boys of American commerce, and opposed, naturally on high grounds of principle, by their smaller, weaker rivals, who made a good living out of selling worthless or even dangerous patent medicines (such as Lydia Pinkham’s famous all-purpose cure) and tainted whisky. It too got a large Congressional majority.
The year 1906 was the annus mirabilis of Republican progressivism. The President was well satisfied with Congress, and he himself towered over the national scene. Not only had he sponsored much useful legislation; not only did he conduct the day-to-day business of government, its administration, with businesslike skill; not only did he, very occasionally and very warily, initiate a prosecution under the Sherman Act; he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in helping Russia and Japan to end their war with each other by the Treaty of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1905. It was an optimistic time: everywhere serious reformers began to pluck up their hopes. Perhaps their moment was come at last.
If so, it seemed that they would have to find a fresh leader. By the end of his second term Roosevelt had shot dozens of bears; he had called a conservation conference at the White House in 1908 to publicize the need to husband America’s physical resources; he had shown off America’s fine new navy by sending it off to sail round the world; and he had co-operated with Morgan to overcome the panic of 1907 that had momentarily threatened progressive prosperity. These and his other achievements did not satisfy him, but he had given his word, all too flatly and publicly, on the night of his election in 1905: he would not seek a third term, dearly though he would have liked to keep his job, for he was only just fifty and felt as energetic as ever. At least he could, like Andrew Jackson again, choose his successor: William Howard Taft, who, thanks to Roosevelt’s warm backing, easily defeated Bryan’s last bid for the Presidency in 1908. His patron tactfully took himself off to Africa to slaughter animals, confident that he had left the country and the Republican party in good hands. He did not return for more than a year, and by the time he did so a great political storm was brewing.
Taft was an enormously fat man and had proved invaluable to Roosevelt in the various administrative posts he had occupied, such as Secretary of War. Apart from that he was noted for his legal learning, an attribute which would eventually carry him to the Chief Justiceship of the United States (1921-30) – the only ex-President ever to sit in the Supreme Court. At first he found it difficult to realize he was President, so much had Roosevelt dominated the office; and he does not seem to have expected to achieve very much: ‘this is a very humdrum administration’ he once remarked, not without satisfaction. But he was not yet an iron-bound reactionary, though he became one in his old age; in a sense he too was a progressive; he had a lawyer’s sense of duty and initiated far more anti-trust prosecutions than Roosevelt had done: it was he who broke up the Standard Oil Company, forcing it to dissolve into thirty-four separate organizations (John D. Rockefeller kept his large stake in all of them). But he was not a creative politician; not the man to take the lead and master events, or even his party; and it soon became clear that this ability to lead was just what was essential.
For the Republican party had been too successful. Its steady run of electoral victories had attracted to it a most heterogeneous range of supporters, and even before Roosevelt’s retirement they had begun to quarrel among themselves. There was the tariff, a subject which Roosevelt had prudently left alone. The hard core of the Republicans in Congress were as stoutly protectionist as ever; but many Senators and Congressmen, perhaps especially those from the Mid-West, felt that since the United States was now so prosperous and so clearly stronger than all its competitors, the time had come to lower the tariff somewhat and give American consumers the blessing of a lower cost of living. Andrew Carnegie said the same. The Democrats had always reasoned in this way. There was an almighty row in Congress, which Taft was unable to mediate successfully. Instead he took sides with the high-tariff men of the East, led by Senator Aldrich of Rhode Island and the Speaker, Joe Cannon of Illinois, who in this matter went against his own section. For the tariff of 1909 raised the rates on imported manufactured goods while lowering those on the raw materials produced in the Mid-West. This ‘eastern-made bill to protect eastern products’ was described
by Taft in a speech in Minnesota as ‘the best bill that the Republican party ever passed’. Mid-Western Republicans felt betrayed.
Their indignation was strengthened by two other quarrels. Congress was now receiving recruits who had succeeded in politics by taking the liberal route in state and city affairs, often in the teeth of their local Republican machines. Men such as Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, and Congressmen George Norris of Nebraska and Jonathan Dolliver of Iowa, brought with them to Congress the habits of insurgents (as they were soon to be named) and chafed against the rigid rule of the regular party leadership, which they saw as the mere tool of big business. They hoped, by overthrowing Speaker Cannon, to help clear the way for reforms, especially of the tariff, which they favoured; and at first it seemed that they would have Taft’s assistance. But the President eventually decided that Cannon was more of a help to him than a hindrance: a calculation that was soon exposed as faulty, for the Speaker did little to accommodate Taft’s views on legislation, while the insurgents, with Democratic help, succeeded in stripping him of many of the powers which Speakers had enjoyed over the House of Representatives ever since the days of Henry Clay. In the long run this weakening of the Speaker greatly helped Congressional conservatives, since his power fell into the hands of the chairmen of the various committees who, being chosen by seniority, tended to be old and stick-in-the-mud, when not downright reactionary; but it seemed a victory for progressivism at the time; and Taft had been on the wrong side of the fight.
Still more damaging was a breach that opened between Taft and Roosevelt. This was occasioned by Gifford Pinchot, the head of the US Forest Service, who in Roosevelt’s day had earned great applause by introducing strict measures of conservation (a word he claimed to have invented) in the national domain. Pinchot was one of the first to perceive that America’s resources of timber and minerals would not last for ever, and he led a very successful campaign to curb the traditional energy with which Western entrepreneurs had exploited the new country. Almost 150 million acres were added to the government reserves of forty-five million acres, which did not make the Roosevelt administration particularly popular in the land-greedy Far West. Taft appointed a Western man, Richard A. Ballinger, formerly mayor of Seattle, to be Secretary of the Interior: he and Pinchot soon fell out. Pinchot behaved badly, and Taft supported the secretary against him, eventually dismissing the forester in January 1910. Pinchot rushed over to Europe to seek the aid of Theodore Roosevelt, who returned to America in June; Taft stuck to Ballinger; and before long ‘the Colonel’ (as he was universally known), who never got used to being an ex-President, had persuaded himself that in 1912 it would be his duty to the cause of progress to try to take the Republican nomination and the Presidency away from the man to whom he had given them.
From a purely party point of view, he had some justification. The Republicans were splitting dramatically, and the insurgent wing (now beginning to describe itself as ‘progressive’) was getting stronger and stronger. Taft had made himself unacceptable to what was now the most dynamic element in his party. And Republican disarray was proving a huge tonic to the Democrats. Taft tried to purge the insurgents in the primary elections of 1910; he failed; the insurgents carried state after state; and in the general Congressional and gubernatorial elections of the autumn the Democrats swept to victory in every section except the Pacific West (where the progressive Republicans scored a smashing victory in California, defeating the Old Guard and the Southern Pacific Railroad simultaneously). Even before election day Roosevelt was convinced that some radical steps were necessary. He read Herbert Croly, he began to preach what he called ‘the New Nationalism’ (a popularization of Croly’s ideas) and he went on a huge speaking tour in a vain effort to hold the Republicans together and stave off their defeat.
The sequel may be briefly sketched. The insurgents gathered round Senator La Follette to form the Progressive Republican League, with the avowed aim of denying Taft renomination in 1912. Their original candidate was to be La Follette, but before very long ‘the Colonel’, having suffered one too many affronts at the hands of the administration, threw his hat into the ring and took the League away from its founder. He then moved against Taft. His instrument was the new institution of the primary election. One of the chief concerns of progressives was to rescue politics from the undue influence of the great capitalists, and the politicians, seeing a chance to reassert their own independence, had in many states lent themselves to the cause. The result was the adoption of various measures, the most important of which were the direct election of Senators, which became part of the US Constitution in 1913; the referendum; the recall; and the primary election. The referendum idea permitted any proposal to be laid before a state’s voters, provided that enough of them had petitioned the legislature to have it put on the ballot; the recall election was a device by which an unsatisfactory politician might be forced to face the voters again before his normal term ran out. Though widely adopted in state constitutions, particularly in the West, neither procedure found its way into national politics or the national Constitution. The recall election, in particular, proved rather futile: it was a sort of modernized form of impeachment and, like impeachment, was too cumbersome to be effective. There have been next to no successful recalls in modern times. The primary idea was much more successful. Instead of a party’s candidates being selected in private, by party bosses or any other unrepresentative group, they would now be chosen by the registered voters of that party. There might be primary elections for state offices, or for federal ones (Senatorships and seats in the House of Representatives). There might be primary elections for the Presidency. Not all states had (or have) adopted the system (and it has never been incorporated in the Constitution) but there were enough for Roosevelt to make a great showing in 1912. He swept triumphantly through them all, and arrived at the Republican convention in Chicago announcing that ‘We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.’ Nobody quite knew what this stirring message meant, but it was certainly memorable. However, it did not guarantee success. Taft, using his patronage as President to the utmost and benefiting from the support of the bosses, retained the support of a majority of the delegates, and was renominated.
Roosevelt had always prided himself on his ‘regularity’. Not for him the nice conscience and the finicky disloyalty of a Mugwump. But his blood was up. He and his followers walked out of the convention as soon as the control of the Taft managers was made apparent, and on 6 August met as the Progressive party. ‘The Colonel’ was the candidate; Hiram Johnson, the Governor of California, was the Vice-Presidential candidate; the bull moose challenged the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey as the party symbol; the party platform, embodying the New Nationalism, was one of comprehensive radicalism, promising such things as votes for women, the prohibition of child labour and the eight-hour day. It denounced ‘the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt polities’, the labour injunction and convict labour, and demanded a national system of social insurance. It endorsed labour unions. All this might have alarmed the mighty, except that it was notorious that the funds for the new party were largely supplied by the House of Morgan and that a senior Morgan partner, George Perkins, had had a leading hand in drafting the platform – which is why it also contained a pledge for banking and currency reform. It remained the most remarkable thing of its kind since the 1892 Populist platform. It was also notable for the fact that, unlike the Populist platform, its concerns were overwhelmingly industrial and urban. America had changed profoundly in twenty years.
However, it had not changed so much that an entirely new party, suddenly appearing from within the Republicans, could brush aside both the old parties at once. The Democrats held fast, and could now make a fairly convincing case for themselves as a progressive party. There was the Bryanite tradition: its leader accepted that he could never again be nominated, but his ex-Populist followers were still numerous and vigorous. There was the strong commitme
nt of the Democratic city machines to first- and second-generation immigrants, and to Catholics. Overlapping substantially with this group was organized labour. The workers had had a thin time of it since 1896. A string of court decisions had weakened the AFL, and as many important strikes had been defeated. Worst of all, in California in 1910 desperate union men had dynamited the Los Angeles Times building, which had been erected by non-union labour: twenty lives had been lost in the explosion, and there had been a nationwide reaction of anger and alarm. Plainly, the unions needed all the friends they could get, and ever since 1908 Gompers had skilfully led them to look chiefly in the direction of the Democrats. This had not been acceptable to the more radical wing of the labour movement, which turned rather to Debs and the Socialist party; but the radicals were an inconsiderable force. Their union movement, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or ‘Wobblies’), was no sort of threat to the AFL because of its incessant splits and quarrels. Even the strongly pro-labour platform of the Progressives did not lure the majority of workers away from the Democrats. That party was also helped by its control of the House of Representatives after the 1910 election. It set up the so-called Pujo Committee (named after its chairman, Pujo of Louisiana) to investigate the ‘money trust’ – in other words, J. P. Morgan, who was discovering, to his vast surprise, that most of his fellow-citizens regarded him as one of the problems of capitalism, instead of part of the solution (in 1911 Taft brought suit against US Steel under the Sherman Act). Morgan did not testify before Pujo at any length until after the 1912 election, but the mere existence of the committee seemed to confirm the Democrats’ commitment to reform. The impression was rubbed in by the man they nominated for the Presidency, Governor Wilson of New Jersey.