The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge. Thomas J. Tacoma

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СКАЧАТЬ stripped republican execution of the laws away from the people—seemingly an undemocratic move. But according to the Progressives, this bureaucratic structure did not undermine democracy by taking the operations of government away from the people. Their faith in experts allowed the political leaders to articulate the broad vision of policy goals; administrators and bureaucrats merely brought those policies into practical effect on the people’s behalf. This was a fully grown, mature democracy. This was the modern regime of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and the most advanced European states, especially Bismarck’s Germany, had already paved the way. The United States had only to imitate their administrative practices while applying them to republican circumstances.^[68] According to the Progressives, this would maintain the United States in its position at the fore of history.

      Principal Progressive Reforms

      While Progressives did not accomplish all the reforms at which their 1912 Party Platform aimed, they were still successful in bringing about many of the reforms they desired. Though perhaps these may seem moderate to the post–New Deal and post–Great Society American public, the accomplishments of the Progressives appeared to Americans at the time as transformative.

      At the level of popular and institutional change, the Progressives were fantastically successful in moving the American government away from the republican conception of the American founding toward a more democratic regime.^[69] The expansion of popular rule through direct-democracy reforms was one of the Progressives’ most lasting achievements. Progressives had replaced the old-style party ballots with the secret ballot, which was an anti-party reform generally in place by 1900. Progressives also worked to undercut party dominance through the institution of direct primaries. By 1915, thirty-two states had adopted the primary as the method of choosing candidates for offices. Likewise, direct legislation by the people grew as a method of working around the perceived corruption and conservatism of state legislatures. Progressives proposed the initiative and referendum as methods of allowing the people a direct say on the laws. By 1914, eighteen different states had adopted initiative and referendum proposals. The recall of elected officials likewise enabled the people to force their elected leaders out of office before their terms expired. Some twelve states had adopted the recall by 1915. At the national level, Progressives successfully brought about the direct election of senators through the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment. This reform was but one more means of governing without the influence of state-level officials.^[70]

      The Progressives also successfully transformed the office of the presidency from its constitutionally limited scope into a focal point for all American political leadership. Theodore Roosevelt led the way, using his prestige as president in 1902 to force striking anthracite coal miners and the mine owners to come to a solution. Similarly, in the financial panic of 1907, Roosevelt stepped in to stop the spreading crisis on Wall Street (though ultimately it was J. P. Morgan’s money that stopped the bleeding).^[71] President Taft followed TR’s lead in assuming new powers to the presidency, though with less political tact. Constitutional historians note that President Taft was actually the first president to draft legislation for Congress. Wilson, too, exercised the full scope of the presidency’s public prestige to push his legislative agenda through Congress. Other trends were also at work to empower the presidency and executive branch in general, particularly Congress’s actions in delegating more and more power to the president. The Tariff Act of 1890 allowed the president to impose tariffs (according to a tariff schedule) whenever he was satisfied that certain threshold conditions were met in international trade. The Supreme Court upheld this law in Field v. Clark (1892), ruling that the distinction between ascertainment of fact and genuine policy-making allowed the president to exercise such powers. This delegation continued when the Court ruled in Buttfield v. Stranahan (1904) that Congress could create and empower a Board of Tea Inspectors to recommend and enforce tea standards that would carry the force of law. This placed an essentially legislative power in the hands of an executive agency—and the Court upheld it.^[72]

      Abandoning constitutional formalism, the Progressives successfully expanded the scope of state and federal government regulations. In the federal structure established by the U.S. Constitution, the police powers to regulate for the health, safety, and welfare of the community were traditionally reserved to the state governments. This distinction was part of the reserved sovereignty of the states that the authors of the Federalist had argued was essential to the Constitution of 1787.^[73] But the Progressives smuggled the police powers into federal regulations through their constitutional power to tax and to regulate interstate commerce.^[74] In 1895, Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate shipment of lottery tickets. In 1902, in a move clearly calculated to prevent further sales of a specific good, Congress raised the tax on artificially colored oleomargarine. The Supreme Court upheld these laws, validating Congress’s new experiments in national regulation. Other laws, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Mann White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, extended the federal government’s control over food production and over prostitution. Likewise, in 1898 Congress passed the Erdman Act, which sought to prohibit “yellow dog” contracts that aimed to prevent employees from unionizing. In 1906, the Employer’s Liability Act made rail carriers engaged in interstate commerce liable for on-the-job injuries or the death of their workers. In 1916, the Keating-Owen Act (the Child Labor Act) made illegal the sale of goods produced in factories that employed children for excessively long hours. The Adamson Act of 1917 provided for a mandatory eight-hour day for workers involved in interstate railroad business. Some of these laws were struck down by the Court as unconstitutional, but most were upheld.^[75]

      As a necessary corollary of the expanded scope of governmental regulation, the Progressives pushed for expert commissions, bureaus, and agencies who could manage the particular details of regulation from day to day. That President Roosevelt added over fifty thousand government jobs to the civil services list belongs to this trend, and the expert “Tea Commission” is but another example of the same phenomenon.^[76] The old method of regulating giant corporations and trusts—breaking them up through lawsuits under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890—proved less desirable than “regulation by means of an administrative commission, staffed by experts and capable of adjusting the relations between business and government.”^[77] Roosevelt had campaigned for this kind of regulation in 1912; Wilson incorporated it into the legislative and regulatory agenda of his own presidency. The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, was created in 1914 with the broad power to prohibit unfair methods of competition or deceptive practices in business. The law left it to the five-member Commission to define just what “unfair methods” meant. Similarly, under the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor, Congress had added the Bureau of Corporations in 1903. The creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913, with its general power to regulate monetary and credit policies for the whole nation, was part-and-parcel of this movement. During the World War, Congress went along with Wilson in creating many new agencies and commissions—the U.S. Shipping Board, the Federal Farm Loan Board, the Railway Labor Board, and in 1921, the Bureau of the Budget.^[78]

      Conclusion

      The net effect of the Progressive reforms was to expand both size and scope of the federal government. At the same time, the exclusive power of the political parties to control candidate selection was broken, and the power of state officials was largely circumscribed. The candidate-centered elections that began to emerge as the norm after the election of 1912 indicated the rising influence of direct primaries, but the creation of new expert agencies and commissions set a precedent to be followed for the rest of the twentieth century. The new power of presidential leadership over national politics and in social or cultural matters was another remarkable shift away from the nineteenth-century Whig conception of the presidency.^[79] Perhaps the greatest change brought about by the Progressives, however, stemmed from their critique of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No longer would a strict interpretation of the Constitution guide the federal government or serve to limit its powers. Government must be made to work for the people, the СКАЧАТЬ