Rush Limbaugh ponders a Trump debate against Pete Buttigieg: 'What's gonna happen there?'

Those who suffered from "open sewers" and unsanitary living conditions were isolated and already transitioning away from such conditions.

People were moving up and out, but just as many were moving in, coming mostly from overseas.

Your take is that America "had to change" in order to meet these challenges. My take is that America deals with these challenges innately and that "reform" merely exacerbates the problems, as we've seen across the 20th century.

What made that era different from today was the fear of revolution and the fear of epidemics. The feeling was that working class concerns had to be addressed or the poor would turn violently on the rich, and that poverty and squalor had to be dealt with or else crime and disease would overflow into the wealthier communities. The other thing that distinguished that era was the country's great energy and hunger for idealism. People were inclined to put that energy into government efforts to deal with "social problems." They didn't see the downside of big government yet.

And that's my problem w/ TR and the progressives. The headrush of reform was unnecessary, the problems exaggerated, existing structures adequately met the needs of the people, and the solutions were more dangerous than the problems addressed.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, just that I understand why things happened as they did. Also, how much of the "headrush" was real and how much was just rhetoric and symbolism? One could rationally have expected food and drug regulation, some trust-busting, tariff reform, primary elections. To what extent was the feeling of great change reflected in actual policy and to what extent was it a emotional jolt that people enjoyed?

What made that era different from today was the fear of revolution and the fear of epidemics.

This triggers a thought about our historical understanding of the period. It seems to me that historians focus too much on periodicals and books that hyped the fears of the day, our famous muckrakers, but which circulated amongst a small audience.

In my research of the 1907-1913 period, I read the NYTimes editions from every day (literally) and surveyed the Washington Star across the same. I also surveyed many of the major progressive periodicals, such as McClures, American Magazine, Collier's Pearson's and Scribner's, among others, as well as some of the more mainstream publications such as Munsey's or the Saturday Evening Post.

McClure's circulation peaked at approx 375k following the Tarbell stories on Std Oil, which seems pretty high, but compared with dailies, was nothing, as they were running those types of numbers daily. The NY Sun or the NY World were the more likely indicators of public sentiment, but I went w/ the Times becuase of its larger national and less sensationalist perspective. So I believe I got a more balanced view of popular opinion from the Times, ultimately.

In my direct reading of the period, the outrage of the period that so occupies Progressive Era 101 was absent. Issues came and went, but Americans were not obsessed with "reform" as our historians would have it. The daily news was decidedly middle class and tuned to it more than to elites who read McClures. There were regular stories of outrages, such as a series I particularly enjoyed on the "Bonnet Gang," an anarchist gang that robbed and shot up cops in Paris (like the Hole in the Wall Gang) that dominated the news cycle for a few months in 1912, but it was ultimately entertainment and not panic itself.

Of course the muckrakers and yellow journalists impacted the politics, but I just don't see it as defining of politics the way you do. The MSM of the day far more spoke to the rising middle class than to tenements, disease, and anarchists.

In my direct reading of the period, the outrage of the period that so occupies Progressive Era 101 was absent. Issues came and went, but Americans were not obsessed with "reform" as our historians would have it.

True. The 1912 election is a centerpiece in history classes, but while the total number of votes increased from 1908, the percentage of voter turnout actually went down. If the statistics are right, a higher percentage of the population even turned out in 1904.

Of course the muckrakers and yellow journalists impacted the politics, but I just don't see it as defining of politics the way you do. The MSM of the day far more spoke to the rising middle class than to tenements, disease, and anarchists.

Certainly the prestige press like the Times wrote for the middle class, not for tenement dwellers and anarchists, but the situation may have been like today's: the people who really influence politics are elites and activists and those who are intensely interested in things that the general public isn't. I'm definitely no expert on the period, but my understanding is that leaders like Roosevelt and Wilson and intellectuals like Brooks Adams were very much captured by visions of ancient Rome and the French Revolution - plutocracy, decadence and anarchy.

To anxious patricians and professors, add the many religious believers inspired by the social gospel, and young intellectuals and social workers. Add to that the many businessmen who were somehow taken with TR's progressive movement. It wasn't a mass movement of the people who put Roosevelt and then Wilson in the White House, but once there, they were able to act on what they and others had been thinking and talking about.

I suspect people voted for Roosevelt and Wilson just because they considered them to be the rightful Republican and Democrat nominees (even when TR was running as a Progressive), but I have to wonder about the "drip-drip-drip" effect. People weren't crying out for reform, but if they heard about the Bradley Martin's decadent ball, or the Jungle or The Shame of the Cities or the Triangle Shirtwaist fire it might have made them more favorable to notions of reform. Not "the people," but enough people to affect the thinking of the day.

In my research of the 1907-1913 period, I read the NYTimes editions from every day (literally) and surveyed the Washington Star across the same. I also surveyed many of the major progressive periodicals, such as McClures, American Magazine, Collier's Pearson's and Scribner's, among others, as well as some of the more mainstream publications such as Munsey's or the Saturday Evening Post.

That is very commendable. Keep us informed as your work progresses.

No doubt the progressive extremes believed in their crusades. For Wilson, it was all just a continuation of their thrice-losing candidate, WJ Bryan, only Wilson got lucky w/ the TR-Taft split. So the Democratic agenda was aligned with that of the progressives, certainly, and there’s a good chunk of the electorate. Yes, it was there, but it was not the dominant perspective, as seen by the prior elections going back to Cleveland (not a radical). The progressive age was a moment, not an enduring movement that without FDR’s depression would be but an ongoing leftist sideshow, with many components enacted into law but without the pervasive leftism. Taft’s take on the incoming Wilson presidency was dead on: “I hope he doesn’t try to out-Herod Herod.” Oh, well.

As for TR, I get that he bought in to his own rhetoric, but he did so like a used car salesman, not a true believer. He saw political opportunity and seized it, knowing that his one chance was to hype the outrage and scare voters to his side. Roosevelt’s core problem was that he had to destroy Lafollette in order to advance the Bull Moose, which he did it by outrunning Lafollette to the left. At every opportunity he scaled up the outrage, something you can track in his rhetoric from 1910 at Osawotomie onward to 1912, which ended with his ludicrous “Armageddon” speech.

TR knew it, too. After the 1912 election, he wrote to Pinchot (a useful idiot), “Perhaps we keyed our note very high, probably too high” and admitted that voters weren’t convinced that progressives “were not engaged in an assault on property, or in wild and foolish radicalism.”

Perhaps there’s something to admire in TR’s political gaming, but I don’t see it. I see it more like another entirely cynical, self-serving politician, Bill Clinton. (And, yes, I did just compare TR to Clinton.)

Btw, glad you mentioned The Jungle and Triangle Shirtwaist Fire. I’m not as familiar with reactions to Bradley Martin’s ball or The Shame of the Cities, but I do know that the public reaction to The Jungle and the fire was not aligned with progressivism as much as straight reactionary fear.

The Jungle scared the white middle class because they were horrified at the idea that a black man had fallen into and had been chopped up in their food supply (a scene included in the periodical but not the published version, and one deliberately designed to provoke outrage) and the overriding concern for the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was to put municipal limits on the height of buildings, not labor reform. Only Washington DC (Philly was slow to rescind it) has maintained height restrictions that were placed on buildings in cities across the nation following the fire.

As always, our leftists historians read too much into their own validations and confirmation bias and miss these larger contemporaneous meanings.

Your thoughts are, as ever, very much appreciated, btw.

From my last post:

The Jungle scared the white middle class because they were horrified at the idea that a black man had fallen into and had been chopped up in their food supply (a scene included in the periodical but not the published version, and one deliberately designed to provoke outrage)

Thanks to PA for asking for that reference, and I stand corrected. It was not directly stated in the text, and whether implied by the work or not, it was taken that way by the larger media/society. My recollection is from a scholar of Richard Harding Davis who told that to me. It is my incorrect recollection that it came from the serial publication (more likely from the Davis papers but now I don't know), and I apologize for getting that wrong. I trust this scholar, and it conforms with my understanding of the period.

The Jungle has two passages that mention workers falling into vats. The first is in Chapter 9, and it got/gets the most attention:

These people could not be shown to the visitor,—for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,—sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard!

The other mention is in Chapter 12:

… sometimes they would say that when a man had been killed; it was the easiest way out of it for all concerned. When, for instance, a man had fallen into one of the rendering tanks and had been made into pure leaf lard and peerless fertilizer, there was no use letting the fact out and making his family unhappy.

The serial publication, which appeared in, "Appeal to Reason" magazine, a socialist rag, is longer but not substantially different from the book as printed in 1906. The main difference is that the serial is more wordy and more maudlin (if that were possible). One omission that comes to mind is reference in Chapter 9 to the slaughterhouses shipping higher quality meat to France and Germany that was not included in the book form. Sinclair testified to this claim in subsequent press/hearings but it was not in the book. I don't know why. Another change is the names of the meat packing company and owner and Chicago politicians. I don't know the particulars other than to assume that the book publisher wanted to avoid law suits.

In that Sinclair wrote that blacks and eastern European immigrants (not then considered "white") worked in the slaughterhouses / meat packing factories and, worse, worked as striker breakers, people assumed that they were also among those who fell into vats of lard. Here for a couple press mentions expressing those fears:

Fell Into Vat of Boiling Water
Walter K Jones, a negro... fell into a vat of boiling wtare at the Swift & Co. packing house. (Washington Post, 1906-04-14)

Sinclair Gives Proof of Meat Trust Frauds
[subheading] Found a Child's Finger ...from a letter by a Brooklyn man, under date of May 10: "An acquaintance of ours... found, perhaps three years or so ago, the little finger of a child in a can of corned beef... I can see that such occurrences might be numerous and that (while nothing could seem more horrible) even more unexpected ingredients are now and then if not continually mixed with the prepared food sent out from Packingtown." (NY Times, 1906-05-28)

Report on Meat Converts Cannon
[workmen] are mostly ignorant foreigners or negros who have on knowledge of the sanitary requirements... some of them are suffering form tuberculosis. In these packing houses the meat is dragged about on the floors, spat upon, and walked upon. (NY Times, 1906-05-28)

Neill's Aides Talk: He Must Report Now
This witness also told the Commissioners that he knew of a case in which two members of the same family had fallen into the lard vats and been partially rendered into lard …. There is not telling how many men meet death in this way. There was a case.. in which a man fell into a tank, and the room was closed while remnants -mostly bones-were fished out.(NY Times, 1906-05-29)

Neill's Meat Report Coming in Sections"
The specific stories of using the skimmings from Bubbly Creek, of the mixing and grinding of the boiled remains of a stockyard employe [sic] who fell into a vat..." (NY Times, 1906-06-02)

I'm certain that there are many more references to this part of the Sinclair story, and these few here are from a quick search in NYT/ WP database. To really know what was going on, I'd want to dig into the ongoing news cycle from May to July 1906. Federal investigations found no evidence of workers actually falling into the vats, but the story served its purpose and provoked the President and Congress into responding w/ the Pure Food and Meat Inspection acts.

Sinclair enjoyed his notoriety, but the next time he hit the national news was in 1907 when his socialist utopia, the "Helicon Home Colony" failed.

Thanks for your note, ProgressingAmerica, I hope this satisfies your question.

It's been a most interesting and enlightening discussion to see evolve, I wish I was in a place to be involved with more of these. There is one comment, however, that I cannot let go.

"arguments against Progressivism should be recognized as mostly historical and cannot soundly be the basis for current political action or constitutional challenge."

This comment was aimed at "old progressivism" of 100+ years ago. I regard sentiments such as this not just reckless but outright deadly. And a lot of people think this, which is why it captures my attention so directly.

Every answer we need to significantly push back against these people lies in the books and speeches and actions they took a century ago. Progressives today lie. But back then, they were honest. At least honest enough to leave very little doubt.

All of the doors and also all of the keys are within the years basically 1900 to 1920. That's where all of the bodies are buried, and where all of the skeletons in the closet are at. If you're just going to brush it off as "historical" or "somehow irrelevant" then you've handed progressives a victory they do not deserve and have not earned. What we really need to do is pick up those keys, and unlock those doors. It's to our advantage.

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