Where's a Progressive When You Need One?

Where‘s a Progressive When You Need One?

First, the history. Unsurprisingly, America was very different at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In this period, America’s middle class emerged, coupled with a Progressive movement which initiated nationwide major business, social and political change. What made the Progressives stand out was that they were politically non-partisan. People from all ideological persuasions whether Democrat or Republican joined in.

The stark contrast between the comfortable living conditions of the rich and the harshness of life of the poor was far more visible in most American cities than it is today. City fathers had to cope with expanding populations and the dreadful social and economic conditions which followed. Slums and tenements sprang up in their thousands in most cities, housing new city dwellers and immigrants alike, those for whom employment was uncertain. If evidence of working class life was needed, it was readily available, either from fictional accounts such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, which was based on life in the Chicago meat industry, or factual accounts such as Marie van Vorst’s “The Plight of the Working Woman”, published in McClure’s magazine in 1903.

Starting as far back as New York City’s Tammany Hall in the 1870s, machine government ruled in all cities. It was often riddled with corruption from top to bottom. In Satan’s Circus, Mike Dash explains how the infamous Boss Tweed made himself a wealthy man. “Under Tweed’s rule, New York spent $10,000 on a $75 batch of pencils and another $171,000 on tables and chairs worth only $4,000.” Tweed and his cronies probably stole more than $50 million, roughly equivalent to $800 million today.

To counter the awfulness of city life, new professional social workers and muckraking journalists investigated and exposed the shocking conditions of sweatshops and dangerous tenement firetraps. Women reformers became prominent. Jane Addams, inspired by England’s Toynbee Hall, established the Hull House settlement houses. Lilian Wald championed the establishment of a Children’s Bureau within the federal government.

All this fed into the Progressive’s crusade for government reform, a crusade both haphazard and piecemeal. Incremental development was unavoidable because municipal power was diffused. The battle had to be fought city to city and state to state. There was little room for political reform in the federal arena. Indeed, the Seventeenth Amendment, under which U. S. senators would in future be elected by popular vote, was the Progressive movement’s sole federal success.

However, Progressives were responsible for numerous political reforms: these included limiting the privileges and duration of franchises, extending the scope of utility regulation, modernizing out-of-date and badly skewed tax assessments to benefit taxpayers as a whole, increasing the number of independently appointed government posts, and broadening the civil service to reserve positions for specialists; introducing central, audited purchasing and rationalizing office structures.

There were failures, Prohibition for one. Also, Progressive ideas found diminishing returns as America entered The Great War and by 1920, Progressivism lost its way as America ‘returned to normalcy’ in the Jazz Age. The zeal for more reform was replaced by a society which like to drink illegally and get involved in get rich quick schemes, promoted by a buoyant stock market. As the federal government loosened all controls on business regulation in the Roaring Twenties, Wall Street became the Wild West. But at the end of the 1920s, America consequently suffered its worst ever economic depression.

I have been reflecting on the Trump domestic agenda and whether there are parallels with the 1920s and ‘30s. The Obama administration, hampered by a contrary Congress, did its best to control debt, while trying to provide poorer citizens a better life. However, the Democrats found law-making a virtual impossibility, met by intransigence in both House and Senate. Now we have the Trump administration.

The first Trump budget, the one still being negotiated, would have resulted in an increase in the $19 trillion American debt, not the promised reduction, the suggested new tax cuts would have benefited mostly the rich and super rich; the middle classes would have paid for the tax reductions through cuts in health benefits. Trump’s jobs initiative – unemployment has indeed fallen this calendar year – is accompanied by loosening of business and environmental regulations, including coal mining on federal land, amongst other policies which may damage the physical and economic health of Americans. Interesting suggestions, for example improving the infrastructure, seem to be on hold, but then so is the ridiculous Mexican wall.

All in all, Trump seems to want billionaires to benefit and to encourage business, particularly big business, to thrive much like Calvin Coolidge who said: “the business of America is business.”  Trump seems unconcerned that his ideology will be introduced at the expense of health, safety and the financial security of the vast majority of Americans, as he puts up the “You’re Not Welcome” sign to visitors from Muslim countries.

Mr Trump seems neither to know nor care for the values of an enlightened government: tolerance, respect for fair debate, a checked and balanced government, objectivity, impartiality and recognition of international interdependencies. These are matters which Mr Obama had at the forefront of his administration and I am saddened by their passing. Nor does Mr Trump seem to have a grasp on America’s history in the first 30 years of the twentieth century.

And this is the man who thought Andrew Jackson fought in the American Civil War! I don’t have a crystal ball but Trump’s America seems to be headed for isolation. If so, what next? How will the administration reduce the fearful American debt? America first may well become America last.

 

 

As I write, the Comey FBI/Russia scandal is speeding up. It is far too soon to make judgments, let alone speculate as to where the story will go. Is impeachment on the cards? Maybe but not for sacking Comey. It’s the Trump business and “emoluments” that could remove him. What really counts is the politics. If senior Republicans come to the view that Trump will wreck their Congressional majorities in the 2018 mid-terms, impeachment will become a reality.