I get a kick out of those things. In terms of its press, the progressive era can be seen as one of the best con jobs in American history. Cosmopolitan, I believe, was one of the biggest rag sheets. It's fun to go from those types of articles to, say, the American Review of Reviews. It's like switching channels from Geraldo to Jim Lehrer.
People don't realized the power of the press back then. It was tv, radio, & newspapers combined. It's difficult for a modern to appreciate the power of Hearst and Pulitzer, much less guys like Albert Shaw, Frank Munsey, and Henry Watterson who could just put forth whatever they wanted to a begging audience. Taft was taken down by the press (I have an article in a modern advertising journal that discusses his "failure of publicity"). The lead attorney in the Glavis affair, Louis Brandeis, was paid by Colliers Magazine upwards $30K, I think. Taft also got into huge trouble when he tried to bring the Postal Service into budget. It was bleeding red from 2nd class subsidies. It'd be like the FCC, back in pre-cable days, telling the networks they'd have to actually pay for their franchise... Taft needed to make up about 100mil annually. Didn't go over well, and the press that so loved to protect the consumer didn't blush when it demanded that 1st class mail consumers pay for its bills.
Senator Aldrich was the left's whipping boy back then. Historians have generally fallen in line. He was a machine politician, he was all-powerful, but he was not dishonest. Like a good politician, he left that to others... But he never, ever, traded politics for money, as David Graham Phillips chargeds in that article. Phillips didn't need any proof: just use the vile words "Wall Street" and "Interests," and that was that.
I shouldn't have used your word "apportionment," when I replied above. I ought have said "home rule" and stuck to the population shift. I don't know how apportionment went, although I do know that the 1910 census changed much.
I'm more familiar with what went on in Ohio around the time, and I think that legislative control of localities was as pernicious as slanted districting (always was & will be politics). Home rule was a reform to keep rural-dominated legislatures from controlling localities, through what was called "ripper legislation" that limited or restricted or gave franchise elsewhere. As far as apportionment went, remember that it was in this period that the population was making its swing from more than to less than half rural. The balance was tricky, and the realization of the swing trickier.
You are correct about how the movement started with the populists and got kicked in by the urban progressives. I don't know, however, that there really is any distinction between the old and the new corruption. It just morphs into something new, like Peter Angelos parading Cal Ripkin through Annapolis on the eve of a State vote on Angelos' billion dollar cut of the tobaccco deal. I don't know how my local rep voted on that.
Remember that the 17th has not just severed the voter from the State legislature, it has cut those same ties between the Congressional representative and the State legislature.
You wrote,
But the nation had already prevailed over the states in people's minds so there wasn't much chance of the state legislatures retaining power over the voters of the various states. The removal of the state legislatures from Senate elections may have been more an effect than a cause.Don't forget "direct democracy." It was a concerted, very well-financed and well-directed movement. The people didn't support it because they thought it would enlarge the federal government. They supported it because they had been convinced that it would clean up politics. Check out the Roosevelt rhetoric -- he was convinced that direct democracy would "moralize" the nation.
New Nationalism
Charter of Democracy
Odd, and very naive.
The muckrakers didn't know much about economics or the Constitution, but they were experts at agitation and propaganda. The totalitarians of the 20th Century learnt much from the yellow journalists of the turn of the century. It was probably the novelty of journalism to many readers, and the changes society was going through that made the impression the muckrakers left on the coutnry so great. And how do you tell people in an age of yellow journalism and growing democratic/majoritarian sentiment that they are better off not having a direct voice in electing their Senators? Lloyd George in Britain was conducting his campaign to limit the powers of the House of Lords at the same time as the campaign for direct election.
The first resolution for direct election of Senators was introduced in 1826. Over the next 85 years there were 197 such resolutions. Starting in 1893 the House started passing them with the necessary 2/3 vote. The Populists supported direct election from 1892, the Democrats from 1900, the Prohibitionists from 1904. Hearst himself submitted such a resolution in 1905 when he was a Congressman, and his publications supported his cause. When the Democrats won big in 1910 and bigger in 1912 passage of the Amendment became inevitable. Even some of the Senators Phillips attacked supported it.
Phillips didn't live to see it, though. In 1911 a socially prominent, but mentally unhinged, Washingtonian who was convinced the writer was persecuting his sister in his novels about fallen women assassinated Phillips.