A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (102 page)

The auto and the airplane were still in their infancy, and only the most eccentric dreamers could envision an America crisscrossed by thousands of miles of asphalt and dotted by hundreds of airports. Dreamers of another sort remained hard at work, though, in the realm of social engineering.

Progressive Reformers

While the Wright Brothers aspired to reach the heavens, quite literally, through technology, another movement sought the kingdom of heaven through more spiritual means. Revivals, of course, had played a prominent role in the First and Second Great Awakenings of the colonial era and Jacksonian periods. Following in the paths blazed by evangelists such as Charles G. Finney and Holiness leader Charles Parnham, evangelists routinely hit the dusty trails to rouse the morally sleeping masses for the Lord. In the late 1800s, many Americans had adopted either a more formal liturgical stance aligned with the major traditional churches or had joined the growing sea of secularists. But in 1905 spiritual shock waves hit Los Angeles, spread from a revival in Wales. The Welsh revival was so powerful that the number of drunkenness arrests fell over a three-year period, and the miners cleaned up their language so much that their horses reportedly could no longer understand the commands. The revival reached the United States through traveling ministers to the American Holiness churches, where a number of prophecies foretold a massive revival that would descend on California.
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A year later, in April 1906, at a church on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, as Elder William Seymour began praying with local church members, the Azusa Christians began to speak in other tongues (technically called glossolalia). This was a biblical phenomenon that occurred at Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit filled the believers, and at that time they spoke in other tongues—that is, they spoke in languages they did not know. Crowds packed the area around the house, growing so large that the foundation of the front porch collapsed. Eventually the prayer services—which, by now, were going on for twenty-four hours a day—had to be moved to an old African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church nearby. As word of the Azusa Street revival spread, it became clear that this was an interracial event, often with women conducting important parts of the services or prayers. Inevitably, divisions and schisms appeared, and some of the early members left or otherwise lost their influence, until finally, between 1909 and 1913 (depending on whether one counts a second revival that occurred at the same location), the revival ended. The Azusa Street revival gave birth to the modern charismatic/ Pentecostal movement in America, setting the spiritual stage for dozens of charismatic denominations in the United States.

An even larger movement, that of the Social Gospel, sprang from mainstream Protestant ministers who emphasized social justice over perfecting the inner man, and the relationship of Christians to others in society. Social Gospel advocates included Washington Gladden, an Ohio Congregational minister; Walter Rauschenbusch, a New York Baptist preacher; and Kansan Charles Sheldon, whose
In His Steps
sold 23 million copies and was a precursor to the twenty-first-century WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) movement. Most Social Gospelers endorsed minimum wage and child labor laws, favored a redistribution of wealth, and generally embraced state regulation of business.
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To do so usually involved significant revisions of the Bible, and many (though not all) Social Gospelers abandoned any claims about scripture’s literal accuracy. Instead, the Social Gospelers viewed the Bible as a moral guidebook—but no more than that. These modernists also “abandoned theological dogmatism for greater tolerance of other faiths.”
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Secularist reformers continued the quest for perfectionism with something like a religious zeal. They wielded great influence in the first decade of the new century. By 1912, Progressives found adherents in both political parties and had substantial support from women, who supported health and safety laws and prohibition and temperance legislation. In turn, woman suffrage became a centerpiece of all Progressive reform. Theodore Roosevelt had done much to dull the campaign issues of food and drug reform and trust-busting. Individual states initiated many Progressive ideas for direct election of judges, popular initiative for legislation that the state assembly did not wish to bring up, public referenda on unpopular bills advanced by the legislatures, and recall of public officials. (Indeed, Arizona’s statehood had been held up until 1912 because its constitution had all these features.)

Reform impulse sprang up as much in the West as in the big cities of the East. Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Texas, Kansas, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Oklahoma, and South Dakota all had enacted woman suffrage by 1919. Progressive ideas were in the air everywhere: from Virginia to Wisconsin, professional city managers replaced city councils, and new campaigns to reform government swept from South Dakota to Texas. There was a certain illogic to the whole reform mentality. Full-time career politicians were venal, and thus needed to be replaced with professional managers. But professional managers were also untrustworthy because they wanted the job in the first place! Jefferson and Madison’s dream of part-time citizen legislators, who would convene at the capital, do their business, and then go home to their constituents, under assault since the Jacksonian party system, now yielded further to demands for the professionalization of politics. This professionalization hardly eliminated corruption. Rather, it changed the names of those controlling the graft.

Under ordinary circumstances, immigrants were the object of considerable pandering, but election days brought even more extreme treatment for those who had newly arrived on American shores. Bosses trucked the immigrants to polls and paid them to vote for the machine. When possible, party loyalists voted multiple times, honoring Tweed’s maxim to “vote early and often.” Supporters stuffed ballot boxes with the names of dead voters, wrote in fictitious residents, or, conversely, helped lose ballot boxes from areas where the opposing party might do well. Secret ballots, of course, undercut this power by hampering vote buying and also by preventing illiterate citizens from voting, since they could no longer take a colored card that indicated party preference, but had to actually read a ballot.

All the while a climate of violence and larceny—and, not surprisingly, organized crime—hovered around the perimeter of political machines, occasionally swooping in to grab a contract or blackmail an official. Every ethnic group in a large city had its own mob. The Italian Mafia was merely the most notorious of these; the Irish, Jews, and, in subsequent decades, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, and Jamaicans had gangs, and every gang battled every other, often in bloody shootouts. Corruption filtered down into police departments, where being on the take was viewed as a legitimate bonus as long as it did not interfere with prosecuting real criminals. Law enforcement officials routinely winked at brothels, gambling rooms, even opium dens—as long as the users remained blissfully pacific—in return for payola envelopes that appeared in the officers’ coat pockets during their daily rounds.

In 1911 the Chicago Metropolitan Vice Commission conducted a thorough study of prostitution, which shocked the investigators. At least five thousand full-time prostitutes worked the city—one for every two hundred women in Chicago—although that number, the commission estimated, might have represented a conservative guess that did not include so-called clandestine prostitutes, such as married women making part-time money. Equally stunning, the prostitution business (when counting procurers, pimps, tavern owners, thugs, and crime lords who ran the districts) probably generated upward of $15 million in annual revenues.
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Had the money stayed only with the criminals, it would have been easier to deal with. But as the commission reported, the graft was so widespread that prostitution income found its way into the hands not only of the owners of the bordellos, but also of the police, judges handling the cases, and politicians appointing the judges.

Progressive-era reformers tried to remedy such social ills and vices through education, their most valued weapon. Public education in such areas as hygiene, they contended, would solve the problems of venereal disease and alcoholism. Only a few groups, such as the Catholic Church, pointed out that a wide gap existed between education and morality, or that secular knowledge did not equate with spiritual wisdom. Reformers silenced those voices with ridicule and embarrassment.

Reformers such as Jane Addams firmly believed all urban dwellers should conform to certain Progressive ideals regarding living spaces (“clean” and not too crowded), personal behavior (eschewing hard liquor, prostitution, gambling, and other vices), and civic equality (women should vote and be educated). The fact that they were imposing what were, in reality, upper-class values on people who did not have the means to maintain them did not stop the reformers.
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Social activists found that they needed more than good intentions to gain the upper ground in the reform debates—they needed an aura of expertise. Consequently, intellectuals and academics appropriated the concept of professionalism and special insight based on science and numbers, and now they applied a strange twist. To claim superior understanding of urban issues, reformers could not rely on established fields of learning, so they created entirely new subjects in which they could claim mastery. These social sciences by their very name asserted
scientific
explanations for human behavior. The new social scientists found that if, in addition to numbers, they could invoke esoteric and virtually indecipherable theories, their claims to special insight became even more believable. Many Americans would dismiss them immediately as cranks, while some (especially the elites and other intellectuals) would find them to be on the cutting edge and revolutionary and would feed their ideas back into the system. Thorsten Veblen was one of the first sociologists to emerge from the new disciplines. Writing
A Theory of the Leisure Class
(1899), a predictably antibusiness book, Veblen proposed a new economic system in which power would reside in the hands of highly trained engineers, including, one suspects, himself.
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Famous (or, perhaps, notorious) for his theory of conspicuous consumption, Veblen viewed the economic world as a zero-sum scenario in which one person’s consumption decreased the amount of goods available to someone else. In that sense, he reinforced the positions of Progressive social scientists, who sought to use science to bolster their antivice crusades. Social scientists managed to exert great influence on lower levels of society by inserting Progressive views of morality and behavior into the public education system through the social hygiene movement. Who, after all, could oppose cleanliness and good health? And whom better to target than children?

Cleaning up individual morality still took a backseat to the central task of eliminating corruption of the city and state governments. Obsessed with perfecting the political system at all levels, Progressives were responsible for the bookends that touched on each end of reform. The first, the income tax, represented a continued irrational antipathy toward wealthy Americans. Hostility toward the rich had characterized the Populists’ platforms, and had never completely disappeared after the 1890s. The interesting twist now was that guilty Progressive elites sought to take wealth from other non-Progressive elites by appealing to still other strata in society. Concerns over inequities in wealth distribution and banking reform were the central features of the Progressives’ agenda. The second, temperance, which had receded temporarily as an issue after the Civil War, found renewed interest in the early twentieth century.

In the 1960s former Alabama governor George Wallace, running as a third-party candidate, complained that there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. He would have been right in 1912, when not one, and not two, but all three of the major candidates to one degree or another embraced the agenda of Progressivism. The incumbent William Howard Taft, the Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson, and the former president Theodore Roosevelt, now an insurgent seeking to unseat Taft, all professed their belief in strong antitrust actions, tariff reform, direct taxation, and more equitable wealth distribution. Of the three, Wilson (perhaps) was the most idealistic, but given the nature of Progressivism itself, all three suffered from a skepticism of free markets and an affinity for government intervention in public health.

Roosevelt held the key to the election. No successor would have satisfied him. “Theodore Rex,” as one recent biographer called him, had an ego that precluded yielding the spotlight.
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Few leaders inherently combined such raw frontier aggressiveness with an upper-class Progressive reform mentality. Roosevelt was a fusion of human diversity as opposite as Arnold Schwarzenegger is from Ralph Nader. Certainly Taft, despite his intention to continue TR’s Progressive agenda, could not measure up. Roosevelt was at his best when campaigning against something, or someone, even if it was his own successor.

He selected Taft as his heir, then ran off to Africa on a safari, only to be hunted down himself by Pinchot and other malcontents who disliked the new president. Within two years of anointing Taft, Roosevelt had second thoughts. The president had a poor public image, despite an activist agenda that would have made even Roosevelt blanch. He had brought eighty antitrust suits (compared to TR’s twenty-five) and declared more lands for public use (that is, yanking them from the private sector) than Roosevelt. Many Republicans, however, disliked Taft, partly out of his sour relations with Congress, partly out of a concern for his weak public image, but most of all because he was not Roosevelt. Consequently, a group of Republican leaders contacted Roosevelt about running in the 1912 election, which the former president greeted with his characteristic toothy smile. Roosevelt planned to enter the primaries, gaining enough convention delegates to wrest the nomination from the incumbent Taft.