What Progressivism Wrought
By Christopher Cox
This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review.
By the time Calvin Coolidge took the national stage, the Progressive Era had run its course. That gave him the opportunity to assess, based on real-world results, both its successes and its failures.
Progressivism in practice had diverged wildly from its aims. America at the end of Woodrow Wilson’s administration was beset with race riots, runaway inflation, violent strikes, and the suppression of civil liberties. Initiatives such as the income tax and Prohibition had very different impacts on middle-class households from what progressive theory had predicted.
When the income tax appeared in 1913, it began with a relatively low top rate of 7 percent, which applied only to the wealthiest people in America—those with incomes of more than $15 million, adjusted to today’s dollars. But by 1920, when Coolidge ran for vice president, the lowest rate stood at 4 percent and applied to all incomes under about $60,000, adjusted to today’s dollars. The top rate had risen to 73 percent. There were fifty-six tax brackets.
Prohibition just as jarringly diverged from the ideal. In reality, enforcement was far beyond the government’s capabilities. Progressivism had imagined that Prohibition would solve a wide variety of moral ills. It would reduce crime and corruption. But instead of solving existing social problems, it created new ones.
Even so, as lieutenant governor and as governor, Calvin Coolidge remained open to progressive ideals. He supported many progressive causes, such as the rights of working people and the dignity of work. He also supported policies that today we think of as progressive but that Wilson did not support, such as voting rights for women. Beginning in 1907 in the Massachusetts legislature, Coolidge voted in favor of women’s suffrage. In fact, Coolidge became president of the Massachusetts senate when the incumbent president lost his reelection because of his opposition to women’s suffrage.
Scientific Racism
Unlike Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson had opposed women’s suffrage as governor of New Jersey and later as president. Wilson did not support women’s suffrage at the state level until 1915, by which time Susan B. Anthony was nearly ten years in the grave. Wilson didn’t drop his opposition to the Susan B. Anthony amendment until the final years of his second term in the White House.
Wilson’s brand of progressivism came to define the movement, but he and many of the progressives he appointed to his cabinet and his government did not include women’s rights in their definition of progressivism.
Nor did they include civil rights for Black Americans. Most progressives, Wilson among them, subscribed to academic theories that validated racial hierarchies—what the historian David Southern has labeled “scientific racism.” It was built on elaborate intellectual constructs that drew from biology, psychology, sociology, genetics, and eugenics.
In fact, many of the most prominent progressives were instrumental in establishing Jim Crow in the United States. The best-known progressive Democrat in Virginia, Woodrow Wilson’s birthplace, was Carter Glass. Glass championed progressive causes such as higher regulation on banks, corporations, and railroads, but he also led the charge for segregation and for restricting the vote to white males. Glass served as Wilson’s treasury secretary.
William Jennings Bryan, President Wilson’s secretary of state and three times the Democratic presidential nominee during the Progressive Era, argued in a New York Times editorial, “White supremacy promotes the highest welfare of both races.” Bryan spoke at the 1924 Democratic National Convention for nearly half an hour in opposition to a resolution condemning the Ku Klux Klan. Dartmouth professor John Mecklin estimates that Bryan was responsible for the intellectual development of “tens of thousands of devout Klansmen.” When Bryan died in 1925, the Klan conducted memorial services and cross burnings for him across the country.
In the Wilson cabinet, Bryan offered no objection when Postmaster General Albert Burleson proposed segregation for the federal bureaucracy. Wilson himself went along with the idea and defended it in public, even though white and Black workers had worked side by side for years.
The progressive journalist and publisher Josephus Daniels was another white supremacist in the Wilson cabinet. He was well known for fomenting the notorious riots in Wilmington, North Carolina, that resulted in the deaths of sixty Black Americans in one day. Daniels celebrated the result with a jubilee. Wilson made him the publicity chairman for his 1912 presidential campaign and then secretary of the navy.
Late in the Wilson administration, race riots across the United States were in almost every case instigated by white vigilantes attacking Black men and women. Newspapers at the time described the violence as the worst since the Civil War. When unions aimed to keep Black people and women out, Wilson sided with the unions. When the American Federation of Labor threatened a railroad strike because railroads had hired women conductors at equal pay, the Wilson administration recommended that all women conductors be fired.
Who Is the Real Progressive?
In 1920, Coolidge saw what Wilsonian progressivism had wrought. He also understood the popular mood that soundly rejected the results. When he and Harding were elected, it was with the greatest popular landslide in a century.
Still, Coolidge continued to sympathize with progressivism’s highest aims, if not its past methods. He always believed that government should treat the humblest individual with the same dignity as the most exalted. He denounced selfishness. He believed that, in return for government’s protection of private property, the owners of private property had an obligation to use it in service of society. He called this his law of service.
Ultimately, Woodrow Wilson and not Calvin Coolidge would be labeled as “progressive.” But in a very real sense, it is Coolidge’s ideals that have proven to be the enduringly progressive ones.
Christopher Cox chaired the Securities and Exchange Commission and served in the elected leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the author of the forthcoming biography Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn (Simon & Schuster, 2024).