The Historical Progressive Movement and The Republicans | The Rise of Teddy Roosevelt

In this episode, we talk about how the Republican Party came to embrace the historical Progressive Movement during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.

The Progressive Movement was less a single movement than a new reformist spirit that swept across America, particularly among the urban middle class and well to do. It believed we could use the novel tools of social science to plan American society to yield more efficient, just, and moral results.

Progressives included political activists, journalists, politicians, preachers and muckraking journalists. They took on an ambitious agenda of reforms reaching nearly every aspect of society from stopping child labor, limiting abusive work hours, creating public schools, purifying food and medicine, enacting women’s suffrage, creating public green spaces, prohibiting alcohol, ending public corruption, and instilling efficiency in both public institutions and private business.

Overall, it was a movement uniting morality and social science to address the new problems of industrialization then transforming America. And under the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, progressives became the most powerful faction within the Republican Party. They worked within the party with its pro-business faction, made up of the Yankee aristocracy and represented by figures like Calvin Coolidge, who believed in the work ethic and the Republican ideal of the sanctity of labor.

These historical progressives, moreover, weren’t exactly the same as modern progressives. They weren’t interested in empowered the poor, workers, or immigrants like Bryan’s populists. There were committed interested in uplifting and “improving” them into version of American protestant middle class morality.

America had begun a new national debate. On one side stood Bryan’s populist Democrats, representing the interests of the farmers and workers the new industrial economy had left behind. On the other stood Roosevelt’s progressive Republicans, representing the urban middle class and professionals concerned about industrial abuses in the cities. America left behind the Third Party System’s Gilded Age debate over the resentments of the Civil War for its Fourth Party System, launching into a new era of reform under the Populist and Progressive Era.

Check out the book: https://www.amazon.com/Next-Realignment-Americas-Parties-Crumbling/dp/1633885089
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