twentieth century, under the charismatic leader-
ship of Eugene V. Debs, the Social Democratic
Party attempted to win over the worker from
trade union economic bargaining to politics, but
was unsuccessful on a national scale, though
Debs, when he became a presidential candidate,
secured almost 900,000 votes. When labour
unions expanded it was under the direction of
men like Samuel Gompers who rejected political
socialism as utopian and saw themselves as prac-
tical men seeking to improve the wages and con-
ditions of labour day by day without ulterior ends
in view. In 1886 they organised the American
Federation of Labor (AFL) but in the 1890s
found that union militancy could not prevail
against the employers supported by the federal
government. There were some successes to set
against the failures, with the gradual introduction
of maximum working hours and the ending of
the abuse of child labour. Theodore Roosevelt,
when president, showed more sympathy for the
workers. Strikes of national concern, like the coal
strike in Pennsylvania in 1902, were no longer
settled by the federal government siding with the
employers. President Roosevelt intervened and
refused to back the mine owners, who had to
concede higher wages. Roosevelt’s action was
characteristic of one aspect of a new spirit collec-
tively known as the Progressive Movement.
But Roosevelt’s outlook was not shared by all
the states, which had retained extensive rights
under the constitution. In 1903 and 1904 the
governor of the state of Colorado, for instance,
had mobilised the militia, jailed the union leaders
of the striking copper miners and beaten down
the strikes with violence and bloodshed; and in all
this he was eventually supported by the Supreme
Court. Gompers himself was imprisoned by
federal courts after another strike and denounced
as a dangerous rabble-rouser subverting the law.
Against this onslaught of employers, and with
business dominating the courts and the state gov-
ernments, Roosevelt could do little. Though the
AFL expanded from half a million to 2 million
members by 1914, it could scarcely hold its
own. Only the boom brought about by the Great
War and the shortage of labour enabled the
more moderate unions to gain acceptance and to
negotiate better terms for workers. But the mass
of the unskilled and black people remained largely
outside the unions. The AFL’s successes were
mainly won on behalf of the skilled craft unions
and the semi-skilled.
After the depressed 1880s and mid-1890s the
farmers, who had been a major force behind the
rising challenge to eastern business dominance,
became quiescent. From 1897 until 1914 they
enjoyed a short ‘golden age’ of prosperity, the
value of their crops doubling during this period.
Looking at the US as a whole, the only safe
generalisation is that the problems that forced
themselves on the attention of people varied enor-
mously from one region to another, as did the
responses of those in power in any particular state.
Thus, in contrast to the conduct of Colorado’s
government, the governor of Wisconsin, Robert
M. La Follette, passed many practical reforms in
his state, as did Woodrow Wilson after becoming
governor of New Jersey in 1911.
‘Progressive’ became a loose label denoting
little more than a recognition of the many varied
ills besetting American society and politics during
years of rapid change and a desire to remedy
whichever of these ills a particular progressive felt
to be the most injurious. The ills were well pub-
licised by a new breed of journalists who proudly
accepted what was meant to be an insulting
description of their work – ‘The Muckrakers’.
Their targets were manifold – political corruption,
the inequality of wealth, the domination of
politics by big business; they investigated most
aspects of American life; they attacked the doc-
trine of freedom which allowed the grasping
entrepreneur to develop America at too great a
price; they stressed the undermining of democ-
racy; and argued the need for more regulatory
government, not less.
In domestic politics the president’s powers are
limited by the rights of the two Houses of Con-
gress, the Senate and the House of Representa-
tives, and by the Supreme Court, the final arbiter
of any dispute about constitutional rights. What
President Theodore Roosevelt and his successors –
the more conservative William Howard Taft, and
then the Democrat Woodrow Wilson – actually
achieved in legislation was less important than the