Progressivism In America

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“The Progressive era in the broadest sense was an attempt to regain the old values or construct new ones” (9). In the case of Progressivism in the U.S., one can say it was due to the rapid industrialization of a nation on which most of industrialized Europe frowned. At the end of the Nineteenth century, the world moved from a sense of community to a view of a nation as a large and fairly anonymous society. It was a time, world-wide, where the individual mattered far less than society- and the company or corporation- as a whole. Just as this last election in 2004 seemed to revolve, in part, on the subject of “values”, so McElvaine points out (9) that this turned into a fairy united attempt to reestablish values in the U.S.- a sort of united …show more content…
In other words, the Progressivism that McElvaine describes was not something from the bottom up, but a sort of trickle-down attempt to reestablish what the middle and upper classes considered worthwhile American values. “Thus, while Progressivism had important working class, farmer, and corporate components, its dominant form represented a ‘cautious uprising of the better classes’” (9). It would be fair, therefore, to assume that Progressivism was not a labor or management issue, but a moral one. McElvaine differentiates between Populism “a reform dictated by empty stomachs” (10) and Progressivism, “a reform movement guided by the mind and the heart” …show more content…
It seems that it reached its peak during World War I, when President Wilson entered the war because it seemed the “right thing” to do. It was, perhaps the very first time that the U.S. fought a war (or took sides) for moral reasons. If nothing else, then, Progressivism turned America into a Moral guardian, a sort of altruistic policeman, which exists to this very day in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. What McElvaine considers a rationale for entering the war is to defend progressive values: “It tied the war so tightly to progressive values that, if people became disillusioned with the war, they could also lose faith in reform” (10). The first World War turned out to be “the end of American innocence” (11). It also planted the seeds for what was to come, serious economic and social
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