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A s the Progressive Era began, the civic values and republican institutions of the United States suffered from thirty years of decay. Now the growing centralization of power in economic and political institutions threatened to eradicate them completely. Unless Americans reformulated a participatory conception of democracy and reasserted the necessity of an active citizenry, their republican experiment in self-government could not survive. Returning to first principles, Americans revived a republican idiom and applied it to the reform of political, economic, and cultural affairs.1 The call for civic renewal reached the highest levels of politics. This “great republic means nothing unless it means the triumph of a real democracy, the triumph of popular government,” thundered Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, as he began his campaign to regain the presidency. Citizens lacked “free access” to government, answered Woodrow Wilson in his successful battle with Roosevelt for the presidency in 1912. The “machinery of political control must be put in the hands of the people,” Wilson concluded, restoring “their right to exercise a free and constant choice in the management of their own affairs.”2 Roosevelt and Wilson expressed the widespread conviction that governmental powers must be expanded to balance corporate power. Under their leadership , the federal government dramatically extended its responsibilities. During the American intervention into World War I alone, the federal government created five thousand new agencies. But rather than dismantle the corporate order, Roosevelt and Wilson strengthened it by using federal power to stabilize corporate capitalism and guide it toward greater social responsibility. They proved less attuned, beyond a rhetorical commitment, to the need to reactivate citizens.3 CHAPTER 7 The Republican Moment B The Rediscovery of the Public in the Progressive Era 148 • THE PUBLIC IN PROGRESSIVISM AND WAR If democracy meant material well-being and the equitable distribution of wealth, then the regulated corporation and the welfare state served reasonably well. But if democracy meant participation in the decisions that shaped one’s life and required the fullest development of the mind and character of the citizen , then the corporation and the state had to be democratized. The “need of imposing more exacting standards of behavior upon the citizens of an industrial democratic state,” Herbert Croly of The New Republic put it, “applies to the citizen as citizen no less than to the citizen as worker.” But corporate interests placed “many stumbling blocks . . . in the way of a free formation of public opinion and a free expression of the public will,” a civic reformer explained, demanding new efforts to revitalize the public. By restoring popular government at the grassroots, civic reformers cultivated an active citizenry as a counterweight to corporate power.4 The city provided the essential battleground for those committed to civic renewal. As they competed with one another to attract business enterprise, cities became the most active and the most corrupt of polities. With national and state planning in abeyance, private enterprise looked to municipal government for public subsidies and employed corrupt means to secure them. Ironically, public service corporations, securing franchises from city governments to supply essential utilities, provided “the chief, if not the only source, of corruption” in municipal affairs.5 The escalation of labor violence and the deepening of poverty also focused civic reform on the city. A vast literature of urban disorder depicted the destruction of the city in lurid terms. But the turn of the century also produced a literature of urban utopia, imagining cities reborn in civic splendor.“At my feet lay a great city,” Edward Bellamy’s Julian West recalled his reawakening in the renewed Boston of 2000. “Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, along which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the lateafternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side.”6 In cities, the forces of concentrated power and technological interdependence converged in ways that could intimidate and overwhelm the citizen. But the city also generated an inescapable public life. On sidewalks and streetcars, in neighborhoods and newspapers, around soapboxes and lecture halls, city people met and mingled, struggled and cooperated, addressed problems and discovered possibilities. Shortly after his arrival in Chicago in 1894, philosopher John Dewey wrote that the city “seems filled with problems holding out their hands and asking somebody to please solve them—or else dump them in the lake.” Things “simply stick themselves at you, instead of leaving you to think about them. The first effect...

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