Attack on Distributive Politics

Behind this promotional activity were political parties that channeled the distribution of resources and privileges and that dominated political participation during the party period. Each state had party bosses such as the Republican Thomas C. Platt and the Democrat David B. Hill in New York during the 1890s. Urban party machines organized the swarms of recent immigrants and provided them with badly needed services. The parties aggregated the electorate and organized governmental functions, most notably the legislatures, which distributed resources and privileges to individuals and groups. In return, these groups rewarded their chosen party at the polls. Industrialization and urbanization, however, unleashed social changes that this traditional distributive scheme was incapable of accommodating. Third parties and social reform movements burst on the scene to urge a new view of law and legal institutions designed to serve disaffected social constituencies.

Populists, Mugwumps, and the Law

The Populists delivered the initial blow to laissez-faire ideology and traditional distributive politics. The Populist party, which began as social and mutual-aid societies known as the Grange, by the late 1880s and early 1890s had a distinctly political form and a platform that aimed to assist farmers (black and white), laborers, and in some places people with small businesses. The Populists traced the severe economic distress caused by industrialization to the growing control of "moneyed interests" (large corporations and especially railroads) over government. Only radical solutions, Populists argued, could subdue the power of concentrated wealth.

Populists urged government to switch its role from distribution to regulation and administration. Government was encouraged to pursue an active public policy of improving the conditions under which citizens lived. The Populists, for example, in their national platform of 1892, called for nationalization of the railroads, protection of public lands, an end to industrial monopoly, regulation of freight and railroad shipping rates, a graduated income tax, and the abandonment of the gold standard in favor of paper money that would aid the debtor interests with which they were identified. The Populists on the state level won political control of the Nebraska and Kansas legislatures in 1890 and had strong representation in the 1880s in other predominately rural state legislatures; they also clamored for administrative bodies (free from direct political influence) to regulate the rates charged by railroads and grain elevator operators.

Opposition to the traditional distributive role of government and to partisan control of it also came from the social elite of the cities, including professionals, intellectuals, well-to-do businessmen, and old-money families. In part, these groups were unhappy that they were being forced from their former leadership roles, that political operators

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and their legions of immigrant voters had seized political control from the "best men." They stressed values of "disinterestedness," "independence," and "expertise." In the mid-1880s these reformers became a national movement known as the Mugwumps, and throughout the country they pushed for reform of urban politics, the introduction of the secret ballot (from Australia), and the scientific rather than partisan management of government.

As has been true throughout the political history of the United States, much of the Populist and Mugwump program was eventually absorbed by the two major parties, especially when Democratic and Republican leaders concluded that failure to do so would lead to political losses. The borrowing was never complete and often incidental, but the Panic of 1893 was sufficiently shocking that a major realignment of politics followed in the presidential election of 1896. The paralyzing equilibrium of politics in the United States ended with a sweeping Republican victory in 1896; during the subsequent period both parties moved to accept many of the once-radical goals of the Populists.

Progressives and the Law

Lawmakers responded to industrialization, but the forces unleashed in the economy during the late nineteenth century were not fully confronted on the national level until the first two decades of the twentieth century. Developments proceeded somewhat more rapidly in most states, with experimentation in the 1880s involving what subsequently became known as "Progressive" reforms in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

The Progressive movement, with its emphasis on scientific and rational solutions to public policy issues, also brought about an erosion of popular participation in government. The importance of discordant social groups (blacks, poor southern whites who had supported the Populist movement, and immigrants, who fueled the great political machines and flirted with socialism) was reduced in the political equation by Progressive "reforms" such as registration requirements, nonpartisan ballots, and other devices that restricted the suffrage and weakened the discipline of party machines. These changes helped to make government more responsive to well-organized economic interests, a pattern that continued to develop through the twentieth century.

Electoral participation declined at the same time that the function of government switched increasingly to regulation and administration. With this change the necessities of grounding public policy in an active electorate, as had been the case in the "party period," faded. Expertise rather than popular legitimacy provided the rationale for many of the laws intended to reorder American society and economy. In the presidential election of 1904, voter turnout fell below 70 percent for the first time since 1836; eight years later turnout again dropped sharply, to below 60 percent.

Progressivism was not a single unified movement, but a collection of often disparate groups with differing (even contradictory) motivations. Some Progressives pursued the goal of economic efficiency. The business community, for example, recognized that the excesses of industrialization had to be curbed in the interests of a more efficient and profitable marketplace. Civic leaders within the Progressive movement wanted an end to the economic burden they associated with old-fashioned party rule. They urged reforms, such as at-large election districts, whose effects were to under

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mine the political strength of immigrant voters. Other Progressives were animated by a spirit of social justice for many of these same immigrants. Jane Hull, for example, wanted to uplift the lives of the homeless and poor and to end social disharmony, which itself seemed to threaten political stability and belief in a rule of law.

Progressives indeed shared much in common. Most significantly, they possessed an attitude of knowing and confronting social reality. A new "disposition of calculation" came into the formulation of public policy, one that included a "new inclination to think in matter-of-fact terms about cause and effect in social relations and to cast up balance sheets of profit and loss in matters of community-wide effect." ¹⁴ The traditional "rights of the public," which had influenced early nineteenth-century American legal development, became coupled to a political reform movement that stressed the regulation and administration of economic activity. Such calculation required not only new and expanded methods of government, but greater penetration by law and legal institutions into day-to-day life. What was important was scientific expertise capable of rationally solving major issues of public interest rather than the traditional resort to the distributional party politics of the nineteenth century.

Progressivism, composed as it was of impulses of economic efficiency and social justice, embraced many separate but parallel movements: antitrust, railroad regulation, the reform of municipal government, women's suffrage, hours and conditions of work, and the abolition of child labor, to name but a few of the most prominent. The Progressives, in a much more complete and direct way than the Populists and Mugwumps, enlisted legal authority to reach all of these ends. They sought to reshape institutions in ways that would make them more responsive to a growing urban, industrial society. As Richard Hofstadter has concluded about the Progressives, "it was expected that the [neutral] state, dealing out evenhanded justice, would meet the gravest complaints. Industrial society was to be humanized through the law." ¹⁵

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 717