If the Progressives Were Advising Us Today, Should We Listen?

Linda Gordon
New York University

The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era confers a biennial award to a Distinguished Historian in Gilded Age and Progressive Era studies. This essay is the text of the talk Professor Gordon gave when she accepted the award at the annual SHGAPE luncheon at the 2001 meeting of the Organization of American Historians.

It's tempting to ask the Progressives what to do. Their reform efforts responded to a gilded age with which we are becoming again familiar: legislation crafted by and for corporate interests; corruption and coverups in politics and industry; corporate consolidation and the realization of firms of unprecedented size and value; conspicuous consumption; despoliation of the environment; increasing inequalities in wealth and welfare; weakness of labor and, as Ralph Miliband put it, "class struggle from above."1 The Progressives not only analyzed these problems but devised some remedial actions and made considerable progress in realizing them.	1
But I doubt how much the Progressives could help us today. Historians know that we never get clear directives from history, because context is everything, and what worked in 1901 won't likely work in 2001. And then there's the question, which Progressive lessons? We know that Progressivism was a cluster of varied impulses, ideologies and policy proposals. In fact, its incoherence can be dizzying. Let me call on a few individuals to identify some of the contradictions: Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois and Woodrow Wilson were all arch-Progressives, with three conflicting views about the proper role for white and African American people in our polity. Wilson, who led us in a war to make the world democratic, and Jane Addams, who was labeled a traitor and a Bolshevik for opposing that war, were both Progressives. Wilson, who opposed woman suffrage, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association were all Progressives. So were Theodore Roosevelt, our model imperialist, and his opponents in the Anti-Imperialism League all Progressives.	2
So the Progressives probably could not agree among themselves about how to advise us.	3
Yet there was something coherent at the core of Progressivism. One interpretation identifies the common denominator as expanded, interventionist government. I recently had the occasion to discuss Progressivism at a conference with arch-conservative legal scholar Richard Epstein, who argues that the courts were wrong to uphold Progressive regulatory legislation, and arch-liberal Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., defender of the very same legislation. One condemned and the other praised the Progressive tradition, but they defined it identically: state regulation of the economy.	4
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