by Stephen Fife-Adams

Created on: December 22, 2006   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

The historiography of American Progressivism is notable for the fact that historians have had difficulty agreeing on whom the Progressives were, what they believed in, and whether they truly constituted an identifiable movement. Clearly there were growing reform efforts in urban centers during the late 1890s and first decade of the Twentieth Century, culminating in the election of 1912, in which all three candidates claimed to be Progressives, with Theodore Roosevelt founding the Progressive (Bull Moose) Party. Yet the motives and intentions of self-proclaimed Progressives prove difficult to pin down, to the point that in recent years some historians have concluded that the term is largely meaningless.

Richard Hofstadter, in his overwhelmingly influential The Age of Reform (1955), cast the mold that later historians would attempt to shatter. Hofstadter saw Progressivism as a heterogeneous but purposeful movement with a cohesive center made largely of the iconoclastic Republicans known as Mugwumps. The reforms advocated by these core Progressives were, in Hofstadter's view, an essentially conservative reaction to the economic upheaval of the period, an attempt to restore traditional American values such as self-sufficiency and personal virtue; in this regard, he cast them as the urban fraternal twins of the agricultural Populists. The key concept in Hofstadter's analysis was status: the leading Progressives, by and large, represented the older families of Boston, New York and Philadelphia who had lost social standing to the nouveau riche Carnegies, Rockefellers and Morgans; Progressivism, then, was this class's attempt to regain status.

Robert H. Wiebe, writing a decade later, revised and partially refuted Hofstadter's thesis in a book whose title said it all: The Search for Order: 1877-1920 (1967). Wiebe's central argument was that Progressivism represented a widespread effort by the rising middle class to bring order to what they perceived as social chaos wrought by the rapid and radical shift from a predominantly agricultural society to one that was largely industrial and urban. Wiebe's emphasis on middle class social dislocation shifted the focus away from the Mugwumps, who were simply a special and somewhat unrepresentative case of a broader insecurity. Far from a conservative, backward-looking movement, Wiebe's Progressivism represented the active construction of a forward-looking social order that would give people a sense of place and purpose in the newly

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