Progressive Era

uber 1

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1398

see populism grange

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greg c ref

The Omaha Platform was the party program adopted at the formative convention of the Populist (or People's) Party held in Omaha, Nebraska on July 4, 1892.

Origin

The platform preamble was written by Ignatius L. Donnelly. The Omaha platform was seen as "The Second Declaration of Independence," as it called for reestablishing American liberty.^[1] The planks themselves represent the merger of the agrarian concerns of the Farmers' Alliance with the free-currency monetarism of the Greenback Party while explicitly endorsing the goals of the largely urban Knights of Labor.

In the words of Donnelly's preamble, the convention was "assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation, and filled with the spirit of the grand general and chieftain who established our independence, we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of the plain people, with which class it originated."

The Omaha Platform called for a wide range of social reforms, including a reduction in the working day, a "safe, sound, and flexible" national currency, assistance to farmers with the financing of their labours, "fair and liberal pensions to ex-Union soldiers and sailors," the direct election of Senators, single-terms for Presidents and Vice-Presidents, "the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum," "the unperverted Australian of secret ballot system," the nationalization of the railroads, the telegraph, and the telephone systems, a postal savings, "a graduated income tax," and "the free and unlimited coinage of silver."

In referencing the Omaha Platform, Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska suggested the wealth of the "super rich" had to begin flowing "to all the people, from whom it was originally taken."^[2]

The Populist, or People's, Party went on to capture 11 seats in the United States House of Representatives, several governors and the state legislatures of Kansas, Nebraska and North Carolina. 1892 Presidential nominee and former Greenbacker James B. Weaver received over a million popular votes, and won four states (Colorado, Kansas, Idaho, and Nevada) and 22 electoral votes.

The Party's legislative majorities were thereafter able to elect several United States Senators. Taken as a whole, the electoral accomplishments of the Populist Party represent the high water mark for a United States third party after the Civil War. In 1896, the Populists abandoned the Omaha Platform and endorsed Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan on the basis of a single-plank free silver platform.

Goals

The first goal of the Omaha Platform was to increase the coinage of silver and gold at a 16:1 ratio. The Omaha Platform suggested a federal loans system so that farmers could get the money they needed. The platform also called for the elimination of private banks. The platform proposed a system of federal storage facilities for the farmers' crops. The objective was to allow the farmers to control the pricing of their products. The Omaha Platform proposed a special taxing system for them so that they would have to pay taxes depending on how much money they made. They also sought for an eight-hour workday and the direct election of senators, as opposed to their being elected by state legislatures. These main goals of the Omaha Platform were all focused on helping rural and working-class Americans. After 1894, Populists emphasized the demand for free coinage of silver rather than other goals, such as state-run railroads.

Dissolution

The platform did not appeal to the more urban areas of the country where wage earners were working industrial jobs.^[3] The platform's only clear attempt to appeal to northerners in the east was the clause mentioning pensions to ex-Union soldiers.^[4] The Populist Party dissolved before World War II as members were unable to meet in Omaha for the party's semi-centennial celebration, and for the reason that many of the party's values have been accepted by other, more dominant political parties.^[5]

It’s also fair to say we use “fascism” too narrowly. By doing so, we leave out a lot of our history, which, you know, is kinda sorta fascist. If you’re someone who believes the US is the land of the free, the beacon of hope around the world, the shining city on the hill, well, using fascist to describe America’s past is probably going to cause discomfort.

Henry Wallace wasn’t squeamish about calling a spade a spade. He was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president (the 1940 election). He was also the leader of what used to be called the Progressive Party. In 1944, the Times asked him to define what fascism means. The result was a document that could have been written yesterday. Wallace wrote:

“If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.”

That sounds like a lot of people we know: the J6 insurgents, Donald Trump’s family and cronies, the Republicans and the very obscenely rich people who continue to fund their party and its efforts to, first, starve the republic, over a period of decades, before sabotaging it.

Wallace, moreover, wasn’t squeamish about saying something else that needed saying. There are “several million fascists in the United States” who are happy to collude with the enemy if that’s what it takes to rule.

As it happens, these millions are the most bigoted people imaginable. Hatred on the nation’s inside is sympatico with hatred of the nation outside. The implication? These “super-patriots” can be traitors.

I think we should see them as such. Yet we don’t.

We gotta face facts. The excerpt below might make facing them easier. Wallace was writing as America was at with Nazi Germany. Fascism wasn’t as abstract as it is today. After reading the below, I hope it becomes concrete. We like to think of all of our fellow Americans as believing in freedom, democracy and the American way. It’s not so.

A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.

The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart.The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.

… . The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.

If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends. They are patriotic in time of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow power and the dollar wherever they may lead.

American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information, and those who stand for the K.K.K. type of demagoguery.

Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. …

The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups. …

The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy. … They claim to be superpatriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjugation. …

Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise. In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.

It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship. What we must understand is that the industries, processes, and inventions created by modern science can be used either to subjugate or liberate. The choice is up to us. The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people. It was Mussolini's vaunted claim that he "made the trains run on time." In the end, however, he brought to the Italian people impoverishment and defeat. It was Hitler's claim that he eliminated all unemployment in Germany. Neither is there unemployment in a prison camp.

Democracy to crush fascism internally must demonstrate its capacity to "make the trains run on time." It must develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit.We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels. As long as scientific research and inventive ingenuity outran our ability to devise social mechanisms to raise the living standards of the people, we may expect the liberal potential of the United States to increase. If this liberal potential is properly channeled, we may expect the area of freedom of the United States to increase. The problem is to spend up our rate of social invention in the service of the welfare of all the people.

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan. Democracy can win the peace only if it does two things:

Speeds up the rate of political and economic inventions so that both production and, especially, distribution can match in their power and practical effect on the daily life of the common man the immense and growing volume of scientific research, mechanical invention and management technique. Vivifies with the greatest intensity the spiritual processes which are both the foundation and the very essence of democracy.

The moral and spiritual aspects of both personal and international relationships have a practical bearing which so-called practical men deny. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.

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The Great American Railroad War: HowAmbrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took On the Notorious Central Pacific Railroad

Dennis Drabelle

Macmillan, Aug 21, 2012 - History - 320 pages

https://books.google.com/books?id=lSMPBuHcCbUC

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went after SPRR octopus?

https://psmag.com/social-justice/the-corrections-45618

THE CORRECTIONS

In 1896, William Randolph Hearst unleashed his pit-bull ace reporter, Ambrose Bierce, in the nation’s capital to expose the Railroad robber baron's grip on California’s Legislature. Reforms happened. The state was returned to its people. Trouble is, some of those fixes are bringing California to its knees.

DENNIS DRABELLE UPDATED:JUN 14, 2017 ORIGINAL:AUG 28, 2012

THE MORASS THAT IS CALIFORNIA POLITICS today may have originated in mid-January of 1896, when a middle-aged man boarded an eastbound train in Oakland. With his ex-soldier’s ramrod bearing and his red-gold hair turning gray, the traveler was not likely to have gone unrecognized. He was Ambrose Bierce, the West’s most famous newspaperman, who used his San Francisco Examiner column to skewer fools and rogues, as well as to coin the acerbic definitions later collected in his Devil’s Dictionary. (Example: “PEACE, n: In international affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.”)

Although the conservative Bierce admired businessmen, he was en route to Washington DC to lead a SWAT team of journalists, cartoonists, and accountants in an effort to prevent California’s most powerful corporation, the Central Pacific Railroad, from doing what American capitalists so love to do: obtain a favor from Congress.

Bierce was overriding his instincts for two reasons. First, his boss, Examiner publisher William Randolph Hearst, a Democrat,had asked him to go afterthe railroad, which had long been identified with the Republican Party. Hearst not only paid Bierce a handsome salary but also let him write what he pleased. Bierce couldn’t deny that Hearst had earned the right, for once, to draft him for a pet cause.

Then, too, Bierce loathed dishonesty more than he revered capitalism. Backed by generous federal subsidies, the Central Pacific came into being as a segment of America’s first transcontinental line, linking up with the Union Pacific at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. In the process, the Central Pacific’s owner-builders—Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, and Charles Crocker, known as the Big Four—had each siphoned away a private fortune of about $20 million from the federal pot.By ’96, death had reduced the Big Four to a Big One, but the 74-year-old Huntington was overbearing enough for four.In pitting the pugnacious columnist against the notorious robber baron, Hearst was practically doing Bierce a favor.

Huntington couldn’t help but take notice of Bierce’s journey—it had been trumpeted on the Examiner’s front page. But Huntington had deep pockets, a couple dozen lobbyists at his disposal, and the ear of the Republican Party, which controlled both houses of Congress. What’s more, the issues involved were geographically remote and hard to understand: In addition to land, the subsidies had consisted of federal bonds handed over to the railroad to sell as its own certificates.Those bonds—with interest, the tab added up to roughly $75 million—were now coming due, and the Central Pacific sought to postpone repayment to the United States for 75 more years. Huntington reckoned that Congress wouldn’t want to dwell on such distant complexities for long.

Out in California, the Progressive movement was making some noise, but Huntington was accustomed to having his way in the Golden State. He saw no reason why it shouldn’t be the same at the national level.

Huntington was about to learn how mighty the pen can be, and the Progressive movement would take heart from the outcome. Yet given the current state of governance in California, it’s fair to say that the railroad tycoon had the last laugh.

BORN IN 1842, Ambrose Bierce grew up in rural Indiana, where he cultivated a deep love of reading. When the Civil War broke out, Bierce joined the Ninth Indiana Volunteers. He was a distinguished cartographer andaide to a general, until he took a bullet in the head during the 1864 Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. He recovered, and his time in action ended shortly thereafter. After the war, he fetched up in San Francisco, where he tried his hand at writing. Bierce’s Civil War tales exude authenticity because he, almost alone among 19th-century American fiction writers, could draw upon firsthand knowledge of combat. In the 1870s, he found a niche as an elegant gossip columnist, a forerunner of Herb Caen and his “three-dot journalism.”

In 1887, at a point when Bierce’s career was stagnating, Hearst beckoned. Newly installed as the publisher of a newspaper that his millionaire father had given him as a present, the young mogul wanted to make a splash in journalism, and who better than Bierce to send water flying? At the Examiner, Bierce consolidated his position as the West Coast’s chief scourge of blockheads and knaves, the Big Four very much among them.

Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker were all Easterners lured by the Gold Rush to California, where they quickly realized that the surest way to succeed was not by prospecting but byselling prospectors what they needed. All four settled in Sacramento, where Huntington and Hopkins met and became partners in a hardware store, Stanford sold groceries, and Crocker peddled dry goods. They also had in common their opposition to slavery, allegiance to the Republican Party, and outsized ambition. In the early 1860s, they saw merit in a scheme proposed by an engineer named Theodore Judah. At the time, everyone paid lip service to the idea of connecting the American West and East by train, but Judah had gone so far as to scout the least troublesome route over the Sierra Nevada.

Judah died of yellow fever in 1863, but his know-how had helped persuade Congress to subsidize the grand project. The Big Four carried on without him. Stanford was the group’s unctuous figurehead, Hopkins the geeky bookkeeper, Crocker the swaggering construction manager, and Huntington—operating out of New York and Washington—the crafty fund-raiser and influence-peddler.

They entered into a race from opposite directions with the Union Pacific (the more miles of track laid by a railroad, the larger its share of thefederal subsidies). On the way, both sets of owners had the same underhanded idea: they should establish a construction firm, ostensibly independent, but in fact owned by them. After steering construction contracts to the new company, they could pay themselves fat dividends on the sly. The Union Pacific came to grief when it was learned that the firm had bribed members of Congress, in what became known as the Crédit Mobilier scandal. Hopkins made sure that the Central Pacific eluded scrutiny—by destroying the company’s ledgers—but his efforts accomplished only so much.

For a while, the Big Four had a fifth partner, David Colton, who bought his way into the Central Pacific but never paid his full share. After his death in 1878, the surviving partners tried to collect from his widow, who fought back by releasing damning letters to the press. Spelled out for all to read were Huntington’s recommendations that Colton stoop to such methods as bribing state legislatures to enact pro-railroad bills.

In California, strategic payments gave the railroad such a stranglehold that when a state constitutional convention established a commission to regulate the railroad, the Central Pacific managed to dominate it, too. Nor was the corporate image burnished when three of the Big Four built gaudy mansions on San Francisco’s Nob Hill.[spite fence?] A magazine cartoonist played upon the company’s growing unpopularity by depicting it as anoctopus whose tentacles were squeezing the life out of various sectors of the California economy. (Frank Norris was to borrow that motif for his muckraking novel about a thinly disguised version of the Central Pacific, The Octopus, published in 1901.)

Still, the railroad’s power remained intact. In early 1896, Huntington and his lobbyists sought to punt repayment of the company’s federal debt well into the next century, and few sporting men in Washington would have bet against them.

Once he reached Washington, Bierce set up shop in a hotel near the White House. He faced two challenges. He had to master a wealth of factual, financial, and legal material that Huntington and his minions already knew intimately. And he had to make Easterners care about a subject removed from them by three decades and three thousand miles. Hearst stood ready to bankroll a special Washington edition of the Examiner. Printing it was one thing, however; getting people to read it was another. Bierce’s job was to fill that special’s pages with cogent, sparkling copy.

He had some advantages, though. He lived in an age when verbal combat was a much-practiced art—words didn’t just ring out; they slapped, kicked, gouged, and pulled hair—and there was no better word warrior than Bierce. Nor, as Huntington’s forces soon discovered, was he slow to take advantage of an opening.

In early February, the Huntington-friendly Washington Post reprinted a telegram in which a number of prominent Californians endorsed the railroad’s bid for debt postponement.As it turned out, however, some of the nabobs listed as signers had never even heard of the telegram and in fact, their views were quite the opposite. Bierce gleefully devoted several articles to this sloppy work by Huntington’s staff.

Soon he was launching broader attacks. He cited facts and figures, but above all he flexed his rhetorical muscles. Here, for example, is his diatribe against Huntington after the old man testified before a House committee:

Mr. Huntington is not altogether bad. Though severe, he is merciful. He tempers invective with falsehood. He says ugly things of his enemy, but he has the tenderness to be careful that they are mostly lies.... Mr. Huntington’s rancor blown about in space as a pestilential vapor will outlive all things that be. It is his immortal part.

Elsewhere in the same piece, Bierce summed up Huntington as “an inflated old pigskin.”

Before long, le tout Washington couldn’t wait for its daily dose of salty witticisms at Huntington’s expense. Bierce had succeeded admirably in calling attention to the railroad’s scheme. Meanwhile, the California congressional delegation lined up against the railroad, with one exception: a Democratic representative named Grove Johnson, whom Bierce mocked as a hireling of the railroad. At one hearing, Bierce wrote, Johnson “modestly bent his goatlike head and emitted a faint odor of violets.”

Huntington met with another setback after an anti-railroad senator questioned him at length about how much he’d invested at the dawn of the project. (The idea was to highlight the disparity between how little he had put in, and how much he had taken out.) Lots and lots of money, Huntington replied, the implication being that his great wealth was justified by the risks he’d taken. Then the senator sprang his trap, giving Huntington copies of his Sacramento tax records for the early 1860s. They exposed him as a man of decidedly modest means. “It was obvious that the old man had been caught in rank perjury,” Bierce commented.

But the Republican majority stuck with Huntington, until he pushed his luck by asking Congress for a second favor—to referee a conflict between Santa Monica and Los Angeles over the location of a deepwater port for Southern California. Huntington favored Santa Monica, and it soon became clear why: he owned land there, and a port would surely multiply the land’s value. Bierce jumped all over this “coincidence,” which, unlike the matter of the Central Pacific’s federal bonds, was easy to comprehend. Bierce’s next story was headlined “Another Thieves’ Scheme on the Pacific Coast.”

In California, leaders of the state Republican Party took note of Bierce’s scathing and relentless reports. For the sake of its candidates in the upcoming fall elections, the party made a dramatic decision: to break with Huntington and oppose his railroad bill. The national party deferred to its California offspring, and with that—five months after it had started—the game was over. Congress ultimately settled the matter by ordering the Central Pacific to retire its debt within 10 years, and Bierce and Hearst were lauded as giant-killers.

Emboldened by Huntington’s defeat, California Progressives went on to score impressive victories, notably the election of their man for governor in 1910. His name was Hiram Johnson, and in a twist that almost defies belief, he was the son of Grove Johnson, the congressman whose steadfast support of the railroad in 1896 had left him odd man out in the California delegation. Governor Johnson pushed through a series of measures to bring railroads under control, as well as state constitutional amendments authorizing the initiative, referendum, and recall.

OF ALL THE BIG FOUR'S SINS, the most grievous was its poisoning of the California body politic. The Progressive-era safety valves were put in place to assuage the widespread fear that big money had swamped government and left the normal checks and balances unable to loosen corporations’ grips on the levers of power. A century later, however, the perverse effect of that “cure” has been to hobble the state, which finds itself drowning in deficits, furloughing its employees, beggaring its educational system, and sometimes going for months on end without a budget.[PROP 13 HOWARD JARVIS SWORN NEMESIS OF MTA PROP 49/59]

As they were designed to do, initiatives bypass the normal legislative process by which, as bills are refined and debated, diverse interests get to have their say. Instead, voters are presented with up-or-down votes on what are typically raw and rigid proposals. And in an irony that the Big Four might have appreciated, gathering signatures to put an initiative on the ballot, buying ads to influence voters, hiring lawyers to contest alleged defects in an election—all of these tasks have become so costly that large corporations [GUN TO HEAD SODA TAX] and well-heeled interest groups enjoy a decided advantage whenever a measure touches upon their prerogatives. In 1996, for example, an initiative to establish a no-fault insurance system for motor-vehicle accidents drew the ire of trial lawyers, and they opened their wallets to beat it.In 2005, after a disastrous experiment in deregulation of the state’s electric utilities, the utilities poured millions of dollars into defeating an initiative to reimpose strict regulation. Big money, in short, still has California over a barrel, just as it did in the Gilded Age.

The state is a prisoner of its own reforms, especially those traceable to the frustration people felt in the late 19th century over how single-mindedly, and with so little regard for ethics, the Central Pacific worked its will. A healthy representative government should be able to do without the initiative, referendum, and recall. Today it can be argued that California government will never fully regain its health with them.

WHILE IRONIC, of course the state’s current troubles can’t be blamed on Bierce or Progressives; they were only trying to save their state. One thing seems clear now, however: among the actors in the 1896 drama, the defeated Huntington is the one who left the deepest, and darkest, imprint on the state.

This article is adapted from Dennis Drabelle’s new book, The Great American Railroad War: How Ambrose Bierce and Frank Norris Took on the Central Pacific Railroad, published in August by St. Martin’s Press.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/its-a-wonderful-life-for-bankers/

no lnx

‘It’s a Wonderful Life’… for bankers

Written by Christopher W. Shaw / Common Dreams December 27, 2019

Christmas movies provide a yearly opportunity to imagine a more caring society. Among the favorites that are watched year after year, It’s a Wonderful Life stands out for stressing the importance of banking to such a society. The film’s hero George Bailey is an honest and generous Main Street banker who has helped struggling working people achieve their dreams of homeownership. Yet Bailey is on the brink of committing suicide before discovering just how much his life has meant to the local community. On this fateful night, an alternative future is revealed in which Bailey never existed, and his beloved hometown of Bedford Falls has fallen into the clutches of the greedy Henry Potter, owner of the town’s largest bank and a man who cares nothing for the public welfare. Without Bailey to finance the hopes and aspirations of his neighbors, Potter has created an unrecognizable town that is defined by corruption, slum housing, pawn shops, and seedy bars.

While we often consign the subject of finance to bankers, the annual tradition of watching It’s a Wonderful Life serves as an unexpected reminder of just how much power finance exerts over all of our lives. The figures of Bailey and Potter represent contrasting models for how banking can be conducted. Bailey’s bank is an asset to Bedford Falls, while Potter’s bank exploits the community. Bailey’s bank provides depositors with safety and makes affordable loans available to working people, while Potter’s bank focuses solely on benefiting its owner. Potter will fund only those projects that produce the most profit for himself, and he has no regard for the impact his decisions have on others.

It’s a Wonderful Life may be fiction, yet its release in 1946 registered a half-century long struggle to make banking democratic. During the Gilded Age, when working people thought of bankers they envisioned Henry Potter. Americans were more likely to see J. P. Morgan as a personification of greed than to honor his business achievements. Such economic disasters as the Panic of 1907 and the Great Depression exposed the banking system’s flaws, inspiring everyday Americans to engage in regular discussions of financial policy and proposed banking reforms. All too frequently, small depositors lost their life’s savings in bank failures that resulted from mismanagement and even fraud. And banks typically declined to extend the affordable small loans necessary for homeownership and operating farms.

For decades, working people sought to have the national government make banks safer and loans more accessible. Labor union and farm organization meetingsroutinely backed these reforms. The residents of one Nebraska town declared their support for federal farm loans “at a low rate of interest.” Among the voices that promoted the idea that government should guarantee bank deposits was the Chicago Federation of Labor, which insisted such a program would be “comprehensive and effective.” Meanwhile, bankers vehemently opposed these policy proposals as government overreach.

Amid the severe economic crisis and banking meltdown of the early 1930s—when thousands of banks failed—grassroots agitation for financial reform produced mailbags filled with letters and telegrams demanding government action. In response to the constituent mail piling up on Capitol Hill and at the White House, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal reformed the banking system so that it better served ordinary citizens. Roosevelt signed a law creating the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to protect bank depositors. The New Deal also introduced important measures that provided farmers and homeowners with reliable supplies of low-cost credit.

Thanks to New Deal financial reform, by the 1940s bankers started looking less like Henry Potter and more like George Bailey. Grassroots engagement with financial issues had made banking more humane. For the first time in American history, bank failures became rare events. Farmers benefited from easier access to credit and homeownership would rise significantly. Once achieved, however, ordinary citizens started to take this reformed financial order for granted. Working people began to neglect financial issues following World War II, leaving an opening forindustry lobbyiststo direct banking policy. By the close of the twentieth century, deregulation had allowed the Potters of the banking world to resume their former practices. The economic crisis of 2008 led many Americans to consider the degree that their nation has come to look less like Bedford Falls and more like Pottersville. When voters cheer on Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for criticizing Wall Street, it’s a call to bring back George Bailey.

Christopher W. Shaw is the author of Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (University of Chicago Press, 2019). Follow him on Twitter: @chris_w_shaw.

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/political-scientist-the-chaos-of-trumps-reign-could-be-a-prelude-to-an-era-of-reform-and-were-already-seeing-the-signs/

no lnx

Political scientist: The chaos of Trump’s reign could be a prelude to an ‘era of reform’ — and we’re already seeing the signs

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story November 25, 2019

President Donald Trump and his political allies have assaulted countless constitutional and structural norms in American politics, and the country is more divided than it has been in decades. But the endgame, wrote political scientist Lee Drutman for The New York Times on Monday, could in fact be a popular movement for progressive reform.

“Eras of reform follow a general pattern,” wrote Drutman. “First, a mood of impending crisis prevails. Unfairness and inequality feel overwhelming, and national politics feels stuck and unresponsive to growing demands. But beneath the shattered yet still stubborn national stasis, new social movements organize. Politics becomes exciting and full of moral energy. New writers, empowered by new forms of media, invent new narratives. And future-oriented politicians emerge to channel that energy and challenge the old establishment.”

“Of the reform periods, the Progressive Era holds the clearest parallels to ours,” argued Drutman. “In the 1890s, inequality, partisanship and discontent were all sky-high. The depression of 1893-97 shattered faith that a growing industrial economy would lift all boats. New leviathan railroad and public-utility corporations seemed imposingly powerful, and partisan politics seemed thoroughly corrupted by them. Mass immigration was changing the face of the nation.”

“As public dissatisfaction built, and pressure grew from multiple directions, the political system eventually responded, led by a new generation of reform-oriented activists and politicians. New forms of participatory democracy — the primary, direct elections for the Senate, the initiative and the referendum — reshaped a political system that seemed to privilege the few over the many,” continued Drutman. “Women achieved the right to vote, first in cities and states, then finally nationwide in 1920. New regulatory agencies wrestled with the size and scope of giant corporate enterprises, cutting some down to size, putting stricter boundaries on others. But even as late as 1902, it was far from obvious that the years ahead would bring so much change.”

All of this happened, Drutman wrote, in spite of the fact that there was no clear leadership and organization to the reform, and despite the fact that not all of the reformers agreed on what to do.

“When future historians look back on the 2010s, they will observe three larger trends that paved the way for a new era of reform by clearing away the old consensus: a loss of faith in ‘neoliberal’ economics, the breakdown of white male-dominated social and cultural hierarchies, and the collapse of the ‘normal’ political process,” wrote Drutman, noting that the financial crisis, the monolithic power of big tech companies, and the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements have all pushed the political system to breaking point. “These cultural changes have provoked a backlash that contributed to Donald Trump’s rise and the associated growth of alt-right movements. Fights over identity now define national partisan competition because they echo and reinforce fundamental divides in the ethnic and geographical coalitions of the two major parties and amplify the zero-sum stakes of two-party electoral conflict. The unceasing culture war is a battle over two very different and diverging visions.”

Drutman envisions that the endgame is a series of reforms that break the two-party system itself. “In 2018, Maine became the first state to use ranked-choice voting for federal elections (after Mainers approved it in two statewide referendums). This month, New York City voters adopted it. Also in 2020, expect voters in Alaska and Massachusetts to decide whether they want in on ranked-choice voting,” he wrote. “By removing the spoiler effect of third parties, ranked-choice voting can break the us-versus-them force driving our partisan warfare, and create space for a political realignment that creates new coalitions to shape economic reforms and negotiate social change.”

“As with each era of reform, we’ll get some things right and some things wrong. We’ll overcorrect for some past mistakes, and make some new ones,” concluded Drutman. “But democracy isn’t something to perfect or solve. It’s a continuing, improbable experiment in self-governance, of devilish scale and complexity. We’re still learning.”

You can read more here.

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Seventeenth Amendment (Amendment XVII) to the United States Constitution established the popular election of United States Senators by the people of the states. The amendment supersedes Article I, §3, Clauses 1 and 2 of the Constitution, under which senators were elected by state legislatures. It also alters the procedure for filling vacancies in the Senate, allowing for state legislatures to permit their governors to make temporary appointments until a special election can be held.

The amendment was proposed by the 62nd Congress in 1912 and became part of the Constitution in 1913 on ratification by three-fourths (36) of the state legislatures. Sitting Senators were not affected by the Amendment's provisions until their existing terms expired, so the Amendment took six years to fully implement. The transition began with two special elections in 1913 and 1914 - the first in Maryland and the second in Alabama. The transition then began in earnest with the November 1914 election, and was complete on 4 March 1919 when the Senators chosen at the November 1918 election took office.

Text

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Calls for a constitutional amendment regarding Senate elections started in the early 19th century, with Henry R. Storrs in 1826 proposing an amendment to provide for popular election.^[21] Similar amendments were introduced in 1829 and 1855, with the "most prominent" proponent being Andrew Johnson, who raised the issue in 1868 and considered the idea's merits "so palpable" that no additional explanation was necessary.^[22] In the 1860s, there was a major Congressional dispute over the issue, with the House and Senate voting to veto the appointment of John P. Stockton to the Senate due to his approval by a plurality of the New Jersey Legislature rather than a majority. In reaction, the Congress passed a bill in July 1866 that required state legislatures to elect senators by an absolute majority.^[22]

By the 1890s, support for the introduction of direct election for the Senate had substantially increased, and reformers worked on two fronts. On the first front, the Populist Partyincorporated the direct election of senators into its Omaha Platform, adopted in 1892.^[23] In 1908, Oregon passed the first law that based the selection of U.S. senators on a popular vote. Oregon was soon followed by Nebraska.^[24] Proponents for popular election noted that ten states already had non-binding primaries for Senate candidates,^[25] in which the candidates would be voted on by the public, effectively serving as advisory referenda instructing state legislatures how to vote;^[25] reformers campaigned for more states to introduce a similar method.

William Randolph Hearst opened a nationwide popular readership for direct election of U.S. Senators in a 1906 series of articles using flamboyant language attacking "The Treason of the Senate" in his Cosmopolitan Magazine. David Graham Philips, one of the "yellow journalists" whom President Teddy Roosevelt called "muckrakers", described Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island as the principal "traitor" among the "scurvy lot" in control of the Senate by theft, perjury, and bribes corrupting the state legislatures to gain election to the Senate. A few state legislatures began to petition the Congress for direct election of senators. By 1893, the House had the two-thirds vote for just such an amendment. However, when the joint resolution reached the Senate, it failed from neglect, as it did again in 1900, 1904 and 1908; each time the House approved the appropriate resolution, and each time it died in the Senate.^[26]

On the second national legislative front, reformers worked toward a constitutional amendment, which was strongly supported in the House of Representatives but initially opposed by the Senate. Bybee notes that the state legislatures, which would lose power if the reforms went through, were supportive of the campaign. By 1910, 31 state legislatures had passed resolutions calling for a constitutional amendment allowing direct election, and in the same year ten Republican senators who were opposed to reform were forced out of their seats, acting as a "wake-up call to the Senate".^[25]

Reformers included William Jennings Bryan, while opponents counted respected figures such as Elihu Root and George Frisbie Hoar among their number; Root cared so strongly about the issue that after the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment, he refused to stand for re‑election to the Senate.^[11] Bryan and the reformers argued for popular election through highlighting perceived flaws with the existing system, specifically corruption and electoral deadlocks, and through arousing populist sentiment. Most important was the populist argument; that there was a need to "Awaken, in the senators...a more acute sense of responsibility to the people", which it was felt they lacked; election through state legislatures was seen as an anachronism that was out of step with the wishes of the American people, and one that had led to the Senate becoming "a sort of aristocratic body – too far removed from the people, beyond their reach, and with no special interest in their welfare".^[27] The settlement of the West and continuing absorption of hundreds of thousands of immigrants expanded the sense of "the people."...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Era

The Progressive Era was a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States, from the 1890s to the 1920s.^[1] The main objectives of the Progressive movement were eliminating problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corruption in government.

The movement primarily targeted political machines and their bosses. By taking down these corrupt representatives in office a further means of direct democracy would be established. They also sought regulation of monopolies (Trust Busting) and corporations through antitrust laws. These antitrust laws were seen as a way to promote equal competition for the advantage of legitimate competitors.

Many progressives supported prohibition of alcoholic beverages, ostensibly to destroy the political power of local bosses based in saloons, but others out of a religious motivation.^[2] At the same time, women's suffrage was promoted to bring a "purer" female vote into the arena.^[3] A third theme was building an Efficiency Movement in every sector that could identify old ways that needed modernizing, and bring to bear scientific, medical and engineering solutions; a key part of the efficiency movement was scientific management, or "Taylorism".

Many activists joined efforts to reform local government, public education, medicine, finance, insurance, industry, railroads, churches, and many other areas. Progressives transformed, professionalized and made "scientific" the social sciences, especially history,^[4] economics,^[5] and political science.^[6] In academic fields the day of the amateur author gave way to the research professor who published in the new scholarly journals and presses.

The national political leaders included Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and Charles Evans Hughes on the Republican side, and William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson and Al Smith on the Democratic side. Yet, leaders of the movement also existed far from presidential politics. Jane Addams, Grace Abbott, Edith Abbott and Sophonisba Breckinridge were among the most influential Progressive Era reformers.

Initially the movement operated chiefly at local levels; later, it expanded to state and national levels. Progressives drew support from the middle class, and supporters included many lawyers, teachers, physicians, ministers, and business people.^[7] Some Progressives strongly supported scientific methods as applied to economics, government, industry, finance, medicine, schooling, theology, education, and even the family. They closely followed advances underway at the time in Western Europe^[8] and adopted numerous policies, such as a major transformation of the banking system by creating the Federal Reserve System in 1913.^[9] Reformers felt that old-fashioned ways meant waste and inefficiency, and eagerly sought out the "one best system".^[10][11]

Government reform:

"The Awakening" Suffragists were successful in the West; their torch awakens the women struggling in the East and South in this cartoon by Hy Mayer in *Puck* Feb. 20, 1915

Disturbed by the waste, inefficiency, stubbornness, corruption, and injustices of the Gilded Age, the Progressives were committed to changing and reforming every aspect of the state, society and economy. Significant changes enacted at the national levels included the imposition of an income tax with the Sixteenth Amendment, direct election of Senators with the Seventeenth Amendment, Prohibition with the Eighteenth Amendment, election reforms to stop corruption and fraud, and women's suffrage through the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.^[12]

Muckraking: exposing corruption:

Further information: Muckrakers and Mass media and American politics

Magazines were not a new medium but they became much more popular around 1900, some with circulations in the hundreds of thousands of subscribers. It was an age of Mass media. Thanks to the rapid expansion of national advertising, the cover price fell sharply to about 10 cents.^[13] One cause was the heavy coverage of corruption in politics, local government and big business, especially by journalists and other writers who were labeled muckrakers. They wrote for popular magazines to expose social and political sins and shortcomings. They relied on their own investigative journalism reporting; muckrakers often worked to expose social ills and corporate and political corruption. Muckraking magazines–notably McClure's–took on corporate monopolies and crooked political machines while raising public awareness of chronic urban poverty, unsafe working conditions, and social issues like child labor.^[14]

The journalists who specialized in exposing waste, corruption, and scandal operated at the state and local level, like Ray Stannard Baker, George Creel, and Brand Whitlock. Other like Lincoln Steffens exposed political corruption in many large cities; Ida Tarbell went after John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. Samuel Hopkins Adams in 1905 showed the fraud involved in many patent medicines, Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle gave a horrid portrayal of how meat was packed, and, also in 1906, David Graham Phillips unleashed a blistering indictment of the U.S. Senate. Roosevelt gave these journalists their nickname when he complained they were not being helpful by raking up all the muck.^[15][16]

Modernization:

The Progressives were avid modernizers, with a belief in science and technology as the grand solution to society's weaknesses. They looked to education as the key. Characteristics of Progressivism included a favorable attitude toward urban-industrial society, belief in mankind's ability to improve the environment and conditions of life, belief in an obligation to intervene in economic and social affairs, and a belief in the ability of experts and in the efficiency of government intervention.^[17][18] Scientific management, as promulgated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, became a watchword for industrial efficiency and elimination of waste, with the stopwatch as its symbol.^[19][20]

Women

Main article: History of women in the United States § Progressive era: 1900–1930

...

Economics:

The Progressive Era was one of general prosperity after the Panic of 1893—a severe depression—ended in 1897. The Panic of 1907 was short and mostly affected financiers. However, Campbell (2005) stresses the weak points of the economy in 1907–1914, linking them to public demands for more Progressive interventions. The Panic of 1907 was followed by a small decline in real wages and increased unemployment, with both trends continuing until World War I. Campbell emphasizes the resulting stress on public finance and the impact on the Wilson administration's policies. The weakened economy and persistent federal deficits led to changes in fiscal policy, including the imposition of federal income taxes on businesses and individuals and the creation of the Federal Reserve System.^[90] Government agencies were also transformed in an effort to improve administrative efficiency.^[91]

In the Gilded Age (late 19th century) the parties were reluctant to involve the federal government too heavily in the private sector, except in the area of railroads and tariffs. In general, they accepted the concept of laissez-faire, a doctrine opposing government interference in the economy except to maintain law and order. This attitude started to change during the depression of the 1890s when small business, farm, and labor movements began asking the government to intercede on their behalf.^[91]

By the start of the 20th century, a middle class had developed that was leery of both the business elite and the radical political movements of farmers and laborers in the Midwest and West. The Progressives argued the need for government regulation of business practices to ensure competition and free enterprise. Congress enacted a law regulating railroads in 1887 (the Interstate Commerce Act), and one preventing large firms from controlling a single industry in 1890 (the Sherman Antitrust Act).

These laws were not rigorously enforced, however, until the years between 1900 and 1920, when Republican President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), Democratic President Woodrow Wilson(1913–1921), and others sympathetic to the views of the Progressives came to power. Many of today's U.S. regulatory agencies were created during these years, including the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

Muckrakers were journalists who encouraged readers to demand more regulation of business. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) was influential and persuaded America about the supposed horrors of the Chicago Union Stock Yards, a giant complex of meat processing that developed in the 1870s.

The federal government responded to Sinclair's book and The Neill-Reynolds Report with the new regulatory Food and Drug Administration. Ida M. Tarbellwrote a series of articles against Standard Oil, which was perceived to be a monopoly. This affected both the government and the public reformers. Attacks by Tarbell and others helped pave the way for public acceptance of the breakup of the company by the Supreme Court in 1911.^[91]

When Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected President with a Democratic Congress in 1912 he implemented a series of Progressive policies in economics. In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified, and a small income tax was imposed on high incomes. The Democrats lowered tariffs with the Underwood Tariff in 1913, though its effects were overwhelmed by the changes in trade caused by the World War that broke out in 1914. Wilson proved especially effective in mobilizing public opinion behind tariff changes by denouncing corporate lobbyists, addressing Congress in person in highly dramatic fashion, and staging an elaborate ceremony when he signed the bill into law.^[92] Wilson helped end the long battles over the trusts with the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914. He managed to convince lawmakers on the issues of money and banking by the creation in 1913 of the Federal Reserve System, a complex business-government partnership that to this day dominates the financial world.^[93]

In 1913, Henry Ford dramatically increased the efficiency of his factories by large-scale use of the moving assembly line, with each worker doing one simple task in the production of automobiles. Emphasizing efficiency, Ford more than doubled wages (and cut hours from 9 a day to 8), attracting the best workers and sharply reducing labor turnover and absenteeism. His employees could and did buy his cars, and by cutting prices over and over he made the Model T cheap enough for millions of people to buy in the U.S. and in every major country. Ford's profits soared and his company dominated the world's automobile industry. Henry Ford became the world-famous prophet of high wages and high profits.^[94]

Labor unions:

Labor unions, especially the American Federation of Labor (AFL), grew rapidly in the early 20th century, and had a Progressive agenda as well. After experimenting in the early 20th century with cooperation with business in the National Civic Federation, the AFL turned after 1906 to a working political alliance with the Democratic party. The alliance was especially important in the larger industrial cities. The unions wanted restrictions on judges who intervened in labor disputes, usually on the side of the employer. They finally achieved that goal with the Norris–La Guardia Act of 1932.^[95]

Immigration

The level of immigration grew steadily after 1896, with most new arrivals unskilled workers from eastern and southern Europe, who found jobs working in the steel mills, slaughterhouses, and construction crews in the mill towns and industrial cities. The start of World War I in 1914 suddenly stopped most international movement, which only resumed after 1919. Starting in the 1880s, the labor unions aggressively promoted restrictions on immigration, especially restrictions on Chinese and other Asians.^[96] The basic fear was that large numbers of unskilled, low-paid workers would defeat the union's efforts to raise wages through collective bargaining.^[97]Other groups, such as the prohibitionists, opposed immigration because it was the base of strength of the saloon power, and the West generally. Rural Protestants distrusted the urban Catholics and Jews who comprised most of the immigrants after 1890.^[98] On the other hand, the rapid growth of the industry called for large numbers of new workers, so large corporations generally opposed immigration restriction. By the early 1920s a consensus had been reached that the total influx of immigration had to be restricted, and a series of laws in the 1920s accomplished that purpose.^[99] A handful of eugenics advocates were also involved in immigration restriction.^[100] Immigration restriction continued to be a national policy until after World War II.

During World War I, the Progressives strongly promoted Americanization programs, designed to modernize the recent immigrants and turn them into model American citizens, while diminishing loyalties to the old country.^[101] These programs often operated through the public school system, which expanded dramatically.^[102]

War:

Although the Progressive Era was characterized by public support for World War I under Woodrow Wilson, there was also a substantial opposition to World War I.

Decline:

In the 1940s typically historians saw the Progressive Era as a prelude to the New Deal and dated it from 1901 (when Roosevelt became president) to the start of World War I in 1914 or 1917.^[103] Historians have moved back in time emphasizing the Progressive reformers at the municipal^[104] and state^[105] levels in the 1890s.

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===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_Party_(United_States,_1912)

Progressive Party was a third party in the United States formed in 1912 by former President Theodore Roosevelt after he lost the presidential nomination of the Republican Party to his former protégé, incumbent President William Howard Taft. The new party was known for taking advanced positions on progressive reforms and attracting some leading reformers. After the party's defeat in the 1912 presidential election, it went into rapid decline, disappearing by 1918. The Progressive Party was nicknamed the "Bull Moose Party" after journalists quoted Roosevelt saying that he felt "fit as a bull moose" following an assassination attempt on the campaign trail shortly after the new party was formed.^[1]

As a member of the Republican Party, Roosevelt had served as President from 1901 to 1909, becoming increasingly progressive in the later years of his presidency. In the 1908 presidential election, Roosevelt helped ensure that he would be succeeded by Secretary of War Taft. After Taft took office, he hewed closer to the conservative wing of the party and this and other actions alienated Roosevelt from his former friend. Progressive Republican leader Robert La Follette had already announced a challenge to Taft for the 1912 Republican nomination, but many of his supporters shifted to Roosevelt after the former President decided to seek a third presidential term, which was permissible under the Constitution prior to the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment.

At the 1912 Republican National Convention, Taft narrowly defeated Roosevelt for the party's presidential nomination. After the convention, Roosevelt, Frank Munsey, George Walbridge Perkins and other progressive Republicans established the Progressive Party and nominated a ticket of Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson of California at the 1912 Progressive National Convention. The new party attracted several Republican officeholders, although nearly all of them remained loyal to the Republican Party—in California, Johnson and the Progressives took control of the Republican Party.

The party's platform built on Roosevelt's Square Deal domestic program and called for several progressive reforms. The platform asserted that "to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day". Proposals on the platform included restrictions on campaign financecontributions, a reduction of the tariff and the establishment of a social insurance system, an eight-hour workday and women's suffrage. The party was split on the regulation of large corporations, with some party members disappointed that the platform did not contain a stronger call for "trust-busting". Party members also had different outlooks on foreign policy, with pacifists like Jane Addams opposing Roosevelt's call for a naval build-up.

In the 1912 election, Roosevelt won 27.4% of the popular vote compared to Taft's 23.2%, making Roosevelt the only third party presidential nominee to finish with a higher share of the popular vote than a major party's presidential nominee. Both Taft and Roosevelt finished behind Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson, who won 41.8% of the popular vote and the vast majority of the electoral vote. The Progressives elected several Congressional and state legislative candidates, but the election was marked primarily by Democratic gains.

The 1916 Progressive National Convention was held in conjunction with the 1916 Republican National Convention in hopes of reunifying the parties with Roosevelt as the presidential nominee of both parties. The Progressive Party collapsed after Roosevelt refused the Progressive nomination and insisted his supporters vote for Charles Evans Hughes, the moderately progressive Republican nominee. Most Progressives joined the Republican Party, but some converted to the Democratic Party and Progressives like Harold L. Ickes would play a role in President Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration. In 1924, La Follette established another Progressive Party and a third Progressive Party would be established in 1948 under the leadership of Henry A. Wallace.

Birth of a new party

Theodore Roosevelt was the founder of the Progressive Party and thus is often associated with the party

Roosevelt left office in 1909. He had selected Taft, his Secretary of War, to succeed him as presidential candidate and Taft easily won the 1908 presidential election. Roosevelt became disappointed by Taft's increasingly conservative policies. Taft upset Roosevelt when he used the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to sue **U.S. Steel** for an action that President Roosevelt had explicitly approved.^[2] They became openly hostile and Roosevelt decided to seek the presidency. Roosevelt entered the campaign late as Taft was already being challenged by progressive leader Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. Most of La Follette's supporters switched to Roosevelt, leaving the Wisconsin Senator embittered.

Nine of the states where progressive elements were strongest had set up preference primaries, which Roosevelt won, but Taft had worked far harder than Roosevelt to control the Republican Party's organizational operations and the mechanism for choosing its presidential nominee, the 1912 Republican National Convention. For example, he bought up the votes of delegates from the southern states, copying the technique Roosevelt himself used in 1904. The Republican National Convention rejected Roosevelt's protests. Roosevelt and his supporters walked out and the convention re-nominated Taft. The next day, Roosevelt supporters met to form a new political party of their own. California governor Hiram Johnson became its chairman and a new convention was scheduled for August. Most of the funding came from wealthy sponsors, magazine publisher Frank A. Munsey provided $135,000; and George W. Perkins, a director of U.S. Steeland chairman of the International Harvester Company, gave $130,000 and became its executive secretary. Roosevelt's family gave $77,500 and others gave $164,000. The total was nearly $600,000, far less than the major parties.^[3][4]

The new party had serious structural defects. Since it insisted on running complete tickets against the regular Republican ticket in most states, few Republican politicians were willing to support it. The exception was California, where the progressive element took control of the Republican Party and Taft was not even on the November ballot. Only five of the 15 more progressive Republican Senators declared support for it. Republican Representatives, Governors, committeemen and the publishers and editors of Republican-leaning newspapers showed comparable reluctance. Many of Roosevelt's closest political allies supported Taft, including his son-in-law, Nicholas Longworth (though Roosevelt's daughter Alice stuck with her father, causing a permanent chill in her marriage). For men like Longworth, expecting a future of his own in Republican politics, bolting the party would have seemed tantamount to career suicide. However, many independent reformers still signed up.

Historian Jonathan Lurie notes that scholars usually identify Roosevelt as the leader most identified with progressive conservatism. Roosevelt said he had "always believed that wise progressivism and wise conservatism go hand in hand".^[5] However, Taft and his supporters often hailed Taft as the model progressive conservative and Taft himself said he was "a believer in progressive conservatism".^[6] Four decades later Dwight D. Eisenhower declared himself an advocate of "progressive conservatism".^[7]