Progressive Years

The spirit and achievement of American Reform at the turn of the 20th century as seen by the men and women who helped to shape those years.

From the dust jacket:

"I have constructed this book," writes Professor Pease, "to reveal something of the first years of twentieth-century America through the writing of men and women who helped to shape those years. Rather than extract small selections from many sources, I have chosen from only a few writers unified selections substantial enough to convey the style of their thought and the depth of their preoccupations. They were for the most part extraordinary people. Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson were American Presidents and accomplished historians; Roosevelt and Jane Addams each won a Nobel prize for peace; Eugene Debs was a candidate for President and the embodiment of fundamental but responsible social dissent; Walter Lippmann was an advisor to a President; Frederick Howe, Lawrence Veiller, and Jane Addams were civic experts and reformers; Lincoln Steffens, Peter Dunne, Howe and Lippmann wrote influential journalism; and William James, writer, psychologist, philosopher, may have cast a deeper shadow than any of the rest. They were at once writers and doers. They embodied their age, they wrote to influence their age, and in consequence their writings can tell us much about their age....

"In the first new decade (of the twentieth century) New York carved itself a subway system, Chicago a forty-million-dollar drainage canal to divert sewage away from the lake, and San Francisco dug itself out of the rubble and ashes of an earthquake and rebuilt a white city on golden hills. While William Vanderbilt, Jr. drove his new French sports car from Newport to Boston and back at an unheard-of forty miles per hour, a quiet engineer named Ford had begun plans to put a cheap, serviceable automobile at the disposal of every crossroads farmer who could afford the incredibly low sum of $600. In 1900 British scientists announced that a human voice had been conveyed electrically six miles across the air. Three years later two Americans lifted themselves off a Carolina sand flat in a manmade machine; flying for fifty-nine seconds under their own power, they broke forever man's physical bond to the surface of the globe. Under the watchful eye of men like Morgan and Rockefeller industrial firms were regrouping their forces for a long stretch of prosperity; while the United States Steel Corporation was formed to take over Carnegie's efficient enterprise, the Standard Oil Compan in one quarter paid 15% on its stock. After the bitter years of uncertain employment and instability of wages, the skilled workman and the more prosperous farmer found the first two decades of the new century a period of rising return on income and far steadier opportunities.

"Times were changing in America. Restless young men who appeared to know what they wanted were beginning to confront their powerful elders with questions and proposals. They did not always do so in a spirit of dissent. Like Steffens they shared with Morgan the bullish confidence that a little reorganization here and there would permit the nation to push on, to grow. Steffens was no reformer–yet. In another twenty years, the young inquirers into progress had become its custodians, they had infused it with revolutionary principles and fresh means, and they would inquire from the aged Morgans not advice on how to fix it but an accounting of what previously had been done to it that had required such a job of repair. In twenty years a new century had replaced the old. Here it was that the concept of growth or progress bestowed its name on an age. These years, for the reformers and reformed alike, were the Progressive years."