VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM ★^703An American Standard of Living
The maturation of the consumer economy gave rise to concepts— a “living
wage” and an “American standard of living”—that offered a new language
for criticizing the inequalities of wealth and power in Progressive America.
Father John A. Ryan’s influential book A Living Wage (1906) described a decent
standard of living (one that enabled a person to participate in the consumer
economy) as a “natural and absolute” right of citizenship. Ryan had grown up
in Minnesota in a family sympathetic to Henry George, the Knights of Labor,
and the Populists. His book sought to translate into American terms Pope Leo
XIII’s powerful statement of 1894, Rerum Novarum, which criticized the divorce
of economic life from ethical considerations, endorsed the right of workers to
organize unions, and repudiated competitive individualism in favor of a more
cooperative vision of the good society. Ryan’s insistence that economic rela-
tionships should be governed by moral standards had a powerful influence on
social thought among American Catholics.
The popularity of the idea of an American standard of living reflected, in
part, the emergence of a mass- consumption society during the Progressive era.
For the first time in the nation’s history, mass consumption came to occupy a
central place in descriptions of American society and its future. In the Gilded
Age, social theorists like Henry George had wondered why economic progress
produced both increased wealth and abject misery. The Progressive generation
was strongly influenced by the more optimistic writings of Simon W. Patten, a
prophet of prosperity. Patten announced the end of the “reign of want” and the
advent of a society of abundance and leisure. In the dawning “new civilization,”
he proclaimed, Americans would enjoy economic equality in a world in which
“every one is independent and free.”
VARIETIES OF PROGRESSIVISM
For most Americans, however, Patten’s “new civilization” lay far in the future.
The more immediate task, in the Progressives’ view, was to humanize indus-
trial capitalism and find common ground in a society still racked by labor
conflict and experiencing massive immigration from abroad. Some Progres-
sives proposed to return to a competitive marketplace populated by small pro-
ducers. Others accepted the permanence of the large corporation and looked
to the government to reverse the growing concentration of wealth and to
ensure social justice. Still others would relocate freedom from the economic
and political worlds to a private realm of personal fulfillment and unimpeded
self- expression. But nearly all Progressives agreed that freedom must be infused
How did the labor and women’s movements challenge the nineteenth- century
meanings of American freedom?