[x]

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?

[nicollo]

William Allen White pondered your question in his autobiography (1946), concluding:

"Yet we Bull Moosers … were fat and saucy in our attack upon aggrandized capital, were almost alone in our charge upon the citadel of privilege … the whole cause and justification of our attack upon the established order was paling. And the injustices of the distributive system were being corrected, not by laws but by speeding up the wheels of industry in the United States and to an extent around the world…. In our own country a new element had come into the industrial and commercial picture. The automobile age had arrived. Ford’s assembly belt was turning out Model T’s. A kind of democracy was coming into the world and not through the ballot box, not by marching cohorts in the streets carrying banners, not even out of Congress nor its laws. The thing which was changing our world was the democratization of transportation."

(apologies for the cuts in text, I don't have the full copy in front of me, but it doesn't change the meaning)

[nicollo]

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.