Words Worth Remembering: Who Is a Progressive?
On Wednesday, April 3, 1912, the same day in which The New York Times covered several workers’ strikes, former president Theodore Roosevelt, aiming for a return to the presidency, delivered a speech in Louisville, Kentucky. TR’s topic: “Who Is a Progressive?”
There was a reason for that topic; it was not simply a regular campaign stump speech. In Philadelphia, incumbent President William Howard Taft, a Republican whom Roosevelt believed had betrayed progressive ideals, had declared himself a progressive.
TR took issue. “A well-meaning man may vaguely think of himself as a Progressive without having even the faintest conception of what a Progressive is,” TR opened his address in Louisville. “Both vision and intensity of conviction must go to the make-up of any man who is to lead the forward movement, and mildly good intentions are utterly useless as substitutes.”
Even progressives had difficulty defining what, exactly, being a progressive person meant in the world of the social and the political. Noah Webster’s classic American Dictionary of the English Language defined progressive, then a non-political term, as “moving forward,” “proceeding onward,” “advancing,” and “improving.” That, more or less, was how progressives thought of themselves—as being people dedicated to a better future.
But to TR, being progressive meant more; the future, though good, had to be good for all and not just a few. The revolutionary boom of urbanization and industrialization had birthed unprecedented wealth and power, leading to gross inequality, abuses in labor and living standards for workers, political corruption, fissures in social cohesion, and government passivity.
TR had many influences, one which was the urban journalist Jacob A. Riis, who, in his 1890 work, How the Other Half Lives, documented, in words and photographs, the grueling life in the tenements of American cities like New York. “As business grew, and the city grew with rapid strides, the necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors,” Riis wrote.
Large rooms, Riis quoted one report, “were partitioned into several smaller ones, without regard to light or ventilation.” It was not rare to find five or more working families sharing a single 12 x 12 room “with only two beds, without partition, screen, chair, or table.” Riis’s investigations of garment sweatshops also displayed the chasm widening in the land of hope.
“The half that was on top cared little for the struggles, and less for the fate of those who were underneath,” Riis wrote, “so long as it was able to hold them there and keep its own seat.”
Impressed by Riis’s work, TR pledged to “help him in any practical way to make things a little better.” Riis had helped make TR “well awake to the need of making ours in good faith both an economic and an industrial as well as a political democracy.”
(Ascending to the presidency in 1901 at age 42 following the death of William McKinley, and winning election in his own right in 1904, TR took action. He fought corrupt political machines, big business monopolies, and gross labor conditions, all while working to conserve the nation’s national resources from greedy exploitation and destruction.)
In Louisville, TR declared that many statesmen “not merely distrust the people, but wish to keep them helpless so as to exploit them for their own benefit.” To TR, being a progressive meant more than being aware of social and political injustice; it meant constant action to destroy it.
“Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people,” he said. “With this purpose in view, we propose to do away with whatever in our government tends to secure to privilege, and to the great sinister special interests, a rampart from behind which they can beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice, and frustrate the will of the people.”
TR continued, “Every man is to that extent a Progressive if he stands for any form of social justice, whether it be securing proper protection for factory girls against dangerous machinery, for securing a proper limitation of hours of labor for women and children in industry, for securing proper living conditions for those who dwell in the thickly crowded regions of our great cities, for helping, so far as legislators can help, all the conditions of work and life for wage-workers in great centers of industry…”
TR declared that “the present contest is but a phase of the larger struggle” of Americans to fight for the “square deal” they are each entitled to in a free society created by their ancestors for the people’s benefit.
The fight was against “the powers that prey, the powers of privilege, the dread powers that exploit the people for their own purpose, and that turn popular government into a sham,” he said.
“We who stand for the cause of progress, for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind, are pledged to eternal war against tyranny and wrong, by the few or by the many, by a plutocracy or by a mob,” he said.
“None of us can really prosper permanently if masses of our fellows are debased and degraded, if masses of men and women are ground down and forced to lead starved and sordid lives, so that their souls are crippled like their bodies and the fine edge of their every feeling is blunted.
“This country,” TR concluded, “will not be a good place for any of us to live in if it is not a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.”
Two years earlier, TR had said that “the object of government is the welfare of the people” and that “a genuine and permanent moral awakening” was needed.
In Louisville, he defined, at length, what it meant to be a progressive. “Our cause is the cause of justice for all, in the interest of all,” he said. “Surely there was never a more noble cause.”