A little over thirty years ago at the invitation of Stanley Kutler at Reviews in American History, I spent a summer trying to puzzle through the historiography surrounding Progressive Era society and politics. “In Search of Progressivism” the result was titled, and it has had a much longer life than most historiographical pieces of that sort do. Many excellent historiographical treatments of the Progressive Era have been published since that essay's appearance in 1982, along with a huge amount of historical writing. The field has burgeoned in ways that were barely visible thirty years ago. And yet the essay endures, and from time to time I think of revisiting and revising it.Footnote ¹

If I were to do so, the most important change to note would be the exhaustion of the idea that historians could find a singular impulse behind the reform movements of the Progressive Era. The quest to locate a unitary “progressivism” has given way to recognition of multiplicity. Those whom we call progressives worked within shifting, tension-filled alliances, held together by a sense of affinity far more than agreement on any bedrock principle. From time to time, the modal progressive personality that Richard Hofstadter tried to pin down years ago has reappeared: yearning for moral and social control (as Michael McGerr would have it) or for regeneration and rebirth (in Jackson Lears's formulation). But for the most part the search for singularity has been called off.Footnote ² The term “progressivism” hangs on as a kind of vestigial shorthand, but almost no one now thinks that diagraming the logic of this “ism” is the place to begin. A new plurality of goals and undertakings frames modern readings of Progressive Era politics and culture, and that is a good thing.

A much greater diversity of persons occupy those coalitions in modern accounts as well, and that, too, is a good thing. Historians are now much more attentive to questions of race: to the ways in which white progressives enlisted in the period's intensifying forces of racial exclusion, but also to the ways in which African American elites often used the distinctive forms of progressive politics and social action to resist. There is vastly more attention to women's social and political action in modern accounts of the Progressive Era than there was in Richard Hofstadter's or Robert Wiebe's day. In index mentions, Jane Addams ranks at the top or near-top in most standard accounts, and it is with her social feminism, rather than with the careers of a Theodore Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, or Woodrow Wilson, that a reader's introduction to the era now often begins. There are global travelers in modern historians' account of progressive political alliances. There are imperialists. There are immigrant political bosses and politically powerful farmers' lobbies in addition to the corporate managers, social scientists, status-anxious members of the middle class, and bohemian cultural radicals who had always been there.

I will leave it to others in this forum to consider how these new readings of the era's reform coalitions have changed our understanding of the ways in which the structures and aspirations for democratic politics were reconstituted in these years—except to say that they have made the binary opposition between a unitary people's will and the work of the engineers of social control seem much less compelling than it once did. I want to concentrate, instead, on the first term in this forum's title: capitalism.

For to write about Progressive Era politics in the 1980s was to begin with capitalism. The most powerful interpretation of the day began with the profound restructuring of the economy in the wake of the 1890s depression; the rise of new forms of industrial and finance capitalism; and the ways in which their needs for stability, predictability, and efficiency recast everything around them. The “search for order,” in Robert Wiebe's massively influential phrase, was said to flow from a professional-bureaucratic class that was eager to shape society to its new ambitions, from the “distended” state of late nineteenth-century American society, and from the dynamics of “modernization” itself. But nowhere were the concepts of rationality, efficiency, and order put to work on as large a scale as in the new, aggressively modernizing, national business corporations. The brief, angry outcry against the trusts, James Weinstein, Gabriel Kolko, and others argued, missed the main event of the era. In the wake of the 1890s reorganization of the economy, the needs of corporate capitalism slipped into the driver's seat, to stay there, despite their partial setback in the 1930s, for the rest of the century.Footnote ³

This intense focus on political economy has faded from contemporary historical writing on the Progressive Era. A chapter on the trusts and antitrust policies is obligatory, to be sure, although few modern accounts now begin there. Conflicts between labor and capital still have an important place, though less prominent now than a generation ago when labor history was at its height. The everyday economic and social lives of early twentieth-century Americans have been intensively studied. New histories of consumption, risk, and failure have been written. But the relationship between progressive social reform and capitalism is no longer the central analytical question now.

This is not all loss. The terms within which an earlier generation had tried to capture that relationship—the triumph of “corporate liberalism,” the “organizational synthesis,” the emergence of the “corporate state”—were too monolithic, often as overextended as the phenomenon, “progressivism,” they undertook to explain. But the recession of political economy from the historiographical center has left historians without an adequate way of thinking about the relationship between those who called themselves progressives and the capitalist economy that they both embraced and tried to reform.

Part of the analytical challenge in exploring that relationship is that our modern term “capitalism” was not central to the social language of the Progressive Era itself. Grafting “ism” to the root word “capital” was the work of socialists in the early twentieth century. It was not yet core to the broader vocabulary of modernity or a hinge point of general debate. Look up the books published in the United States with the term “capitalism” in their titles, setting to the side books by socialist authors or published by the radical press, and prior to 1920 there are astonishingly few. Search the presidential speeches and writings of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and you will find references to the “capitalist” as a figure in the economy; but “capitalism” and the “capitalist system” cannot be found at all.Footnote ⁴ The issue is not simply one of linguistic politics. The intricately related economic phenomena that historians lump together as the capitalist transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were experienced by contemporaries not as wholes but parts. They arrived along distinctly different tracks, moving at different speeds, and leaving different marks on preexisting economic relations.

The most startling of those transformations was the advance of new forms of business organization: corporate giants, sprawling across state lines, commanding unprecedented power and resources; and organizing labor, capital, and production on a massive scale. The shift toward larger and more complex forms of business enterprise was not wholly as new as many of the antitrust reformers imagined it to be. The railroad corporations that had stretched their net across the continent in the wake of the Civil War had forecast the economic organizations to come. But the giant scale of the mergers and trusts put together after the depression of the 1890s, the highly visible hand of finance capitalists in their construction, and the shock they posed to the system of partner-owned ventures that had dominated the nineteenth-century economy, all pressed hard on Progressive Era Americans' experience and imagination.

The second consequence of the era's capitalist transformations was a restructuring of class relations. Shock of encounter with the urban and industrial economy's new forms of inequality sometimes led contemporaries to exaggerate the novelty of class divisions in American life. Lights-and-shadows contrasts between the cities' superrich and abject poor had been a set piece of social reporting since the middle years of the nineteenth century. But a sense of widening inequality and rising class tensions, of a nation riven into distinct social nations and braced for a new kind of inner civil war, accelerated sharply in the progressive years. The uprising of the labor unions gave the new class relations flesh and politics. The new descriptive sociology of the early twentieth century gave them data and substance. To think of themselves as standing over a widening abyss between the masses and the few sank deep into many progressives' imaginations and shaped their social-economic ambitions and projects.

The third way in which capitalism transformed society was in the commodification of more and more facets of life. The “consumer revolution” of the early twentieth century, as historians have learned to describe it, brought vastly more goods into use and circulation. But just as importantly, those same underlying processes brought more and more realms of life and labor into the price system. More and more spheres of action, as Clifford Odets was later to protest, became “printed on dollar bills.”Footnote ⁵ Here the economic transformations of the early twentieth century had their deepest precedents and moved most glacially of all. But to anyone who could remember older, more personalized economic relationships of patronage, family, or locality, the cumulative impact was striking.

By capitalism, in short, we can mean (a) a distinctive organizational form of economic action, (b) a structure of inequalities and wealth distribution, or (c) a shift toward price and commodification across more and more aspects of everyday life. Where did most of those within the shifting progressive coalitions of action and reform stand with regard to each of these?

The experience that still dominates our standard historical narratives, the shock of economic consolidation and the emergence of the share corporation as the dominate template for economic organization, was, I think, the one with which the progressives made their peace most easily. The efficiencies associated with the new scale of corporate organization captivated many of them. So did a sense of the corporate economy's modernity and eagerness for the consumer goods that began to pour out of it. The corporate giants had their critics. Angry small businessmen saw their opportunities gobbled up by distant corporations. Radicals and trust-busters feared the economic and political power that inhered in the new scale of capital and enterprise. But for all the short-lived furor that trust-creation and trust-busting could generate, the corporation's critics made very little headway. By the 1930s the idea of a public service corporation organized to do the people's work, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, even the dream of reorganizing the whole economy on the model of efficient corporate action, as in the National Recovery Administration, had caught the imagination of many on the left. Antitrust efforts persisted in fits and starts. But efforts to mitigate the one-share, one-vote rule that quickly made investors' money hegemonic in the United States, or to open seats on corporation boards to public or labor representatives, were, in contrast to corporate governance policies elsewhere, extremely weak in the United States.Footnote ⁶

On the rising inequalities of the era, progressives pushed back more strongly. They campaigned aggressively for the taxation of large inheritances, not merely as a revenue generator but as a moral crusade. They laid down the theoretical foundations for progressive income taxation. The fought to establish minimum wage legislation, even if they found it hard to get the principle past the courts in any but limited and highly gendered ways. They pioneered in the creation of institutions to stabilize employer-employee relationships and mediate industrial conflict. Those who called themselves progressives lived in a world of sharply delimited social classes. There is very little evidence that they wanted to overthrow the structure of class relations. But they were the inventors of our modern tools for softening its harshest consequences and setting some effective brakes on rising inequality.

It is in respect to commodification of the spheres of social action, however, that the progressives figure most importantly of all. They worked piecemeal, without much theoretical coordination, but they proved to be ingenious and resourceful architects of decommodification across a very broad terrain. Some of their projects looked to the expansion of public goods, rationed by something other than straight price. Public forests and conservation lands, national parks and public playgrounds, much more extensive municipal services, comprehensive public schools where access was a citizenry's entitlement: in each of these areas progressives pushed back against private markets to expand significantly the stock of public goods. A second set of projects pushed back against the commodification of labor to set sharp new limits on the permissible sphere of private wage contracts. Progressives fought to ensure that employers could not, even by adding a bit more pay, require an employee to work inhumanly long hours or under excessively dangerous conditions, nor entice children into premature labor. Third, progressives pushed to narrow the ways in which private property could be sold, by setting public limits on what could be offered as housing, or sold as food, or marketed as medicine.

Decommodification, the term that Gøsta Esping-Andersen proposed for these and similar projects years ago, is an ungainly word, which has not yet found much traction among historians of the progressive years.Footnote ⁷ But it is a more revealing analytical term than “regulation,” which too often disguises the private interests that state regulatory legislation may be designed to promote. And the term fits the Progressive Era more precisely. At no other time in the history of the United States—barring the abolition of slavery and wholesale destruction of slaveholders' property—has there been a comparable movement to extract so many things from the nexus of sale. The result was not to radically alter capitalism, as the progressives' socialist rivals wanted, but to bound the realm of price and commerce more tightly.

Does a schema of this sort, a sharpening of our understanding of the varied impact of the capitalist transformations of the early twentieth century, offer anything besides a redescription of phases of progressive action that we already know? I think it does. For stretch these histories forward, past the New Deal and into our own time, and these three threads unspool in very distinctive patterns.

Acceptance of the corporation as the dominant, inevitable form of modern economic life has barely changed across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Occasionally feared and in rare cases broken apart, often intricately regulated but not often effectively controlled, the joint-stock corporation has become accepted and normalized. Investor capitalism not only rules but is lauded as the new democracy. The syndicalists and cooperative movement advocates who once imagined radically different modes of economic organization have almost completely fallen away. If to criticize capitalism means to imagine challenge to its current corporate form, there is barely any significant dissent from capitalism at all in contemporary America.

If one follows the second of these themes, the acceptable limits of wealth concentration, however, the pattern is quite different. The modest measures toward greater wealth and income equalization that were made in the progressive years were dramatically accelerated in the New Deal years and the Second World War. They culminated in a truly important attack on the sources of poverty in the 1960s. And then came retreat. The key policy inventions of the Progressive Era—inheritance taxation, progressive income taxation, and minimum wage legislation—have been subject to increasingly powerful political and theoretical attack. The mid-twentieth-century project of stabilizing labor relations through management-union cooperation has given way to a political attack on unionization reminiscent of the 1890s. Income and wealth inequalities have grown relentlessly since the mid-1970s until by many measures they approximate the wealth concentrations that prevailed when the Progressive Era began. The brief flare-up that was the Occupy Wall Street movement notwithstanding, there seems little in sight that is likely to reverse the pattern.

Finally, if decommodification was the most important thread in the progressives' social politics, it has all but unraveled in the last forty years. Price-incentive models of human behavior experienced a dramatic resurgence in the policy schools and political think tanks. The “market” was increasingly valorized as the arena of choice and freedom. Pressure to privatize public goods and voucherize public services is a hallmark of our times. These trends would have astonished and distressed most progressives. They distrusted price as the central arbiter of human relations. They wanted to decrease the range across which market relations dominated. We have conspired to expand them.Footnote ⁸

Their efforts to bring some of the economic forces sweeping through early twentieth-century society under more conscious control did not make the progressives either critics or boosters of “capitalism.” The term is too blunt for our purposes. To ask if they would have given a yes or no to capitalism is to ask a question that only gets in our way, like the false choice between forward and backward looking that haunted Populist historiography so long. For the Progressive Era, historians need something sharper, more closely related to experience, and more readily comparable across time. Without it we are in danger of letting the progressives' economic ideas and ambitions vanish from what we remember and should still value about them.