Progressivism

• Author: Donald J. Pisani
• Pages: 2048-2050

Page 2048

In the decades after the CIVIL WAR, American law was forced to accommodate to the increasing pace of economic change as the United States was transformed from an agrarian, rural nation of small operatives into an urban, industrial nation characterized by huge transportation, manufacturing, extractive, and financial corporations that served national rather than local or regional markets. The Standard Oil trust, formed in 1882, consisted of thirty-nine different companies that pumped oil in eight states, refined it in six, and sold it everywhere. Railroad mileage increased from 36,801 miles in 1866 to 193,346 in 1900, and the gross national product increased by a factor of twelve. By 1900, the United States was producing more steel than Great Britain and Germany combined. Nevertheless, the devastating depression of 1893?1897 underscored the pain, human suffering, and dislocation caused by industrialization?ranging from child labor to burgeoning farm tenancy, strikes, and massive unemployment (which ran as high as twenty percent during the darkest months of the depression). It also underscored the lack of rationality and order in the marketplace. The century ended with a flurry of mergers as 2,274 firms disappeared during the years 1898?1910.

Historians have questioned whether there was a "Progressive movement," disagreed about who were its leaders and followers, and argued about its dates. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, institutional reform occurred at many levels of government, but Progressives were not unified by party, class, or objectives. For example, those who favored economic efficiency, such as the conservationists, seldom showed much sympathy for those who championed social issues. Not surprisingly, the Progressives never decided how the business corporation could be made more accountable to public opinion or what role it should play in American society. Since the colonial period, American law has attempted to blend pormotional and regulatory elements, though the former prevailed for most of the nineteenth century. It has proved far easier to promote economic growth?through such legal mechanisms as EMINENT DOMAIN, the power of incorporation, tax policy, and limits on liability for personal injury?than to regulate it.

For constitutional and legal scholars, it is appropriate to define the Progressive era as the years from about 1886 to 1917. Some recent historians look more charitably on the Supreme Court during this era than did scholars who wrote before the 1970s. They argue that many Justices were by training and inclination classical liberals who saw the Constitution as the embodiment of natural law. These judges wanted to preserve higher law rights and individual liberty, limit monopoly and government "paternalism," and protect the central government from expanding STATE POLICE POWER. They rejected "special privilege" in all forms. Earlier historians had charged that most members of the Court...