Did the Progressive Movement Have a "Class Problem"?

If the progressives were alive today, what would they think of their historical reputation? Surely they would be mortified. American reformers in the early twentieth century believed that they served the eponymous cause of progress and nobly "battled for the Lord," as Theodore Roosevelt put it. But in the decades since the progressives shuffled off the political stage, American historians have cast serious doubt on their sincerity, their motivation, their respect for democracy, even their very coherence. The progressive movement was neither progressive nor a movement, according to the distilled historiographic wisdom of the past fifty years. Despite a lot of meretricious rhetoric about "the people" versus "the interests," the progressive movement, by most accounts, was a top-down plot to weaken democracy, cut off immigration, stamp out pluralism, institutionalize racism, repress popular amusements, tame radicalism, spread bureaucracy, and protect capitalism. But at the same time, we are told, the progressive movement was fragmented, diverse, and divided, a congeries of disparate groups with clashing agendas. Accordingly, the picture of progressivism that emerges from the historical literature is so confused and contradictory that the prestigious Companion to American Thought (1995) once likened the movement to a science-fiction monster that "cannot be killed."¹

Into the breach steps Shelton Stromquist with a bold new interpretation. Recent books on progressivism by Alan Dawley, Robert Johnston, and Michael McGerr have cautiously praised the movement's democratic, even "radical" spirit—based on intentions, if not results.² But Stromquist, like Nancy Cohen in another recent book, prefers to resurrect the familiar charge that the progressives were domineering elitists at heart. This view first gained ascendancy in the 1960s when Samuel Hays and others portrayed the progressives as disingenuous crypto-conservatives ("corporate liberals") who wanted to rationalize industrial capitalism while heading off Populism and Socialism.³ Later historians fleshed out this unflattering portrait by reminding us that the progressives were racist, sexist, nativist, and imperialist, too.⁴ Stromquist updates these classic critiques by taking a pseudo-psychiatric approach. Rather than accuse the progressives of conspiring against democracy, Stromquist diagnoses them with a psychic blind spot toward what he terms "the class problem."

Progressives, it seems, wished that everyone were the same—racially, ethnically, and most of all, economically. The industrial revolution had wrought many changes in American society, but none bothered progressives more than the sharpening of class distinctions between the toiling many and the privileged few. The opening of this social chasm created a "class problem" for progressives. The problem was, first, that classes existed, and second, that classes were in conflict. The mostly middle-class progressives wanted class distinctions to melt away and everyone to be happy with their station in life. Stuck in denial about class conflict, they could not bring themselves "to accept a world indelibly demarcated by classes" (p. 6). Of course, Marxists and other radicals dreamed of a classless world, too, but progressives accepted capitalism and private property, so a proletarian dictatorship was hardly what they had in mind. Rather, according to Stromquist, progressives envisioned a tranquil social order of classless comity. The progressive dream was that somehow they could persuade the clashing classes to recognize their shared interests as Americans, cease their strife, and cooperate for the common good. The "problem," as Stromquist sees it, was that the progressives ignored the intractable nature of class conflict in industrial society. They were committed to "the search for social unity and a harmony of interests," as if such a thing were possible or even desirable (p. 83). The insidious "contradiction" that "lay at the heart of the Progressive movement" was "the movement's inability or unwillingness to acknowledge that class mattered" (p. 130). Instead of hearing the voices of the victims of industrialism, the progressives, according to Stromquist, wished the restive masses would just shut up, sit down, and be content with their lot—or at least with whatever "meliorist" reforms...