Social Class and the Progressive Era

Social Classand theProgressiveEra David Colburn and George E. Pozzetta, eds. Reform and Reformers in the ProgressiveEra. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.196+ xi pp. Robert M.Crunden. Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889-1920. New York:Basic Books, 1982.307 + xiipp. Gerald G. Eggert. Steelmasters and Labor Reform, 1886-1923. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981.212+ xvii pp. John F.McClymer. Warand We~fare: Social Engineering inAmerica, 1890-1925. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.248 + xvipp. Richard L. McCormick. From Realignment wReJ011n: Political Changein New York State, 1893-1910. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.352pp. Gerald T.White. The United States and the Problemof Recovery after 1893. University: University of Alabama Press, 1982.160+ x pp. Alvin Finkel Boththe impetus for reform during the so-called "Progressive" era (roughly 1900-1918) and the character of that reform have been debated by American historiansfor the past twenty years. Especially contentious have been the questionsof what social forces promoted reforms in American institutions andwhat social forces benefited. At bottom, one discovers divergent views about the relationship of the state to society in America, varying from optimistic pluralist accounts in which the state acts as a mediator among thevarious social classes to hardline Marxist accounts in which the state in a capitalist country is little more than the "executive committee of the bourgeoisie," as Marx once called it. The debate on the Progressives continues, but it would appear from the recent literature on the two decades before World War I that a consensus isemerging on at least one key issue: the failure of Progressive reformsandthus , by implication, Progressive reformers-to redistribute wealth or economic power within America. While one author (McCormick, p. 271) believesthat economic interest groups other than business elites began to have input into government decision-making after 1900, all the authqrs believe that the bottom half of the income scale remained outside the politicalprocess and achieved few benefits from the "reforms" of the period. There is, however, sharp disagreement about why this was the case, with much of the argument focusing on the classic left-wing thesis presented in Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 15,Number 4, Winter 1984,465-480 466 Alvin Finkel the sixties by Gabriel Kolko and James Weinstein: Progressive "reforms" benefited the rich because they were the reforms for which privileged groups had fought in the first instance. 1 Of course, Kolko and Weinstein observed that a variety of groups were pressing for government legislation that would have regulated the operations of the overall economic system as wellasparticular corporations and that the "corporate liberals," as Weinstein called the Progressive businessmen and their congressional supporters, wereforced to accommodate such pressures when they framed legislation. Nevertheless, many historians continue to reject the view that blatant self-interest on the part of elites explains the failure of the Progressives to achieve redistribution of wealth or power. At times, however, one feels that the rejections of the Kolko-Weinstein view are proforma. It is difficult to know what to makeof statements such as the following one by Blaine Brownell: That many reformers sincerely desired to open the political process to all citizens, imprO\e the accountability of elected officials and bureaucrats to the public, and restrain the power of the giant corporations cannot be questioned. Kolko and Weinstein, especially, gavefar less credit to these motives and impulses than can be justified. But we now know, also, that these purposes were sometimes more the stuff of rhetoric than action; at worst, they shrouded underlying attempts to carve out more security for corporations, upper-class groups, and professionals, sometimes at the expense of genuine mass political participation. On the whole, it does appear that in the early twentieth century, and later during the New Deal. corporate capitalism was shaped and adjusted to new circumstances, with the result that economic and political power gravitated to fewer and fewer hands. But this should not suggest that reforms were always calculated to buttress narrow economic interests or that they were always welcomed secretly by Big Business. Of course, it is true that one cannot prove that Big Business initiated legislation simply by demonstrating that the legislation ultimately largely benefited...