Imagine a political movement that successfully
ended child labor, gave women the right to vote,
and basically broke up these massive, tyrannical
corporate monopolies. I mean, it sounds incredible,
right? Yeah, it sounds like this perfect triumph.
But then you have to imagine that exact same
movement simultaneously laying the groundwork
for systemic racial segregation, strict immigration
quotas, and, well, eugenics. Right. You actually
don't have to imagine it at all, because that
was the American progressive era. It really is
one of the most intellectually dizzying periods
in history, I think. Oh, absolutely. We're talking
about a window of time roughly from the 1890s
through the 1920s that just completely rewired
how society functions. So today, we are taking
a deep dive into the source code of modern America.
A big one. It is. Our mission here is to understand
how this massive coalition of middle -class reformers,
investigative journalists, and really ambitious
politicians looked at the extreme wealth inequality
of the Gilded Age and the rampant political corruption
and just decided to forcefully install a new
operating system on the country. Yeah, they really
hacked the political machine. They did. But we're
also going to confront the deeply troubling blind
spots of this movement. Because if you have ever,
you know, voted in a primary election, or eaten
government -inspected meat, or even taken a vacation
to a national park, you are interacting with
the exact system the progressives built. You're
living in their house, essentially. Exactly.
Okay, let's unpack this. To fix a broken operating
system, you first have to realize it's infected
with malware, right? So how did the average American
in the 1890s suddenly wake up to how corrupt
things had become? Well, it required a fundamental
shift in how people consumed information. In
the 1890s and early 1900s, America experienced
this mass media boom that, honestly, it looks
surprisingly similar to the dawn of the internet.
Really? How so? So before this point, magazines
were largely these high brow literary journals.
They were meant for the wealthy elite. They were
super expensive to produce and obviously expensive
to buy. Right. But then national advertising
enters the picture. Ah, so the unit economics
completely flip. Exactly. Companies started buying
these full page ads for soaps and bicycles. And
that advertising revenue subsidized the printing
costs. Which means the cost for the reader goes
way down. Way down. The cover price of popular
magazines plummeted to just 10 cents. Suddenly,
the financial barrier to high quality information
was totally eliminated for your average middle
class citizen. Wow. And with that cheap access
came a whole new breed of journalists, right?
Yeah. Theodore Roosevelt actually coined the
term for them. He called them the muckrakers.
It was just such a great name. It is. But he
actually meant it as an insult. He was complaining
that they were entirely focused on raking up
the muck of society. But the writers, they wore
the name like a badge of honor. I mean, I would
too. Right. These journalists specialized in
deep, serialized, investigative nonfiction. They
weren't just writing angry opinion pieces. They
were digging through financial records and court
documents to expose corporate and political corruption
with undeniable proof. It feels very analogous
to today's like viral investigative substacks
or those massive, meticulously cited social media
threads that take down a public figure. Oh, totally.
That's a perfect comparison. You had journalists
like Ida Tarbell, who spent years dissecting
the ruthless monopoly tactics of John D. Rockefeller's
Standard Oil Company. Yeah, her work was groundbreaking.
And then you had Upton Sinclair, who took a slightly
different route with fiction. Sinclair is the
perfect case study for the visceral impact of
this era. In 1906, he published a novel called
The Jungle. Right, and his goal there was to
expose the horrifically unsanitary and unsafe
working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking
industry. Because he was hoping to arouse a sense
of working -class solidarity. Exactly. He wanted
people to care about the workers. But the public
reaction bypassed labor solidarity entirely and
went straight to sheer panic about what was on
their dinner plates. Yeah, they missed the point.
but it was still incredibly effective. There
is an incredible quote from Sinclair reflecting
on the aftermath. He said, I aimed at the public's
heart and by accident, I hit it in the stomach.
It's so good. What's fascinating here is the
mechanism of why this media shift works so well.
Yeah, let's get into that. So for decades prior,
during the Victorian era, the dominant philosophy
in America was strict individualism. Meaning
you are entirely responsible for your own fate
right if you were poor or I don't know if you
lost an arm in a factory gear Victorian morality
dictated that it was your own personal failing
you'll act character. Which is just a brutal
way to view the world. It really is. But the
Muckrakers provided undeniable evidence that
the game was actually rigged. So a factory worker
wasn't poor because of a character flaw. They
were poor because a monopoly was suppressing
wages and bribing the local aldermen. Exactly.
That completely shatters the illusion of individualism.
If the system is rigged, then poverty and injury
aren't moral failings. They are systemic failures.
And that realization just completely galvanized
the middle class. It did. They abandoned strict
individualism and embraced this new sociological
concept popularized by reformers like Jane Addams.
It was called association. Association, which
was the idea that different classes are interconnected,
right? Yeah, and with that connection comes a
shared social responsibility. Because once you
see the structural rot, you feel responsible
for fixing it. Right, you can't unsee it. But
the reformers quickly slammed into a massive
roadblock because, well, you can't just politely
ask a corrupt political boss to pass a law outlawing
his own corruption. No, they're not going to
vote themselves out of power. Exactly. The entire
system, the local courts, the state legislatures,
the police was controlled by these political
machines. So the progressives realized they had
to bypass the politicians entirely. They had
to hack. the democratic system itself. And the
laboratory for this political hacking was at
the state level. Let's look at Oregon, for example.
Yeah, Oregon is a great example. In 1898, a political
activist named William Uren read a book analyzing
Swiss democracy and inspired by the Swiss model,
he pushed for what became known as the Oregon
system. By 1902, Oregon adopted two massive patches
to their political operating system. The initiative.
and the referendum. Let's break down how those
actually function because they fundamentally
change the power dynamic. They really do. So
an initiative means that if you gather enough
signatures from everyday citizens, you can place
a proposed law directly on the ballot. Meaning
you don't even need a politician to introduce
it? Exactly. And a referent is the flip side.
If the corrupt legislature passes a terrible
law, citizens can gather signatures to put that
law on the ballot and vote to veto it. It is
a direct bypass of the corrupted hardware. Yeah.
And by 1908, Oregon added the recall, meaning
citizens could directly fire corrupt elected
officials before their term was even up. Wow.
And this hacking spread, didn't it? Oh, like
wildfire. In the Midwest, you had Wisconsin Governor
Robert M. LaFollette practically declaring war
on the political bosses. He implemented the direct
primary. Which took the power to choose political
candidates away from the backroom party bosses
who, you know, used to just select their cronies
in a smoke filled room. Right. And it handed
that choice directly to the voters. And La Follette
went further with something called the Wisconsin
Idea. She understood that modern society was
becoming incredibly complex. Meaning what, exactly?
Well, if you want to regulate a massive railroad
monopoly, you can't just write a vague law. the
railroad's corporate lawyers will tear it apart
in court. Ah, of course. They'll find the loopholes.
Exactly. So, Lafollette partnered with experts,
economists, and professors at the University
of Wisconsin to draft these airtight, scientifically
rigorous reform laws. They were writing bulletproof
code. Yes. And because of that partnership with
university experts, Wisconsin was able to create
the first effective workplace injury compensation
law and the first state income tax. And this
drive to break the power of party bosses eventually
scaled all the way up to the U .S. Constitution,
right, with the 17th Amendment in 1913. Yeah,
that amendment established the direct election
of U .S. senators. Because prior to 1913, senators
were appointed by state legislatures. Right.
And since those state legislatures were almost
always in the pocket of the local political machine.
The U .S. Senate was essentially a millionaire's
club of machine cronies. So the 17th Amendment
handed that power directly to the public. Exactly.
Wait let me stop you there because I'm looking
at the historical record and there is a massive
glaring contradiction staring me in the face
here. Oh I think I know where you're going with
this. On one hand, you have the progressives
fighting tooth and nail for more direct democracy.
They want ballot initiatives, referendums, direct
primaries, the direct election of senators. They
are screaming power to the people. Right. But
on the other hand, these exact same reformers
are pushing to hand huge amounts of power to
entirely unelected experts. They're advocating
for city managers, appointed university professors,
independent commissions to run things. Yeah,
they really are. Aren't those two ideas totally
at odds? How do you champion the everyday voter
while simultaneously saying, actually, let's
let unelected scientists and academics run the
city? This raises an important question. And
that tension is really the defining psychological
trait of the progressive era. OK. Because to
a reformer in 1905, it wasn't a contradiction
at all. How is that not a contradiction? Because
the unifying enemy was the political boss. The
political machine was seen as wasteful, corrupt,
and above all else, incredibly inefficient. Inefficient,
right. Yeah. So whether they were empowering
a grassroots voter through a ballot initiative
or empowering a university economist to write
the tax code, the ultimate goal was always efficiency.
They wanted to eliminate the corrupt middleman.
So, in their minds, a nonpartisan expert running
a city like a streamlined business was just as
democratic as a primary election because both
methods successfully destroyed the power of the
corrupt politicians. Exactly. It is the absolute
gospel of efficiency. And that gospel inevitably
scaled up to the federal stage, which brings
us to the rival presidents. Yes. The progressive
era forced the federal government to completely
abandon its traditional laissez -faire approach
to the economy. Just for context, before this
era, the federal government was practically invisible
in daily life. Pretty much. It basically delivered
the mail, fought occasional wars, managed international
tariffs. It was completely hands off regarding
domestic business. Right. If a monopoly crushed
its competitors, the government just watched.
But Theodore Roosevelt changes the paradigm entirely
with his square deal. He makes the federal government
an active, muscular player. He does. Roosevelt
was massively influenced by Gifford Pinchot,
a pioneer in scientific forestry. Okay, how did
that influence him? Well, Pinchot convinced Roosevelt
that the nation's natural resources were being
violently depleted by private timber and mining
monopolies. So this led Roosevelt to establish
the Forest Service and drastically expand the
national parks system. Right. The government
was suddenly managing millions of acres of land
to prevent private exploitation. And then Woodrow
Wilson takes office with his new Freedom Agenda,
which fundamentally rewired the economic engine
of the country. Totally. Under Wilson, you get
the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. So instead of
of leaving the banking system to the chaotic
whims of private financiers, the government created
a central banking system to manage the money
supply. Yeah, to stabilize economic panics. You
also get the Clayton Antitrust Act to crack down
on price fixing. And crucially, you get the 16th
Amendment. Which made the federal income tax
constitutional. Yes. And the mechanics of that
income tax shift are vital to understand. Right.
Because previously, the government funded itself
mostly through tariffs. tariffs on imported goods.
Exactly. And tariffs are highly regressive. They
raise the price of basic goods, which disproportionately
hurts the poor. Whereas an income tax is progressive,
it taxes the wealthy at a higher rate. Even more
importantly, it gave the federal government the
massive stable revenue stream it needed to fund
all these new regulatory agencies. The political
drama surrounding all this reform is legendary,
by the way. Oh, it's a soap opera. It really
is. Roosevelt actually handpicked his successor,
William Taft, but Taft turned out to be more
conservative and cautious. Yeah, and Roosevelt
felt Taft was abandoning the progressive agenda.
So in 1912, TR fiercely broke with his old friend,
formed his own third party, the famous Bull Moose
Progressive Party, and ran against Taft and Wilson.
Which just split the Republican vote and handed
the presidency to Wilson. Here's where it gets
really interesting though. The historical irony
of that split is profound, particularly when
it comes to monopolies. Oh, you mean the trust
-busting numbers. Yes. This is where the history
gets really counterintuitive. Theodore Roosevelt
has this legendary historical reputation as the
great trust buster, right? The man who fearlessly
took down the monopolies. That's the myth. But
if you actually look at the historical numbers,
Taft pursued far more antitrust cases than Roosevelt
did. It's true. We are talking 90 major antitrust
suits under Taft compared to just 44 under TR.
Taft's administration went after the absolute
titans, American tobacco, U .S. steel, and the
big one, Standard Oil. But breaking up Standard
Oil didn't exactly go the way the reformers planned.
No, it didn't. Taft's attorney general, George
Wickersham, discovered a dynamic that completely
backfired on the administration. It's often called
the advertising paradox. I want to break down
the mechanics of this because it is such a brilliant
aha moment in the history of economics. Go for
it. So Wickersham realized that legally shattering
these giant trusts like Standard Oil actually
resulted in higher prices for everyday consumers.
Right, which seems... Completely backward. Exactly.
But let's think about how a monopoly operates.
When Standard Oil controlled 90 percent of the
market, they didn't need to spend a dime on marketing.
Because who are they going to advertise against?
They're the only game in town. Exactly. But when
the government forces Standard Oil to break up
into 34 separate independent regional companies,
the math changes overnight. Suddenly, you have
multiple oil companies sharing borders, fighting
for the same customers. They have to compete.
And how do you compete? You buy massive full
-page advertisements in national newspapers.
You launch marketing campaigns. And marketing
costs millions of dollars. Right. So the newly
shattered oil companies simply took those massive
new advertising costs and baked them directly
into the price of a gallon of kerosene. The progressive
reformers successfully destroyed the monopoly,
and the everyday consumer ended up paying the
bill. It is a stunning example of good intentions
colliding with market realities. It really is.
But regardless of the immediate economic hiccups,
this era permanently redefined the federal government.
It shifted the state from a passive observer
of capitalism to an active daily manager of the
economy. But this obsession with efficiency didn't
stop at the economy. No, it didn't. Because if
you truly believe you can scientifically engineer
a perfect government, it's only a matter of time
before you try to scientifically engineer the
citizens themselves. Yeah. And that's where this
era gets incredibly dark. Let's explore the human
element of social engineering, starting with
something called municipal housekeeping. So municipal
housekeeping was a brilliant, highly effective
rhetorical strategy used by middle class women
to essentially weaponize traditional gender role.
Okay how did that work? Well at the time society
strictly dictated that a woman's sphere was the
home. She was responsible for keeping the home
clean, moral, and safe for children. The public
sphere of politics was only for men. But progressive
women flipped that logic on its head. They did.
They argued, if our divine duty is to keep our
homes clean and safe, how can we do that if the
city's water supply is contaminated by the political
machine? How can we protect our children if they
are forced to work in unregulated sweatshops?
Ah, so they argued the city is just a larger
home and it needs a mother to clean it up. Precisely.
And that logic justified a massive wave of female
entry into the public political sphere. Which
led to Jane Addams founding Whole House in Chicago,
providing critical social services to exploited
immigrants. Yes. It led to women lobbying fiercely
for the creation of the Children's Bureau to
finally outlaw child labor. And ultimately, this
massive organized mobilization of women resulted
in the 19th Amendment. Finally guaranteeing women
the right to vote. But that exact same moral
crusade also gave us prohibition. The 18th Amendment
outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol.
Now, at first glance, I have to challenge this.
Okay, what's the challenge? How does banning
booze fit into progressive political reform?
I mean, we usually associate Prohibition with
the rise of Al Capone and the mob, not the end
of political corruption. Right. It seems weird
today. But to understand Prohibition, you have
to understand the architecture of the political
machine. The corrupt ward bosses didn't operate
out of fancy office buildings. Their headquarters
were the local saloons. Oh, interesting. Yeah,
the saloon was where the political boss handed
out patronage jobs, organized voter fraud, cashed
paychecks, and bought free drinks to secure loyalty
from poor immigrants. Oh, I see. The saloon was
the literal engine room of the political machine.
Precisely. To the progressive reformer, destroying
the saloon wasn't just about moral puritanism.
It was a targeted strike against the infrastructure
of political corruption. If you starve the saloon,
you starve the political boss. Exactly. Yeah.
Of course, it also carried heavy xenophobic undertones.
Right. It pitted native born rural Protestants
against urban working class Catholic immigrants
whose social lives revolved around those saloons.
And when we talk about xenophobia and marginalized
groups, we have to look directly at the apps
darkest blind spots of the progressive era. We
do. The historical record reveals that this massive
wave of democratic reform coincided with what
historians consider the nadir -like, the absolute
lowest most violent point of American race relations.
The contradictions are staggering. Woodrow Wilson
a champion of economic reform, outright segregated
the federal government. Which is wild because
for decades federal offices had been somewhat
integrated. Yes, but Wilson ordered workspaces,
cafeterias, and restrooms to be rigidly segregated
by race. His administration even hosted a screening
of the wildly racist film Birth of a Nation at
the White House. And Theodore Roosevelt's record
is deeply unsettling as well. Yeah, it's very
mixed. On one hand, he was the first president
to formally invite an African -American leader,
Booker T. Washington, to dine at the White House,
and he defended Black federal appointees against
furious Southern backlash. But then later in
his presidency, Roosevelt allowed the dishonorable
discharge of 167 Black soldiers stationed in
Brownsville, Texas. Right. They were accused
of a violent riot based on entirely false fabricated
evidence despite having airtight alibis. And
Roosevelt refused to hear their defense and ruin
their lives. The historical documents also showed
T .R. held deeply racist views toward indigenous
populations and believed in a strict racial hierarchy.
And this wasn't just personal prejudice, was
it? No, it was systemic to the progressive philosophy.
Remember the gospel of efficiency we talked about?
Yeah. When you apply a cold engineering mindset
to sociology, human beings are reduced to data
points. Many prominent progressives view Jim
Crow segregation laws not as an oppressive injustice,
but as an orderly scientific solution to racial
friction. They looked at racial tension and thought,
well, the most efficient way to manage this is
to keep the populations entirely separate. That
is chilling. It gets worse. Take that a step
further and you arrive at eugenics. Oh, wow.
Yeah. Some progressives. actively championed
the pseudoscience of eugenics, genuinely believing
that society could be scientifically optimized
by literally breeding out the poor, the mentally
ill, or the supposedly unfit. They applied agricultural
breeding concepts to human beings. Exactly. This
same logic fueled their push for the Immigration
Act of 1924, which placed draconian quotas on
Southern and Eastern Europeans and banned Asian
immigration entirely. So what does this all mean?
How do we reconcile this? We are analyzing a
movement that fought tirelessly to end child
labor, gave half the population the right to
vote, and broke the power of tyrannical monopolies
while simultaneously endorsing racial segregation,
passing the 1924 Immigration Act, and promoting
eugenics. It's incredibly difficult. It feels
impossible to hold both of those realities in
your head at the same time. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, it demands a very uncomfortable
level of critical thinking. The fatal flaw of
progressivism was its profound unchecked arrogance.
The arrogance. Yes. It was the absolute certainty
that there is one best scientific way to run
a society and that educated experts have the
moral authority to enforce it. Right. When you
apply an engineering mindset to human beings
and that mindset is wielded by a dominant culture
with its own unchecked biases, it easily morphs
into forced assimilation and oppression. Because
to the progressive mind, segregation and immigration
quotas weren't hateful crimes. They were just
the efficient management of the population. Exactly.
They forgot that human beings aren't lines of
code to be optimized. The line between cleaning
up a corrupt system and engineering away the
people you deem inefficient is terrifyingly thin.
It really is. The progressive era transformed
America. It took the country from the chaotic,
unregulated wilderness of the Gilded Age and
built the massive, regulated, bureaucratic state
we live in today. It was a complex, messy blend
of expanding grassroots democracy while simultaneously
empowering an elite class of experts. And their
code is still running in the background of our
lives. It is. Every single time you check the
ingredients on a food label to make sure it's
safe to eat, every time you file your federal
income tax, or every time you trust a government
agency to ensure your workplace won't collapse
on you, you are interacting directly with the
ghosts of the progressive era. You are living
inside the system they engineered. They built
the infrastructure of our modern civic lives,
for better and for worse. Which brings me to
a final thought I want to leave you with today.
We spent this entire deep dive unpacking the
progressive obsession with efficiency. We've
looked at how they relied on scientists, academics,
and experts to fix the messy, corrupt elements
of human society. Right. Now think about the
world we live in right now. Think about the algorithms,
the artificial intelligence tools, the tech billionaires,
and the Silicon Valley technocrats we increasingly
rely on today to efficiently manage our lives,
to curate our news feeds, to drive our cars,
and to run our smart cities. It's the same mindset.
Are we entering a new progressive era? Are we
once again making the choice to trust experts
in automated systems over the messy, unpredictable,
and inefficient reality of human democracy? And
if we are, based on what we just learned about
the dark side of the 1890s, who is at risk of
being quietly engineered out of the picture in
our modern quest for a perfectly optimized society?
That's the real question. Next time you rely
on an algorithm to make a decision for you, ask
yourself who wrote the code.