578 Chapter 21 The Age of Reform
such a measure would be unconstitutional, he
believed. He also refused to back the constitutional
amendment giving the vote to women.
By the end of 1914 Wilson’s record, on balance,
was positive but distinctly limited. The president
believed that the major progressive goals had been
achieved; he had no plans for further reform. Many
other progressives thought that a great deal more
remained to be done.
The Progressives and Minority Rights
On one important issue, race relations, Wilson was dis-
tinctly reactionary. With a mere handful of exceptions,
the progressives exhibited strong prejudices against
nonwhite people and against certain categories of
whites as well. Many were as unsympathetic to immi-
grants from Asia and eastern and southern Europe as
any of the “conservative” opponents of immigration in
the 1880s and 1890s. The Gentlemen’s Agreement
excluding Japanese immigrants was reached in 1907 at
the height of the progressive movement. In the same
year, Congress appointed a commission headed by
Senator William Dillingham of Vermont to study the
immigration question. The Dillingham Commission
labored for more than two years and brought forth a
forty-one-volume report that led in 1913 to a bill
restricting the number of newcomers to be admitted
and reducing especially the influx from eastern and
southern Europe. Only the outbreak of war in Europe
in 1914, which cut immigration to a trickle, prevented
the passage of this measure.
American Indians were also affected by the pro-
gressives’ racial attitudes. Where the sponsors of the
Dawes Act (1887) had assumed that Indians were
inherently capable of adopting the ways of “civilized”
people, in the progressive period the tendency was to
write Indians off as fundamentally inferior and to
assume that they would make second-class citizens at
best. Francis Leupp, Theodore Roosevelt’s commis-
sioner of Indian affairs, put it this way in a 1905
report: “If nature has set a different physical stamp
upon different races of men it is fair to assume that
the variation... is manifested in mental and moral
traits as well.... Nothing is gained by trying to undo
nature’s work.” A leading muckraker, Ray Stannard
Baker, who was far more sympathetic to blacks than
most progressives, dismissed Indians as pathetic
beings, “eating, sleeping, idling, with no more
thought of the future than a white man’s child.”
In 1902 Congress passed the Dead Indian
Land Act, which made it easier for Indians to sell
allotments that they had inherited, and in 1906
another law further relaxed restrictions on land
sales. Efforts to improve the education of Indian
children continued, but most progressives assumed
that only vocational training would help them.
Theodore Roosevelt knew from his experiences as a
rancher in the Dakota Territory that Indians could
be as energetic and capable as whites, but he con-
sidered these “exceptional.” As for the rest, it
would be many generations before they could be
expected to “move forward” enough to become
“ordinary citizens,” Roosevelt believed.
To say that African Americans did not fare well at
the hands of progressives would be a gross understate-
ment. White southerners, furious at Populist efforts to
unite white and black farmers, imposed increasingly
repressive measures after 1896. Segregation became
more rigid, white opposition to black voting more
monolithic. In 1900 the body of a Mississippi black
was dug up by order of the state legislature andTable 21.2 Progressive Legislation (Federal)
Newlands Act^1902 Funneled revenues from sale of public lands to irrigation projects
Elkins Act 1903 Strengthened the ICC by making it illegal for railroads to deviate from published rates,
such as by granting rebates
Hepburn Act 1906 Gave ICC the power to fix rates of railroads and other corporations involved in interstate
commerce (such as corporations operating oil pipelines)
Pure Food and Durg Act 1906 Prohibited the fraudulent advertising, manufacturing, and selling of impure foods
and drugs
Mann-Elkins Act 1910 Empowered ICC to suspend rate increases for railroads or telephone companies
Underwood Tariff 1913 Lowered tariff rates; introduced graduated tax on personal incomes
Federal Reserve Act 1913 Established federal supervision of banking system
Sixteenth Amendment 1913 Authorized federal income tax
Clayton Antitrust Act 1914 Exempted labor unions from antitrust laws and curtailed injunctions against labor leaders
Nineteenth Amendment 1920 Established woman suffrage