A Very Different Age: America's Progressive Era Reviewed

Introduction: Framing the Progressive Era

Many comprehensive works have been written about the now-infamous Progressive Era in the United States — some glowing with praise for the pioneering changes begun during that period, while others offer a more measured portrayal of an age in which real strides were made but at considerable cost and with mixed motives. Steven J. Diner's A Very Different Age clearly falls within the latter category. The work defines the motives and changes of the era from multiple perspectives in an attempt to produce a comprehensive assessment of just how much American lives actually changed.

The Progressive Era roughly spanned the early twentieth century and built upon transformations set in motion by the Industrial Revolution. Diner stresses that it represented a culmination of the need for individuals in America to redefine how they lived — not as small entrepreneurs operating within modest households, as they had in the past, but as members of larger communities defined by wage labor, often for very large employers well outside the home. These same individuals also had the opportunity, when it was afforded to them, to use and interact with thousands of new products that redefined their time and social status, products that were both the result of their own labor and of corporate development.

Diner argues that the origins of the Progressive Era were initially rooted in individual reforms intended to reconcile the severe depression of the 1890s and the nation's economic decline with the emergence of a working and middle class (Diner 1998, 19–23). Individuals across the nation in positions of moderate to significant power saw the era as an opportunity to develop and enact legislation, enforce standards, and limit economic volatility through controlled utilization of resources. This impulse evolved into corporate and governmental reform as well as social and economic reforms at a more basic level — including consumer protections, consolidation of services, local civic reform aimed at reducing corruption, and labor reforms such as worker-driven union representation, though these last were among the most hotly contested and subject to the most compromise (67).

Diner also stresses that, most importantly, what he calls the "Progressive Discourse" was a conversation among those at the top, aimed at reconciling the interests of workers with those of managers, including government and corporations (203). Educational reform similarly drove this discourse, with a broad movement toward educating the masses. As Diner writes:

Competing Groups and the Limits of Reform

"An educated and informed citizenry would demand 'justice' and do what was 'morally right.' Using such language, progressives captured the discourse of politics, defining the terms within which competing players argued their positions on corporate regulation, labor, conservation, welfare, women's rights, representative government and other great issues of the day." (203)

For Diner, the Progressive Era marked the beginning of a fundamental struggle to define the nation as it responded to unprecedented growth, development, and consumerism. He is particularly adept at describing the manner in which competing groups negotiated change and accepted compromise. Compromise was often the defining term of the era: different cultural groups and coalitions argued for change, while others supported reform in theory and permitted only those changes most advantageous to their own ends. Yet for the most part each chapter of the work functions as an introduction to its concepts, since the book is not long enough for Diner to fully develop all of the lines of reasoning he opens.

Diner largely assesses the origins of the Progressive Era as seeded in the public — in workers redefining their relationship to labor and striving to build new lives shaped by employment that simultaneously produced immense social and cultural change through the mass production of new technology. Yet he also stresses that not all reform benefited the worker, nor did it originate in a pure workers' movement; it was instead a collection of compromises among competing groups seeking greater power within their own particular environments.

Diner contends that the Progressive Era has historically been obscured by the notion that corporate and governmental reform were the central achievements of the period, when in reality it was the changed and changing lives of individuals that truly marks it. His work attempts to unite social, economic, and cultural history into a coherent account of an era that granted some groups meaningful reform while leaving others — low-wage workers, immigrants, women, and African Americans — with only minimal gains. The book's chapters are thematic, covering: Owners, Managers and Corporate Capitalism; Industrial Workers' Struggle for Control; Immigrants in Industrial America; Rural Americans and Industrial Capitalism; African Americans' Quest for Freedom; White Collar Workers in Corporate America; The Competition for Control of the Professions; The Progressive Discourse in American Politics; and The Great War and the Competition for Control.

The Progressives, according to Diner, were a group of people who developed ideas and concerns and stressed the need for reform, all the while portraying most reform as a bottom-up process when in reality everyone was at the table — and owners, managers, and political leaders were often at its head. Though reform did occur, the bottom-up theory was largely a thematic representation of future hope rather than a reflection of real bottom-up demands being met. In other words, not much reform actually occurred without the consent and substantial input of owners and high-ranking politicians in any given area (48).

Corporate Power, Labor, and the Progressive Discourse

As Diner illustrates:

"When shopkeepers and small distributors railed against the trusts and demanded government action to protect traditional entrepreneurship, they echoed a familiar theme of the Progressive Era. Organized farmers demanded regulation of railroad rates and grain elevators and called on government to give farmers control over the marketing of crops. Middle-class reformers, troubled by industrial violence, child labor, and horrific work conditions, demanded government regulation of factory and mine safety, child and female labor, working conditions and hours." (46)

Diner assesses the "progressives" as a many-faced collection of groups and demands, some more successful than others, none of which should be viewed as wholly independent or entirely progressive, since individual interests were always in play alongside the powerful voice of those already in power. The Progressives were, in this reading, a diverse set of factions waging change demands against those they believed capable of making such changes — and, more importantly, conducting a massive public opinion campaign that built recognition for ideas and standards never previously regarded as important, including checks and balances on capitalism and the laissez-faire economy (20).