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 urbanized America.
Little evidence for a modernizing impulse could be found in David M. Wrobel's The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (1993). Wrobel addressed how "frontier anxiety" engendered the concerns of many Progressives, who feared that the closing of the frontier in 1890 would fatally foreclose America's ability to acculturate new immigrants and preserve Jeffersonian liberty. Seen through the lens of frontier anxiety, Progressivism takes on conservative shadings that recall Hofstatder; but where Hofstatder saw Populism and Progressivism as distant relations, Wrobel argued that Populism only added to the general atmosphere of crisis. Frontier anxiety, Wrobel argued, was woven into the cultural discourse of the era; he found evidence for it in newspapers, political speeches and public presentations dating back to 1870. Thus, many reforms we associate with Progressivespublic education, settlement houses, housing and urban development, land conservation, and so forthmay be understood as alternative ways to reckon with the social ills that the frontier had formerly mitigated.
All of the motivating factors Hofstatder, Wiebe and Wrobel had identified as giving rise to Progressivismand many morecame into play in Steven J. Diner's A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (1998). Indeed, Diner rejected the idea that there was any such thing as a Progressive movement, positing instead that Progressivism was a catch-all term whose definition changed depending upon which so-called Progressives were under consideration. Mugwumps, for instance, may indeed have been motivated by status, while others may have been more concerned with social order or the disappearance of the frontier. Taking each group on its own terms, from white-collar professionals to newly-urbanized African-Americans to immigrants, Diner contended that individuals adopted specific Progressive positions based on their own self-interest, and that there was never a unified Progressive agenda. His survey approach to the period allowed Diner to sidestep many of the historical problems with which the other three historians had wrestled, but in the process he brought the lived experience of average Americans during this period to the fore in a way the earlier historians had not done.
As the historiography demonstrates, there is no one way to approach a period as complex, contradictory and chaotic as the Progressive Era. Depending upon which groups or social trends or intellectual currents the historian chooses to emphasize, a very different view of Progressivism may emerge. Yet there may be value in an effort to step outside the traditional historical debates and attempt to understand these multiple Progressivisms in full; Diner's textbook notwithstanding, such a study has yet to be written.