Could democratic government solve, or even effectively address, the problems of a modern society? For decades, this question vexed Progressive reformers as they navigated the transformation of the United States from a country of small farms and rural communities to a nation of factories, corporations, and cities. Before the Civil War, Americans never doubted that they governed themselves and controlled their own lives. The mechanisms and practices of local democracy, such as the town meeting, enabled them to safeguard and exercise the prerogatives of self-government. Although they remembered the past as more tranquil and carefree than it was, the circumstances that crowded growing numbers of Americans into cities at the end of the century, and compelled them to mingle with an assortment of immigrants, severed them from their agrarian roots and isolated them in mind, body, and spirit. The urban political machines, which came to dominate so many immigrant neighborhoods, lacked authority among migrants from the American hinterland. To make matters worse, or at least to make them more complicated, corrupt party bosses eroded confidence in local government as the bastion of freedom and independence. As a consequence, efforts to expand democracy soon gave way to a movement focused on preserving it.
Some Progressives tried to reinvigorate a democratic politics by espousing the initiative, referendum, and recall, adopting the secret ballot, promoting the direct election of senators, and effecting civil service reform, all of which were designed to take power from party regulars and return it to the people. Acknowledging the revolutionary changes that had taken place in American society, others proved more willing to embrace radical solutions. They appealed to the federal government to eliminate, or at a minimum to diminish, the corruption rampant in local politics. Government oversight, they argued, promised a uniformity of national rules and standards that would ensure economic progress without incurring the social upheaval that had so often attended it. For there was also among the Progressives a rising awareness of the unequal distribution of wealth and resources on which they believed depended economic opportunity and social advancement for all. Only the federal government had the means to redress conditions that the Progressives had come to regard as dishonest and unjust.
Most Americans, by contrast, disdained the prospect of the national government exercising immense powers. The reasons for the gradual erosion of this preference for limited government are integral to understanding the history of the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Originally undertaken to cleanse municipal and state government, Progressivism in comparatively few years broadened its mission into a crusade to redeem the nation. The Progressives combined evangelical fervor with realistic proposals, trusting that God had uniquely favored the United States and that divine guidance would enable them to lead the American people to the Promised Land.
In a speech delivered at Osawatomie, Kansas on August 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt conveyed the religious enthusiasm that animated the Progressive coalition, while at the same time identifying a new role for the national government....