The ever-harsher domination of the capitalist oligarchy encountered resistance all along the way from the masses. These were divided into three important sections: the agrarian producers, the urban middle classes, and the industrial workers. The currents of protest welling forth from the depths of the people were mostly movements of reform which aimed to curb, control, or reverse the processes of capitalist concentration in economic, political, and cultural life. Outright revolutionary voices were rare, and working-class tendencies bent upon the abolition of capitalism were in their infancy.

The principal large-scale political struggles were waged between the agents of the plutocracy and the representatives of the liberal petty bourgeoisie who headed the plebeian masses. Except in industry itself, the proletariat was as yet a subordinate factor in national affairs. The mainstream of political opposition came from the Populist-Progressive movement, which had its direct social base in the middle-class elements of the country and city. The proletarian currents at various times ran parallel to this mainstream, fed from it, or even emptied themselves into it….

The movement reached the peak of its social energy and political influence in 1896, when its aims ostensibly were adopted by the Democratic Party, and [William Jennings] Bryan led the Progressive hosts in an attempt to dislodge the finance capitalists from power in Washington. After Bryan’s defeat [in the presidential election], the Spanish-American war, and the ensuing prosperity, the Progressive movement died down except in the rural districts. It was revived by the crisis of 1907 and took on several new shapes, culminating in 1912 in Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose crusade and Wilson’s New Freedom.

The entry of the United States into the First World War dealt a mortal blow to the Progressive cause but did not completely dispose of it. After a regional revival in the agrarian Northwest, the movement had a spasmodic national resurgence in the La Follette campaign of 1924, which was a belated response to the consequences of the postwar crisis of 1921. Even then the force of the movement, which had so many decades of struggle behind it and so many hopes deposited with it, was not wholly spent. In his speeches against “the economic royalists,” Franklin D. Roosevelt skillfully exploited Progressive sentiments and traditions to win support for his New Deal. His ex-vice-president, Henry Wallace, aided by the Stalinists, sought in vain to resurrect the corpse of Progressivism as late as 1948.

In all these incarnations, the Progressive movement has been middle class in body and spirit….  
 
A movement for reforms
The Progressives wanted the machinery of the United States government cleansed of its more glaring aristocratic vestiges and its democracy perfected by the introduction of such reforms as the direct election of senators and judges. They sometimes stopped halfway even in the direction of democratizing the state apparatus. They campaigned, for example, to abolish the Supreme Court’s veto power over congressional enactments but upheld the president’s veto power, which is a relic of monarchical rule; they asked for direct election of senators on a state basis, but not the president on a national scale; they did not call for a single instead of a double system of national legislative bodies. Their demands for civil service reform and for cheap, honest, efficient administration even pleased a part of the ruling class which could get along without direct corruption or coercion of their political servitors….

Nevertheless, these reforms did not result in any basic changes in American life or reverse the processes of capitalist centralization and control. In some cases they even produced consequences contrary to those expected or promised. The laws curbing or breaking up the trusts did not halt but rather facilitated the growth of the monopolies. The income tax, which was to make the rich pay more for the costs of running the government, became converted into an engine for extorting the pay of the workers. The various electoral revisions failed to make the system more responsive to the voters’ will; instead of breaking up the party machines, the primaries gave the bosses an additional instrument for handpicking their candidates….

The fundamental reason for the failure of Progressivism lay in the fact that it was progressive only in its incidental features. At bottom it was a retrograde movement which aspired to turn back the wheel of history and reverse the development of modern society. The Progressives longed for a return to the childhood of American capitalism while it was maturing into imperialism. This impotent yearning for an irrecoverable past gave the movement its basically reactionary direction and enveloped it in a utopian atmosphere.

The Progressives demanded greater equality, wider opportunities, peace, the extension of democracy, the sharing and spreading of wealth—all within the boundaries of capitalism. They received in increasing measure more inequality, fewer opportunities for fewer people, wars, the growing concentration of wealth, and political autocracy along with it. These were the natural fruits of monopolist rule launched upon its imperialist phase.  
 
 
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