Riassunto esame United States in the 20th and 21 century, prof. Fiorentino, libro consigliato Age of Reform, Hofstadter

Party lost its independent identity and rapidly withered away. After the defeat of Populism and Bryanism,

the “hard” side of the farmers’ movements, based upon the commercial realities of agriculture, developed

more prosperously than ever. The attempt to make agrarianism into a mass movement based upon third-

party ideological politics also had to be supplanted by the modern methods of pressure politics and

lobbying within the framework of the existing party system. Far from being the final defeat of the farmer, it

was the first uncertain step in the development of effective agrarian organization.

- The terms "populism" and "populist" have been used in the 20th and 21st centuries to describe anti-elitist

appeals against established interests or mainstream parties, referring to both the political left and right.

- Richard Hofstadter portrayed the Populist movement as an irrational response of backward-looking

farmers to the challenges of modernity. He discounted third-party links to Progressivism and argued that

Populists were provincial, conspiracy-minded, and had a tendency toward scapegoatism that manifested

itself as nativism, anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, and Anglophobia. One feature of the Populists

conspiracy theory that has been generally overlooked is its frequent link with a kind of a rhetorical anti-

Semitism. The slight current of anti-Semitism that existed in the United States before the 1890’s had been

associated with problems of money and credit.

- The antithesis of anti-modern Populism was modernizing Progressivism according to Hofstadter's model,

with such leading progressives as Theodore Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette, George Norris and Woodrow

Wilson pointed as having been vehement enemies of Populism, though William Jennings Bryan did

cooperate with them and accepted the Populist nomination in 1896.

Progressivism

The two groups of Populism and Progressivism shared many philosophies, yet the latter was widely

accepted because it was not seen by the majority as anarchically. Progressivism emerged in an era of great

economic and urban expansion. In the post Civil-War period the rapid development of the big cities, the

building of a great industrial plant, the construction of railroads and the power of the corporation,

transformed the old society and revolutionized the distribution of power and prestige. Is not more the local

wealth men who take the chief but the agents of the new corporations, the corrupters of legislatures, the

allies of political bosses. Progressivism was an answer to the needs of a modernizing society (massive

migration to the cities, mass production, standard industrialization, new urbanization, economic boom,

new inventions and technologies). The Progressives were urban, Northeast, educated, middle-class,

protestant reform minded men and women: There was no official Progressive party until 1912, when

Theodore Roosevelt founded it.

The causes for the arise Progressivism (1885-1897) were:

- The status revolution in the post-Civil War era ("new money" supplanted "old money" prestige). The

ferment of the Progressive era was urban, middle-class, and nationwide. Progressivism differed from

Populism in the fact that the middle classes of the cities not only joined the trend toward protest but look

over its leadership. The need for political and economic reform was now felt more widely in the country. In

this way Progressivism became nationwide and bipartisan, encompassing Democrats and Republicans,

country and city, East, West and South. Progressivism was characterized by a fresh, more intimate and

sympathetic concern with urban problems – labor and social welfare, municipal reform, the interest of the

consumer.

- The alienation of professionals. Intellectuals, professional and opinion-making classes, what they feel is

progress and reform. After the Civil War a crucial change of social and psychological position emerged, and

all the profession and groups felt a common sense of humiliation against the plutocracy (government by

wealth; businessmen make laws for his own interests). In the opening decades of the century the American

legal profession was troubled by an internal crisis, a crisis in self respected precipitated by the conflict

between the image of legal practice and the realities of modern commercial practice. Many lawyers were

convinced that their profession had declined in its intellectual standards and in its moral and social

position. Many of them were under the control of important lawyers and worked for big cooperatives and

association, which paid them with a minimum salary. In the firm were many talented young lawyers,

serving their time as a cheap labor. The firms themselves grew larger, the work of the independent

practitioner was taken from him by real-estate, trust, and insurance companies and banks.

- From Mugwump to Progressive: Progressive leaders were the spiritual sons of the Mugwumps.

Mugwumps had been committed to aristocracy, the Progressive spoke of returning government to the

people. Mugwumps had clung desperately to liberal economics and the cliché of laissez faire, the

Progressive were prepared to make use of state intervention wherever it suited their purpose. Mugwumps

had lacked a consistent support among the public at large, the Progressive had an almost rabidly

enthusiastic following. Mugwumps had not allies, Progressives had reliable allies in the very agrarian rebels.

Last chapter: enemies of Progressives like trusts, unions, and political machines. Leaders expressed the

need for entrepreneurship, individualism, and moral responsibility, rather than organization. The

American tradition had been one of unusually widespread participation of the citizen in the management of

affairs, both political and economic. Now with the growth of the large corporation, the central theme in

Progressivism was this revolt against the industrial discipline: Progressive movement was the complaint of

the unorganized against the consequences of organization.

The Progressives were trying to keep the benefits of the emerging organization of life (modern technology

and machine industry) and yet to retain the scheme of individualistic values that this organization was

destroying. Progressivism appealed powerfully to small businessmen who were being overwhelmed or

outdistanced by great competitors. It also appealed to the new middle class of technicians and salaried

professionals, clerical workers and public-service personnel. A large and significant political public had

emerged that was for the most part well educated, full of aspiration, and almost completely devoid of

economic organization. Wilson’s speech appealed to individual Opportunity, free opportunity where no

man is supposed to be under any limitations except the limitations of his character and of his mind. Wilson

saw that Americans were living under “a new organization of society”, in which the individual had been

submerged and human relations were pervasively impersonal. There was a common fear among Americans

that the great business combinations, being the only centers of wealth and power, and that would put an

end to traditional American democracy.

By the close of his 1912 campaign there was no doubt left in Wilson’s mind that a great part if the public

considered an attack on business monopoly necessary to political freedom. He engaged a “Crusade” against

the power that have limited American development.

The Progressives stood for a dual program of economic remedies designed to minimize the dangers from

the extreme left and right. On one side they feared the power of the plutocracy, on the other the poverty

and restlessness of the masses. The first line of action was to reform the business order, to restore or

maintain competition and expand credit in the interests of the consumer, the farmer, and the small

businessman. The second was to minimize the most outrageous and indefensible exploitation of the

working population. The relations of capital and labor, the condition of the masses in the slums, the

exploitation of the labor of women and children, the necessity of establishing certain minimal standards of

social decency.

Both Wilson and Roosevelt ran on platforms so generally Progressive that only their difference on the trust

issue clearly marked them off from each other. The issue was: regulated competition versus regulated

monopoly. Wilson believed deeply in the little entrepreneur and in competition, he rested his hope in “free

competition”, he had a different temperament than Roosevelt. The relations of the reform movement to

business were not limited to the effort to restore competition or check monopoly. There were other more

pragmatic reforms under consideration; and it was the effect of all the monitory writing and speaking, and

all the heated agitation over the trust and their threat to democracy and enterprise and liberty. The

Progressives adopted many initiatives: Hepburn Act; regulation of the railroads; the creation of the Federal

Reserve System; Underwood tariff.

The Progressive Era: a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States,

from the 1890s to 1920s.

Main goals:

1) eliminating corruption in government. The movement primarily targeted political machines

and their bosses. Direct democracy would be established.

2) They also sought regulation of monopolies (Trust

Busting) and corporations through antitrust laws to promote equal competition for the advantage of

legitimate competitors.

3) From 1860 to 1910, towns and cities sprouted up with miraculous rapidity all over the United States.

Large cities grew into great metropolises, small towns grew into large cities, and new towns sprang into

existence on vacant land. While the rural population almost doubled during this half century, the urban

population multiplied almost seven times. The urban boss became a more important and more powerful

figure. In the city the native Yankee-Protestant American encountered the immigrant. Between the close of

the Civil War and the outbreak of the first World War, the rise of the American Industry and the absence of

restrictions drew a steady stream of immigrants. . New political bosses accepted immigrants and protected

them in exchange of votes. The immigrants formed a potent mass that limited the range and the

achievements of Progressivism. The loyalty of immigrant voters to the bosses was one of the signal reasons

why the local reform victories were so short-lived. The immigrants looked to politics not for the realization

of high principles but for concrete and personal gains. And here the boss, particularly the Irish boss, who

could see things from the immigrant’s angle but could also manipulate the American environment, became

a specialist in personal relations and personal loyalties. The boss himself encouraged immigrant to think of

politics as a filed in which one could legitimately pursue one’s interests. So many progressives supported

Prohibition in the United States in order to destroy the political power of local bosses based in saloons,

manufactured and alcohol.

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