Use American History As Inspiration To Do Better Today
Celebrate historical wins, learn from them, and do even better today.
The second American Progressive Era is upon us—if we take advantage.
Nothing about history is inevitable. Yes, as every 11th grade history teacher will tell you, those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it.
But history is an imperfect chronicle of the choices made by various groups of people in the past. That’s all they are: choices. They were not handed down to us by God. We do not adhere to a preordained metaphysical script. Human beings determine human life, for good, ill, and everything in between.
We must collectively choose to pursue specific programs that improve our neighbors' lives and our own. We must choose an overall vision of multicultural democracy where everyone gets a say; gets protections from those who might do them harm and shelter from the worsening elements that will certainly do them harm; gets help when life hits them hard.
The greatest moments of American history should be studied just as rigorously as its worst elements. Because I’ll give the diaper-filling conservatives in right wing media this: It sucks to focus exclusively on feel-bad shit about this country’s past. They won’t agree with me on this part, though: The good stuff in American history is entirely about overcoming those diaper-filling conservatives, literally every single time.
Focus On Actions And Results Over Rote Memorization
Which individuals and groups in America’s past have been most successful at defeating the diaper fillers? What were those groups’ actual ideologies, tactics, and accountability measures? How did they implement the good stuff we think of as “America”?
Committing to memory the names of every leader, remembering the time and location of various battles, obsessing over the latest vocabulary terms, and filling your head with facts and figures and exact quotations is unimportant in 2023. We have Google, so we can fine tune our fact finding without worrying about keeping every bit of pointless minutiae in our heads.
What is important is realizing the results that came from those peoples’ choices.
The abolition movement, for example, worked to end slavery, which culminated in the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Reconstruction Amendments granting citizenship to Black people. How did the abolitionists accomplish those things? What were the moments where they could have failed and how did they overcome those times? What went right for them and what went wrong? What were the things they could control and what bits of luck affected them positively or negatively?
But it’s not just about the abolition of slavery. Whether it’s the various waves of feminism, Civil Rights leaders, or today’s Black Lives Matter and abortion rights and labor activists, history gives us the tools to replicate their successes. It’s up to us to go down that road. It’s also up to us to avoid their mistakes in implementation.
I’ll write more words in support of those and other rights movements in the future, but for today I want to give readers a glimpse at how the original Progressive Era, from roughly the 1880s through World War I, took advantage of the power made possible for ordinary people by the Industrial Revolution. They remade America, set up the next reform era (the New Deal), and granted new rights to millions more people.
Decades Of Agony In Building Power Followed By Rapid Reforms
The Progressive Era was not a pleasant time to be alive. It was not “the good old days.” We should not look on this time with nostalgia.
That’s because, as historian Heather Cox Richardson said in an influential public lecture in 2018, the Gilded Age that overlapped with the Progressive Era meant living under the rule of wealthy oligarchs called the Robber Barons who consolidated power and bought off the leading politicians of the day, in both parties.
This ensured that the wealthiest could do anything they wanted while the masses toiled under starvation wages and dangerous workplaces filled with wondrous new machines creating products humans would have been unable to conceive even a couple decades earlier. This created wealth unseen by even the greatest empires of the past, even though the people creating that wealth didn’t get to enjoy any of it.
Sound familiar?
These conditions created a series of questions asked by the population at large, Richardson said.
“Who gets to have a say in American society?” was a question regularly on the minds of the “waking up” masses. But for the second half of the 1800s, it no longer occupied the minds of any politicians with real power, Richardson said.
By the 1870s, the progressivism of Abraham Lincoln and his Radical Republican allies had largely been swept aside in favor of a GOP that sounds very similar to today’s. They felt they were “done” with trying to improve life in the U.S. after winning the Civil War and passing a few Constitutional Amendments—without enforcing them below the Mason-Dixon line after 1876. They spent this time doing things like hating that New York’s Democratic Machine politicians gave jobs to local people in exchange for votes, even though they gave wealthy businessmen sweetheart oil and rail contracts in the exact same way for the exact same reason.
“By 1872, [the GOP was] absolutely wedded to the idea that the way to protect America is not to guarantee equality of opportunity for everybody—because you can’t trust those laborers out there—but to protect American business,” Richardson said.
This was the first time in American history that the debate over “socialism” and “communism” came into play. If something helped anyone but the richest, it was one of those two automatically bad “ism” words, which politicians in both parties used relentlessly to scare just enough ordinary folks into voting against their own freedoms and safety and upward mobility.
This led to such heinous things as President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, vetoing a bill that would have sent starving Texas farmers seed and other supplies during a brutal drought. A veto means Congress saw fit to provide emergency relief to its constituents. You know, like their job description requires them to do. But because Cleveland was a rich asshole who wanted to impress other rich assholes, he didn’t like it.
Cleveland said, in essence, “Kick rocks, starving people,” and prevented food from getting to them. Simply because he could.
This is because, across American history—and not just in the Trump era—“the cruelty is the point.” The worst elements of America gleefully pursue the harm of the rest of us, precisely because it thrills them to hurt others. They’re sadists. It requires the rest of us to fight back just as gleefully by telling those ogres to fuck off back to their swamps. I’ve made a career out of doing exactly that. It’s fun, I promise.
But, just like the masses during the Progressive Era, you have to choose to join me in that.
So How Did Things Get Better?
The growing labor, feminist, prohibitionist, and other mass movements had built rosters of working class converts across the country in response to those wretched late decades of the 19th century.
But conventions, protests, mutual aid, and unionization can only go so far without allies in the highest rungs of power. Those actions help, but they do not create lasting change without passing public policy that provides material improvements to the lives of the vast majority of the population, and rights guarantees to all. After that, we must remember that passing public policy is worthless without enforcing it.
So things had gone for about 35 or 40 years. These rights and reform movements cultivated relationships with leaders, to be sure, but it took a stroke of “luck” to find the right ally at the right time.
What was lucky for the masses was less lucky for President William McKinley, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet in September 1901, a few months after taking the oath of office for the second time on a lightly progressive platform.
McKinley was not beloved by the working classes, the struggling, those desperate for stability, health, and a chance to do better for themselves, their families, their communities. He and his Republican Party decided the previous year that they could not bank on the votes of the masses to win the White House. They needed to give a little to get a little.
So they settled on Theodore Roosevelt, a famously half-crazed war hero with a thing for sticking up for the little guy, to serve as the party’s vice presidential nominee in 1900, replacing Vice President Garret Hobart, who had died in 1899. Upon winning the November election, Roosevelt figured McKinley had things under control and he could spend his time as vice president basically doing the same thing he had already done for years: Go on safaris and shoot at shit.
Until, of course, McKinley took a dive and Roosevelt had to be recalled to Washington from an adventure to become president.
Richardson, in her 2018 lecture, said that the things that drove Roosevelt as president were “being strong and taking care of your people and producing good citizens.” While he was publicly delicate about his predecessor’s untimely demise, in private Roosevelt was eager to use his newly found power to do big things. “It is a dreadful thing to come into the presidency in this way, but it would be a far worse thing to be morbid about it,” he once wrote.
Roosevelt’s energetic boosterism of America’s working people helped him become one of the most popular presidents during his own terms in office—the people loved him. He is now considered the fourth best chief executive the country’s ever had, according to C-SPAN’s regular poll of historians’ presidential rankings.
Even though he established the National Parks and engaged in multiple rounds of trust busting big business, Roosevelt didn’t accomplish much legislatively. That’s because, despite the reform movements landing a loud and proud ally in the Oval Office, the halls of Congress were a different story.
Fed up with the Legislative Branch, Teddy went to the people directly.
So What Makes Roosevelt Such A Big Deal To The Progressive Era’s Success?
John F. Kowal and Wilfred U. Codrington III, authors of The People’s Constitution: 200 Years, 27 Amendments, and the Promise of a More Perfect Union, have been publicly arguing for years that Constitutional Amendments are not as impossible to enact as they might seem in our current era of gridlock.
In 2021, an excerpt of their book ran in Politico, in the process becoming a piece that has influenced my thinking more than just about anything else in recent years. Their key insight is that these Amendments come in bunches, often all at once, after long periods of political stagnation in American history.
Roosevelt, through his public attacks on big business, those who plunder of the planet, and consolidated power in general, galvanized the populace into taking matters into their own hands rather than rely upon their do-nothing Congressional representation.
“He unleashes these popular forces that have been building since the 1870s that says, ‘no, we are not turning this country over to an oligarchy,’” in the words of the historian Richardson.
What did the American people do with the explicit support of their populist president (and his progressive successor, Woodrow Wilson)? Kowal and Codrington wrote:
Between 1909 and 1920, Progressive Era reformers added four amendments that authorized the income tax, provided for the popular election of senators, launched Prohibition and extended the franchise to women. The spectacular failure of the nationwide liquor ban notwithstanding (the 21st amendment repealed Prohibition in 1933), these amendments established the foundation for the modern U.S. government.
A devastating world war followed immediately. It ended in a bad economic downturn. The recovery from all that put the U.S. on the path to the Roaring Twenties, deregulation of business, and the eventual collapse of the stock market in 1929, causing the Great Depression. The New Deal and the later rights movements of the 1960s and ‘70s would tackle many of the social problems leftover from the Progressives’ own blind spots and the opponents of progressivism’s outright delight in harming their neighbors. None of the things the Progressive Era accomplished for the masses would be “enough” in 2023 terms, nor should we think that they are.
But while the Progressive Era’s leading voices found themselves with an ally in the most powerful seat in the land, they struck. But before that, they knocked on doors for decades. They fought in the streets. They convinced worker after worker, woman after woman, person of color after person of color, to think bigger and to demand more.
It’s on us to do the 21st century version of that.
How Do Today’s Masses Win?
We already are, but the process of winning is not complete. It can still be upended by the bad guys. All those decades of miserable coalition building is reaching its peak right now as the fascists march to take away everyone else’s rights. We’re at a knife’s edge of history. We could choose to beat the fascists, or we can let them take over and violently force us to live every second of our lives the way they deem fit.
Today’s Black Lives Matter, abortion rights, and labor rights activists are some of the leaders of the progressive movement. We landed a surprising ally in the traditionally moderate Joe Biden, who has returned the federal government to actually enforcing labor protection laws for the first time in five decades, invested trillions of dollars in infrastructure and clean energy and healthcare laws that will create millions of jobs for the masses, and has made public appearances in support of unionized workers, those working to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land, and those looking to expand voting rights in an era of mass voter suppression.
None of this is enough. We are owed more. But these are good things that help tens of millions of people live slightly easier lives, and they will be built upon in the years to come to become even better.
But we can’t sit on our heels and expect any of that to just happen. We must make choices to deliver better lives to the American people.
Here are just a few ways to build our second American Progressive Era:
Treat Joe Biden like an employee, not a boss. Write to him here. I do it all the time. I’m not nice. I demand the actual policies I want, from a permanently expanded Child Tax Credit to complete student loan forgiveness.
Vote for him anyway, because his administration and Democrats in Congress will actually respond to your messages with attempts to solve the problems you bring up. Are they good at it all the time? Heavens no. It’s laughable sometimes. But Democrats want to be seen as good people who do a good job. It’s intrinsic to their senses of selves. Use that to get what you, your families, your friends, your coworkers, and your neighbors deserve. If they do a bad job, repeatedly threaten to boot ‘em. Don’t treat them like the good guys because they aren’t. They are hired by us to do a job. If they suck at it or act like they are actually smarter and better than you, see ya.
Ask your members of Congress, whom you can contact here, what they are doing to pass current Constitutional Amendments, like the in-limbo Equal Rights Amendment that would ensure true equality between women, men, and everyone else.
Never vote for the Republican Party.