PLEASE HELP SPREAD THE WORD
/WhatIsAProgressive?
Determining whether or not a specific policy is "progressive" is actually very simple: If the policy takes power and control away from government and/or corporations and shifts that power and control into the hands of individual people or neighborhood organizations, than that policy is "progressive."
Policies that give government more power and control over the people are NOT "progressive." Policies that give corporations more power, control or subsidies are NOT "progressive."
Policies that restrict the power and control of government and large corporations are "progressive."
Policies that give PEOPLE and NEIGHBORHOODS more power and control over their lives and their communities are "progressive."
Policies that give government more power and control over the people are NOT "progressive." Policies that give corporations more power, control or subsidies are NOT "progressive."
Policies that restrict the power and control of government and large corporations are "progressive."
Policies that give PEOPLE and NEIGHBORHOODS more power and control over their lives and their communities are "progressive."
The United States is supposed to be a Republic that is based upon guaranteeing freedoms, but corporations, media and government have taken away too much of the freedom that belongs to "We the People."
The United States has all the ingredients of fascism: an intimate marriage of government, big business, and the military, in which the national media exclusively disseminates government-approved propaganda, and a ruthless, police force that enforces the policies of the ruling elite.
Fascism in the USA is an accomplished fact, and it has been for the past forty years.
During the financial meltdown associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the actions of the U.S. government proved that we have a fascist government that generally acts to support corporations rather than "We the People."
6 BASIC CONCEPTS
THAT DEFINE PROGRESSIVISM
1. PEACE ABROAD AND AT HOME.
Progressives object to any form of violence to achieve social change. The United States leads the world in murders and gun violence.
Progressives believe that this violence must end. Since the United States was founded in 1776, America has been at war during 223 out of its 244 years of existence.
The money spent on armaments and foreign wars must be redirected to improve the lives of Americans so that crime and violence at home can be reduced.
Progressives object to any form of violence to achieve social change. The United States leads the world in murders and gun violence.
Progressives believe that this violence must end. Since the United States was founded in 1776, America has been at war during 223 out of its 244 years of existence.
The money spent on armaments and foreign wars must be redirected to improve the lives of Americans so that crime and violence at home can be reduced.
2. EQUALITY FOR ALL CITIZENS AND PROTECTION OF THEIR RIGHTS.
Progressives champion and fight for the equal treatment of all citizens such as ADOS and other minorities, those who are poverty stricken, those within the LGBTQ community and all other marginalized and subjugated people deserve to have their civil and human rights respected and observed.
A social safety net is a fundamental tenet of progressivism. Society should not only be judged by how high some people rise, but should also be judged by how low it lets some of its people fall and how poorly it treats those who disagree with those in power.
Progressives share beliefs with Libertarians in that both groups oppose legislation that would regulate an individual’s life.
Progressives share beliefs with Conservatives in that both groups look to history for guidance and realize that we should return to SOME traditions that have been lost or forgotten.
Progressives realize that the freedoms enjoyed by some who are born with advantages should not be enjoyed at the expense of others, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or lifestyle choices.
Progressives believe that the approach of capitalists puts too much power into the hands of corporations and the approach of socialists puts too much power and control in the hands of government.
Progressives champion and fight for the equal treatment of all citizens such as ADOS and other minorities, those who are poverty stricken, those within the LGBTQ community and all other marginalized and subjugated people deserve to have their civil and human rights respected and observed.
A social safety net is a fundamental tenet of progressivism. Society should not only be judged by how high some people rise, but should also be judged by how low it lets some of its people fall and how poorly it treats those who disagree with those in power.
Progressives share beliefs with Libertarians in that both groups oppose legislation that would regulate an individual’s life.
Progressives share beliefs with Conservatives in that both groups look to history for guidance and realize that we should return to SOME traditions that have been lost or forgotten.
Progressives realize that the freedoms enjoyed by some who are born with advantages should not be enjoyed at the expense of others, regardless of their race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or lifestyle choices.
Progressives believe that the approach of capitalists puts too much power into the hands of corporations and the approach of socialists puts too much power and control in the hands of government.
3. DISTRUST OF THE CONCENTRATED WEALTH AND POWER IN THE HANDS OF THE CORPORATE OLIGARCHY.
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations that dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” – Thomas Jefferson.
Progressives believe that the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a select few actually does more harm than good to the general welfare of the country. A quick glance at the industrial revolution or “gilded age”, gives us insight on the social ills brought upon the country by unfettered capitalism. Monopolies and corporations that are “too big to fail” are NOT in the best interests of the American people.
Progressives take the view that progress is actually being stifled by the vast economic inequality between the rich and the poor. Progressives promote public policies that they believe will lead to positive social change.
Progressives seek a more equal distribution of resources amongst the many, not the few.
Progressives believe that corporations are NOT people. Corporations receive privileges from the people that can and should be removed if corporations fail to function for the overall good of the people. There should be a death penalty for corporations that abuse their power and/or commit crimes. Corporate "personhood" must be removed by Constitutional amendment.
Progressives believe that government should break up monopolies and regulate large corporations in order to protect the poor, working and middle classes. As a Republic, the purpose of the United States' government is to protect peoples' individual rights while enabling them to address issues facing their community as a whole.
Progressives focus on using government power to make large institutions play by a set of rules that protects the poor, working and middle classes. The government has an important role to play in protecting Americans from being ripped off and taken advantage of by pushing back hard against corporations, monopolies and oligarchs.
Progressives believe that many industries need to be regulated more closely to limit the excesses of free market capitalism in order to spread the wealth among a greater number of people in order to benefit society as a whole, rather than concentrate wealth and power under the control of a few individuals, whether those individuals are associated with corporations or with government.
Progressives believe that capitalism is the most expeditious way to grow the wealth of society BUT that can only occur within a properly structured business environment. Abusive, vulture, predatory capitalism MUST be prevented.
Progressives support the immediate halting of the outsourcing of American jobs by large corporations and support investments in our infrastructure, quality education and universal health care that will benefit everyone. These are all steps to improve ourselves as a country and kick start the economy in order to benefit "We the People."
Examples of markets that may have concentrated power into the hands of too few corporations and should be broken up and/or democratized include:
“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations that dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.” – Thomas Jefferson.
Progressives believe that the concentration of wealth and power into the hands of a select few actually does more harm than good to the general welfare of the country. A quick glance at the industrial revolution or “gilded age”, gives us insight on the social ills brought upon the country by unfettered capitalism. Monopolies and corporations that are “too big to fail” are NOT in the best interests of the American people.
Progressives take the view that progress is actually being stifled by the vast economic inequality between the rich and the poor. Progressives promote public policies that they believe will lead to positive social change.
Progressives seek a more equal distribution of resources amongst the many, not the few.
Progressives believe that corporations are NOT people. Corporations receive privileges from the people that can and should be removed if corporations fail to function for the overall good of the people. There should be a death penalty for corporations that abuse their power and/or commit crimes. Corporate "personhood" must be removed by Constitutional amendment.
Progressives believe that government should break up monopolies and regulate large corporations in order to protect the poor, working and middle classes. As a Republic, the purpose of the United States' government is to protect peoples' individual rights while enabling them to address issues facing their community as a whole.
Progressives focus on using government power to make large institutions play by a set of rules that protects the poor, working and middle classes. The government has an important role to play in protecting Americans from being ripped off and taken advantage of by pushing back hard against corporations, monopolies and oligarchs.
Progressives believe that many industries need to be regulated more closely to limit the excesses of free market capitalism in order to spread the wealth among a greater number of people in order to benefit society as a whole, rather than concentrate wealth and power under the control of a few individuals, whether those individuals are associated with corporations or with government.
Progressives believe that capitalism is the most expeditious way to grow the wealth of society BUT that can only occur within a properly structured business environment. Abusive, vulture, predatory capitalism MUST be prevented.
Progressives support the immediate halting of the outsourcing of American jobs by large corporations and support investments in our infrastructure, quality education and universal health care that will benefit everyone. These are all steps to improve ourselves as a country and kick start the economy in order to benefit "We the People."
Examples of markets that may have concentrated power into the hands of too few corporations and should be broken up and/or democratized include:
- Banking
- Mainstream media
- Social media
- Technology
- Search engines
- Pharmaceutical drugs
- Health insurance
- Health care
- Energy
4. SUPPORT FOR A LIVING WAGE AND WORKPLACE DEMOCRACY.
Progressives believe that workplace regulations, such as implementing the forty-hour work week, safety regulations supervised and regulated by OSHA inspectors, the banning of children working in factories and fair, living wages are all key successes that Progressives strive to protect, uphold and build upon.
Before these regulations, due to the absence of financial leverage, people (including children), often worked eighty to one hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents an hour, sometimes less. Many Progressives coined this abuse to be “wage slavery” and fought to establish a minimum wage that employers were required to pay their employees for what products they produced.
Progressives believe in livable and sustainable working wages. Current wages are artificially suppressed by business owners to ensure the greatest amount of profit, even in the face of rising productivity. This must change.
Progressives see worker ownership of the means of production, especially via cooperatives rather than corporations, as an advancement in workplace democracy.
Progressives believe that more businesses should be structured as worker cooperatives so that workers can share in an appropriate portion of the wealth that they help to generate.
Progressives believe that workers and consumers are being exploited by corporate monopolies and the wealthy class who own the means of production.
Progressives seek to adjust the imbalance of power between workers and business owners by increasing democracy and fairness in the workplace, unlike socialists or communists who seek government programs to redistribute wealth.
Progressives seek to raise the standard of living of the average member of society in order to achieve a positive social change.
Progressives support policies, rules, regulations and restrictions that help spread the wealth among participants (workers) in businesses that are privately owned and operated.
Progressives believe that workplace regulations, such as implementing the forty-hour work week, safety regulations supervised and regulated by OSHA inspectors, the banning of children working in factories and fair, living wages are all key successes that Progressives strive to protect, uphold and build upon.
Before these regulations, due to the absence of financial leverage, people (including children), often worked eighty to one hundred hours a week for twenty-five cents an hour, sometimes less. Many Progressives coined this abuse to be “wage slavery” and fought to establish a minimum wage that employers were required to pay their employees for what products they produced.
Progressives believe in livable and sustainable working wages. Current wages are artificially suppressed by business owners to ensure the greatest amount of profit, even in the face of rising productivity. This must change.
Progressives see worker ownership of the means of production, especially via cooperatives rather than corporations, as an advancement in workplace democracy.
Progressives believe that more businesses should be structured as worker cooperatives so that workers can share in an appropriate portion of the wealth that they help to generate.
Progressives believe that workers and consumers are being exploited by corporate monopolies and the wealthy class who own the means of production.
Progressives seek to adjust the imbalance of power between workers and business owners by increasing democracy and fairness in the workplace, unlike socialists or communists who seek government programs to redistribute wealth.
Progressives seek to raise the standard of living of the average member of society in order to achieve a positive social change.
Progressives support policies, rules, regulations and restrictions that help spread the wealth among participants (workers) in businesses that are privately owned and operated.
5. INVESTING IN THE COMMON WEALTH OF AMERICA.
Progressives value the fact that the United States is a melting pot (or chopped salad) of diverse people and cultures.
Progressives believe that it is important to invest in ourselves as a country.
Progressives advocate that everyone should progressively pay their fair share of taxes and that offshore tax havens should be abolished to prohibit the wealthiest from avoiding taxes.
Progressivism is an economic system that welcomes change and seeks progress and improvement FOR THE GOOD OF ALL SOCIETY, NOT JUST A SELECT FEW.
Progressives believe that government's main task is to REGULATE private enterprise to ensure that their actions support the common good of all the people and place the rights of the people above the rights of corporations.
Progressives believe in a free market economy so long as businesses and markets are not solely focused on personal gain but work together to also support the "public interest" or "common good."
Progressives value the fact that the United States is a melting pot (or chopped salad) of diverse people and cultures.
Progressives believe that it is important to invest in ourselves as a country.
Progressives advocate that everyone should progressively pay their fair share of taxes and that offshore tax havens should be abolished to prohibit the wealthiest from avoiding taxes.
Progressivism is an economic system that welcomes change and seeks progress and improvement FOR THE GOOD OF ALL SOCIETY, NOT JUST A SELECT FEW.
Progressives believe that government's main task is to REGULATE private enterprise to ensure that their actions support the common good of all the people and place the rights of the people above the rights of corporations.
Progressives believe in a free market economy so long as businesses and markets are not solely focused on personal gain but work together to also support the "public interest" or "common good."
6. WISE ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP.
Progressives believe that the health of the environment is imperative for the human species to progress forward.
Progressives believe that all forms of life are woven in an interconnected web and that man must act as a steward to maintain the equilibrium of these natural systems. As a species, we make use of the most advanced technological innovations and political reforms, but all of it is in vain if we (including our posterity), alter our environment in ways that result in damage and destruction that outweighs the desired progress.
Progressives are open to new ideas, technological breakthroughs and scientific innovation and they are willing to listen to others and welcome change that will improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans through policies that are designed to help the country as a whole.
Progressives believe that the health of the environment is imperative for the human species to progress forward.
Progressives believe that all forms of life are woven in an interconnected web and that man must act as a steward to maintain the equilibrium of these natural systems. As a species, we make use of the most advanced technological innovations and political reforms, but all of it is in vain if we (including our posterity), alter our environment in ways that result in damage and destruction that outweighs the desired progress.
Progressives are open to new ideas, technological breakthroughs and scientific innovation and they are willing to listen to others and welcome change that will improve the lives of the vast majority of Americans through policies that are designed to help the country as a whole.
Progressivism is NOT Socialism. Progressives support the ownership of the means of production by workers, not by the national or state government.
Progressivism could also be referred to as "Cooperative Capitalism."
Progressives seek to improve things in a peaceful way NOW, so that violent revolution is not necessary.
Progressives welcome progressive improvements while continuing to strive for further advancement. Utopia is the ideal, but it is not the only option.
Progressives focus on truly empowering "We the People."
Progressives believe in improving the human condition through public policy that benefits all people. The unifying theme is to call attention to the negative impacts of current institutions or ways of doing things, and to advocate to reform those institutions in order to encourage progress and positive change.
Progressives champion the advancement and adoption of new ideas and social reform and fight to enact changes that will benefit the 99%!
Progressivism could also be referred to as "Cooperative Capitalism."
Progressives seek to improve things in a peaceful way NOW, so that violent revolution is not necessary.
Progressives welcome progressive improvements while continuing to strive for further advancement. Utopia is the ideal, but it is not the only option.
Progressives focus on truly empowering "We the People."
Progressives believe in improving the human condition through public policy that benefits all people. The unifying theme is to call attention to the negative impacts of current institutions or ways of doing things, and to advocate to reform those institutions in order to encourage progress and positive change.
Progressives champion the advancement and adoption of new ideas and social reform and fight to enact changes that will benefit the 99%!
THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM
Please watch
the video below...
We seek to
find common ground
in the middle
of the political spectrum
in order to unite
Americans from both sides.
Power to the People!
NO ONE IS A PURE PROGRESSIVE ON EVERY ISSUE.
Political discussions are hopelessly tangled by a lack of agreement on basic definitions. One label is rarely enough to sum up the entirety of one's political beliefs.
Every human being has different views on different issues. Most people do not fit purely in any one category. Every issue presents a different set of choices and every issue is best solved by a different mixture of the factors listed below. Every system and every person's beliefs are a mixture of many political ideas and more.
Individuals can and do have conservative views on certain issues and more progressive or even radical and revolutionary views on others.
Some people support opening up certain markets and making them more free while also advocating for stricter rules, regulations and restrictions in other markets.
Some people want the government to control nearly everything and other people want to limit government intervention as much as possible.
Some people support opening up certain markets and making them more free while also advocating for stricter rules, regulations and restrictions in other markets.
Some people want the government to control nearly everything and other people want to limit government intervention as much as possible.
OTHER POLITICAL PHILOSOPHIES
Conservatives are generally opposed to change. They either want things to remain the way they are or return to "the way things used to be back in the good old days." One can be either a Conservative Capitalist or a Conservative Socialist. A conservative socialist is someone who doesn't want Social Security or Medicare to change. It is possible for an individual to be Conservative on some issues and Progressive on others, but on any specific issue, Conservativism (status quo) and Progressivism (reform) are diametrically opposed.
Free Market Capitalism is an economic system that is supposed to foster competition and innovation but also tends to create monopolies in unregulated free markets that crowd out competition and fair market practices resulting in severe income inequality. Profits from unregulated businesses often go to the few people who control the companies (capitalists) at the expense of their employees and customers. The free market rewards those who succeed but it should also be allowed to financially punish those businesses who fail or take advantage of the commonwealth of society.
National Socialism is an economic system in which the government literally OWNS and OPERATES the businesses in question. Socialists want to abolish capitalism because they believe that it exploits the working class. They want the working class to play an overpowering role in shifting society from capitalism to socialism either through a popular vote or going on a general strike or even going to the extreme of uprising or revolution.
Examples include retirement programs (Social Security), VA health care, military, public schools and universities, police and fire departments, disaster relief (FEMA), public libraries, public transportation, water and sewer systems, public broadcasting, public defenders, public parks, dams, national weather service, street lights, lotteries, public beaches, NASA, Amtrak, etc. Other countries have socialized large industries such as health care, energy, etc.
Examples include retirement programs (Social Security), VA health care, military, public schools and universities, police and fire departments, disaster relief (FEMA), public libraries, public transportation, water and sewer systems, public broadcasting, public defenders, public parks, dams, national weather service, street lights, lotteries, public beaches, NASA, Amtrak, etc. Other countries have socialized large industries such as health care, energy, etc.
Market Socialism (privatization) is an economic system in which government contracts with private businesses for services such as road and bridge building, military equipment and contracting, private prisons, single payer health insurance (Medicare, Medicaid), and trash collection are such examples.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_100_Contractors_of_the_U.S._federal_government
Subsidized Fascism - Many industries (banking, automotive, solar, agriculture, energy, housing, Obamacare, home and student loans) receive subsidies, bailouts or other support from the government. Failed capitalists are often the first to support government support for their failed businesses. They prefer to privatize their profits and socialize their losses. This unholy alliance between government and corporations is essentially Fascist in nature.
Below is an excerpt from the Progressive Party Platform of 1912:
"The conscience of the people, in a time of grave national problems, has called into being a new party, born of the nation’s sense of justice. We of the Progressive party here dedicate ourselves to the fulfillment of the duty laid upon us by our fathers to maintain the government of the people, by the people and for the people whose foundations they laid.
This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest. It is time to set the public welfare in the first place.
THE OLD PARTIES
Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
The deliberate betrayal of its trust by the Republican party, the fatal incapacity of the Democratic party to deal with the new issues of the new time, have compelled the people to forge a new instrument of government through which to give effect to their will in laws and institutions.
Unhampered by tradition, uncorrupted by power, undismayed by the magnitude of the task, the new party offers itself as the instrument of the people to sweep away old abuses, to build a new and nobler commonwealth."
This country belongs to the people who inhabit it. Its resources, its business, its institutions and its laws should be utilized, maintained or altered in whatever manner will best promote the general interest. It is time to set the public welfare in the first place.
THE OLD PARTIES
Political parties exist to secure responsible government and to execute the will of the people. From these great tasks both of the old parties have turned aside. Instead of instruments to promote the general welfare, they have become the tools of corrupt interests which use them impartially to serve their selfish purposes. Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
The deliberate betrayal of its trust by the Republican party, the fatal incapacity of the Democratic party to deal with the new issues of the new time, have compelled the people to forge a new instrument of government through which to give effect to their will in laws and institutions.
Unhampered by tradition, uncorrupted by power, undismayed by the magnitude of the task, the new party offers itself as the instrument of the people to sweep away old abuses, to build a new and nobler commonwealth."
A speech given by Theodore Roosevelt
Louisville, Kentucky
April 1912
"In his recent speech at Philadelphia President Taft stated that he was a Progressive, and this raises the question as to what a Progressive is.
More is involved than any man’s say-so as to himself.
A well-meaning man may vaguely think of himself as a Progressive without having even the faintest conception of what a Progressive is.
Both vision and intensity of conviction must go to the make-up of any man who is to lead the forward movement, and mildly good intentions are utterly useless as substitutes.
The essential difference, as old as civilized history, is between the men who, with fervor and broad sympathy and imagination, stand for the forward movement, the men who stand for the uplift and betterment of mankind, and who have faith in the people, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the men of narrow vision and small sympathy, who are not stirred by the wrongs of others. With these latter stand also those other men who distrust the people, and many of whom not merely distrust the people, but wish to keep them helpless so as to exploit them for their own benefit.
The difference has never been more accurately set forth than in a lecture by the great English writer, Mr. J.A. Froude, delivered some forty-five years ago, and running as follows:
Two kinds of men… appear as leaders in time of change.
On one side there are the… men who have no confidence in the people—who have no passionate convictions—men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed downward from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt, qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular intelligence.
Opposite to these are the men of faith—and by faith I do not mean belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in righteousness.…
They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is honorable, for what is good, for what is just. They believe that if they can find out that, then all hazards, in spite of all present consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred?
When the air is heavy with impostors, and men live only to make money,… and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and pure in man is smothered by corruption, fire of the same kind bursts out in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand by them.
They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of history or science or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be honest, that they shall be brave.… They know well that conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated, that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or intellect.
We of to-day who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired.
Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people. With this purpose in view, we propose to do away with whatever in our government tends to secure to privilege, and to the great sinister special interests, a rampart from behind which they can beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice, and frustrate the will of the people.
For this purpose we believe in securing for the people the direct election of United States Senators, exactly as the people have already secured in actual practice the direct election of the President. We believe in securing for the people the right of nominating candidates for office, from the President down, by direct primaries, because the convention system, good in its day, has been twisted from its purpose, so that the delegates to the conventions, when chosen under the present methods by pressure of money and patronage, often deliberately misrepresent instead of representing the popular will. We believe in securing to the people the exercise of a real and not merely a nominal control over their representatives in office, this control to include the power to secure the enactment of laws which the people demand, and the rejection of laws to which the people are opposed, if, after due effort, it is found impossible to get from the Legislature and the courts a real representation of the deliberate popular judgment in these matters.
But these and kindred measures are merely machinery, and each community must judge for itself as to the machinery which its needs make necessary.
The object, however, must be the same everywhere; that is, to give the people real control, and to have the people exercise this control in a spirit of the broadest sympathy and broadest desire to secure social and industrial justice for every man and woman, so that the work of all of us may be done and the lives of all of us lived under conditions which will tend to increase the dignity, the worth, and the efficiency of each individual.
If in any State the courts, in addition to doing justice in the ordinary cases between man and man, have striven to help and not hamper the people in their efforts to secure social and industrial justice in a far broader sense for the people as a whole, then in that community there may be no need for change as regards them. But where, in any community, as in my own State of New York, for instance, the highest court of the State, because of its adherence to outworn, to dead and gone systems of philosophy, and its lack of understanding of and sympathy with the living, the vital needs of those in the community whose needs are greatest, becomes a bulwark of privilege and the most effective of all means for preventing the people from working in efficient fashion for true justice, then I hold that the power, after due deliberation and in Constitutional fashion, to have their judgment made efficient and their interpretation of the Constitution made binding upon their servants the judges no less than upon their servants the legislators and executives?
Every man who fights fearlessly and effectively against special privilege in any form is to that extent a Progressive. Every man who, directly or indirectly, upholds privilege and favors the special interests, whether he acts from evil motives or merely because he is puzzle-headed or dull of mental vision or lacking in social sympathy, or whether he simply lacks interest in the subject, is a reactionary.
Every man is to that extent a Progressive if he stands for any form of social justice, whether it securing proper protection for factory girls against dangerous machinery, for securing a proper limitation of hours of labor for women and children in industry, for securing proper living conditions for those who dwell in the thickly crowded regions of our great cities, for helping, so far as legislators can help, all the conditions of work and life for wage-workers in great centers of industry, or for helping by the action both of the National and State governments, so far as conditions will permit, the men and women who dwell in the open country to increase their efficiency both in production on their farms and in business arrangements for the marketing of their produce, and also to increase the opportunities to give the best possible expression to their social life.
The man is a reactionary, whatever may be his professions and no matter how excellent his intentions, who opposes these movements, or who, if in high place, takes no interest in them and does not earnestly lead them forward.
When, in deference to the reactionaries in Congress, the President put a stop to the work of the Country Life Commission, so that for three years the National Government has done little but mark time, or indeed to step backward, as regards this movement, then, no matter how good his intentions, his actions ranged him against the Progressive side. When the President supports those courts which declare that the people have no power to do social justice by enacting laws such as those I have above outlined, and when he opposes the effort to give to the sober judgment of the people due effect, as against the decisions of a reactionary court, then he shows himself a reactionary.
When the President characterizes a moderate proposal to render effective the sober judgment of the American people, as against indefensible and reactionary court decisions in favor of the privileged classes, as “laying the ax at the foot of the tree of well-ordered freedom,” then the President is standing against the sane and moderate movement for social justice; he is standing in favor of privilege; and he thereby ranks himself against the Progressives, against the cause of justice for the helpless and the wronged, and on the side of the reactionaries, on the side of the beneficiaries of privilege and injustice.
Four years ago the Progressives supported Mr. Taft for President, and he was opposed by such representatives of special privilege as Mr. Penrose of Pennsylvania, Mr. Aldrich of Rhode Island, Mr. Gallinger of New Hampshire, and Messrs. Lorimer, Cannon, and McKinley of Illinois; and he was opposed by practically all the men of the stamp of Messrs. Guggenheim and Evans in Colorado, Mr. Cox in Ohio, and Mr. Patrick Calhoun of San Francisco. These men were not progressives then, and they do not pretend to be Progressives now. But, unlike the President, they know who is a Progressive and who is not. They know that he is not a Progressive. Their judgment in this matter is good. After three and a half years of association with and knowledge of the President, these and their fellows are now the President’s chief supporters; and they and the men who feel and act as they do in business and in politics give him the great bulk of his strength. The President says that he is a Progressive. These men know him well and have studied his actions for three years, and they regard him as being precisely the kind of Progressive whom they approve—that is, as not a Progressive at all.
Now, the progressiveness that meets and merits the cordial approval of these gentlemen is not the kind of progressiveness which we on our side champion. However good the President’s intentions, I believe that his actions have shown that he is entitled to the support of precisely these men. Take the most important bit of legislation enacted by the last Republican Congress—the Rate Bill. When this bill was submitted by the Administration, it was a thoroughly mischievous measure, which would have undone the good work that has been accomplished in the control of the great railways during the last twenty years. In that shape it was reported out of the Senate committee by its ardent champion, Senator Aldrich. In that shape it was championed by all those gentlemen whom I have mentioned who had it in their power to give such support.
But the Progressives in the Senate amended the bill, against the determined opposition of the reactionary friends of the Administration. They made it a good bill by striking out the chief features of the bill as the reactionaries framed it. They made but one mistake. They left in the bill the provision for a Commerce Court; and in its actual workings this feature of the bill has proved thoroughly mischievous, and should be repealed.
The gentlemen in question and their allies cordially approve the administration of the Pure Food and Drugs Bill during the last three years, which has resulted in Dr. Wiley’s resigning, because, as he says in print, the situation has become intolerable, and “the fundamental principles of the Food and Drugs Act had one by one been paralyzed and discredited.” He specifically mentioned among the interests engaged in the manufacture of misbranded or adulterated foods which had escaped from the control of the Bureau the interests engaged in “the manufacture of so-called whisky from alcohol, colors, and flavors.” The gentlemen I have named and the great interests back of them, and their allies, like- Mr. Tawney, of Minnesota, were responsible for the President’s abandoning the Country Life and Conservation Commissions, which had cost the Government nothing and had rendered invaluable service to the country; and they also cordially approved the nomination of Mr. Ballinger to the position of Secretary of the Interior.
For two years the Administration did everything in its power to undo the most valuable work that had been done in Conservation, especially in securing to the people the right to regulate water power franchise in the public interest. This effort became so flagrant and the criticism so universal that it was finally abandoned even by the Administration itself. As for the efforts to secure social justice in industrial matters, by securing child labor legislation, for instance, the Administration simply abandoned them completely.
Alike in its action and in its inaction, the conduct of the Administration during the last three years has been such as to merit the support and approval of Messrs. Aldrich, Gallinger, Penrose, Lorimer, Cox, Guggenheim, and the other gentlemen I have mentioned. I do not wonder that they support it, but I do not regard an Administration which has merited and which receives such support as being entitled and to call itself Progressive, no matter with what elasticity the word may be stretched.
No men have been closer or more interested students of the career of President Taft than these men, no men better understand its real significance, no men better appreciate what the effect of the continuance of this Administration for another four years would mean. I believe that their judgment upon the Administration and upon what its continuance would mean to the people can be accepted, and I think that their judgment, as shown by the extreme recklessness of their actions in trying to secure the President’s renomination, gives us an accurate gauge as to what the Administration merits from the people, and what the action of the people should be.
There is no question that in many States these gentlemen and those now allied with them are well aware that the majority of the people are against them, but they have set themselves to work by hook or by crook to overcome that majority. Under ordinary circumstances, in an ordinary political contest among politicians of substantially the same stamp, they would undoubtedly prefer to follow the majority of the people. They do not do so in this instance because they realize fully that the interests they champion are antagonistic to the interest of the people, and that on this occasion the line-up is clean-cut between the people on one side, and on the other the political bosses and all who represent special privilege and the evil alliance of big business with politics.
The Republican party is now facing a great crisis. It is to decide whether it will be, as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people, the party of progress, the party of social and industrial justice; or whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interests, the heir to those who were Lincoln’s most bitter opponents, the party that represents the great interests within and with out Wall Street which desire through their control over the servants of the pubic to be kept immune from punishment when they do wrong and to be given privileges to which they are not entitled.
The big business concern that is both honest and far-sighted will, I believe, in the end favor our effort to secure thorough-going supervision and control over industrial big business, just as we have now secured it over the business of inter-State transportation and the business of banking under the National law. We do not propose to do injustice to any man, but we do propose adequately to guarantee the people against injustice by the mighty corporations which make up the predominant and characteristic feature of modern industrial life.
Prosperity can permanently come to this country only on a basis of honesty and of fair treatment for all. Those men of enormous wealth who bitterly oppose every species of effective control by the people, through their Governmental agents, over the business use of that wealth are, I verily believe, most short-sighted as to their own ultimate interests. They should welcome such effort, they should welcome every effort to make them observe and to assist them in observing the law, so that their activities shall be helpful and not harmful to the American people. Most surely if the wise and moderate control we advocate does not come, then some day these men or their descendants will have to face the chance of some movement of really dangerous and drastic character being direct against them.
The very wealthy men who oppose this action illustrate the undoubted truth that some of the men who have the money touch, some of the men who can amass enormous fortunes, possess an ability as specialized and non-indicative of other forms of ability as the ability to play chess exceptionally well, or to add up four columns of figures at once. The men of wealth of this type are not only hostile to the interest of the country, but hostile to their own interests; their great business ability is unaccompanied by even the slightest ability to read the signs of the times or understand the temper of the American people.
I stand for the adequate control, the real control, of all big business, and especially of all monopolistic big business where it proves unwise or impossible to break up the monopoly.
There is a grim irony in the effect that has been produced upon Wall Street by the complete breakdown of the prosecutions against various trusts, notably the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, under the Sherman Law. I have always insisted that, while the Sherman Law should be kept upon the books so as to be used wherever possible against monopoly, yet that it is by itself wholly unable to afford the relief demanded by the American people as against all the great corporations actually or potentially guilty of anti-social practices. Wall Street was at first flurried by the decisions in the Oil and Tobacco Trust cases. But as regards the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, Wall Street has now caught up with the Administration.
The President has expressed his entire satisfaction with the Anti-Trust Law, and now that the result of the prosecutions under it has been to strengthen the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, to increase the value of their stocks, and, at least in the case of the Standard Oil, to increase the price to the consumer, Wall Street is also showing in practical fashion its satisfaction with the workings of the law, by its antagonism to us who intend to establish a real control of big business which shall not harm legitimate business, but shall really, and not nominally, put a stop to the evil practices of evil combinations.
The President has stated that he distrusts “impulsive action” by the public. I certainly greatly prefer deliberate action by the public, and in every proposal I have ever made I have always provided for such deliberate action. But I prefer even impulsive action by the public to action by the politicians against the interests of the public, whether this action be taken in tricky haste or with tricky deliberation. The President has warned us against soap-box primaries. At least these primaries are better than the primaries which represented the “impulsive action of the postmasters in States like Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, when these “impulsive” postmasters held their conventions at the earliest possible date, so as to affect the result in other States of the Union where there is a genuine Republican party.
I see by the press that in your own State [Kentucky] the postmasters have been warned to resign their leadership in the party committees; but, if the statements in the press are correct, the resignations are not demanded with any “impulsiveness.” On the contrary, they have been asked with such leisurely deliberation that the day for holding the primaries will have passed before the request becomes effective. Now, gentlemen, if the newspaper reports are correct, such a request is a good deal worse than a sham.
We are in a period of change; we are fronting a great period of further change. Never was the need more imperative for men of vision who are also men of action. Disaster is ahead of us if we trust to the leadership of the men whose hearts are seared and whose eyes are blinded, who believe that we can find safety in dull timidity and dull action, The unrest cannot be quieted by the ingenious trickery of those who profess to advance by merely marking time. It cannot be quieted by demanding only the prosperity which is to come to those who have little. There must be material prosperity; they are enemies of all of us who wantonly or unwisely interfere with or disregard it; but it can come in permanent shape only if obtained in accordance with, not against, the spirit of justice and of righteousness.
Clouds hover about the horizon throughout the civilized world. But here in America the fault is our own if the sky above us is not clear. We have a continent on which to work out or destiny. Our people, our men and women, are fit to face the mighty days. If we fail, the failure will be lamentable; for not only shall we fail for ourselves, but our failure will wreck the fond desires of all throughout the world who look toward us with the eager hope that here, in this great Republic, it shall be proved, from ocean to ocean, that the people can rule themselves, and, thus ruling, can give liberty and do justice both to themselves and to others.
The present contest is but a phase of the larger struggle. Assuredly the fight will go on. Our opponents, representing the brute power of ceded privilege, can win only by using the led captains of mercenary politics, and the crooked financiers who stand behind those led captains, and those newspapers which those financiers and politicians own, influence, or control. They can win only by playing upon the timidity or the shortsightedness or the mere lack of knowledge of worthy citizens, and by misleading them into supporting for the moment the powers that prey, the powers that pillage, the dread powers that exploit the people for their own purpose, and that turn popular government into a sinister sham.
Certain big men, who, alas have sometimes perverted the courts to their own uses, now tell us that it is impious to speak of the people’s insisting upon justice being done by the courts. We answer that with all our might we will uphold the courts against lawlessness; and that we also intend to see that in their turn the courts give justice to all. We say, in the words of Lincoln, that we must prevent wrong “being done either by Congress or courts. The people of these United States are rightful masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who prevent the Constitution.”
Again, Lincoln stated our case today when he said, in the course of his joint debate with Douglas, “That is the real issue. That is the issue which will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: You toil and work and earn bread and I’ll eat it. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who bestrides the people of his own nation and lives from the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
And of course this applies no more to the slave-owner or to the foreign despot than to the present-day American citizen who oppresses others by the abuse of special privilege, be his wealth great or little, be he the multi-millionaire owner of railways and mines and factories who forgets his duties to those who earn him his bread while earning their own, or be he only the owner of a foul little sweatshop in which he grinds dollars from the excessive and underpaid labor of haggard women.
We who stand for the cause of progress, for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind, are pledged to eternal war against tyranny and wrong, by the few or by the many, by a plutocracy or by a mob. We stand for justice and for fair play; fearless and confident we face the coming years, for we know that ours are the banners of justice and that all men who wish well to the people must fight under them. We fight to make this country a better place to live in for those who have been harshly treated by fat; and if we succeed, it will also be a better place to live in for those who have been treated? None of us can really prosper permanently if masses of men and women are ground down and forced to lead starved and sordid lives so that their souls are crippled like their bodies and the fine edge of their every feeling is blunted.
I ask that those of us to whom Providence, to whom fate, has been kind, remember that each must be his brother’s keeper, and that all must feel their obligation to the less fortunate who work beside us in the strain and press of our eager modern life.
I ask justice for the weak for their sakes, and I ask it also for the sake of our own children, and of our children’s children who are to come after us. This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in if it is not a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.
When I plead the cause of the crippled brakeman on a railway, of the overworked girl in a factory, of the stunted child toiling at inhuman labor, or all who work excessively or in unhealthy surroundings, of the family dwelling in the squalor of a noisome tenement, of the worn out farmer in regions where the farms are worn out also; when I protest against the unfair profits of unscrupulous and conscienceless men, or against the greedy exploitation of the helpless by the beneficiaries of privilege—in all these case I am not only fighting for the weak, I am also fighting for the strong.
The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice in the present.
If the fathers amuse others to eat bitter bread, the teeth of their own sons shall be set on edge.
Our cause is the cause of justice for all, in the interest of all.
Surely there was never a more noble cause; surely there was never a cause in which it was better worth while to spend and be spent."
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/who-is-a-progressive
Louisville, Kentucky
April 1912
"In his recent speech at Philadelphia President Taft stated that he was a Progressive, and this raises the question as to what a Progressive is.
More is involved than any man’s say-so as to himself.
A well-meaning man may vaguely think of himself as a Progressive without having even the faintest conception of what a Progressive is.
Both vision and intensity of conviction must go to the make-up of any man who is to lead the forward movement, and mildly good intentions are utterly useless as substitutes.
The essential difference, as old as civilized history, is between the men who, with fervor and broad sympathy and imagination, stand for the forward movement, the men who stand for the uplift and betterment of mankind, and who have faith in the people, on the one hand; and, on the other hand, the men of narrow vision and small sympathy, who are not stirred by the wrongs of others. With these latter stand also those other men who distrust the people, and many of whom not merely distrust the people, but wish to keep them helpless so as to exploit them for their own benefit.
The difference has never been more accurately set forth than in a lecture by the great English writer, Mr. J.A. Froude, delivered some forty-five years ago, and running as follows:
Two kinds of men… appear as leaders in time of change.
On one side there are the… men who have no confidence in the people—who have no passionate convictions—men who believe that all wholesome reforms proceed downward from the educated to the multitudes; who regard with contempt, qualified by terror, appeals to the popular conscience or to popular intelligence.
Opposite to these are the men of faith—and by faith I do not mean belief in dogmas, but belief in goodness, belief in justice, in righteousness.…
They are not contented with looking for what may be useful or pleasant to themselves; they look by quite other methods for what is honorable, for what is good, for what is just. They believe that if they can find out that, then all hazards, in spite of all present consequences to themselves, that is to be preferred?
When the air is heavy with impostors, and men live only to make money,… and the kingdom of heaven is bought and sold, and all that is high and pure in man is smothered by corruption, fire of the same kind bursts out in higher natures with a fierceness which cannot be controlled; and confident in truth and right, they call fearlessly on the seven thousand in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal to rise and stand by them.
They do not ask whether those whom they address have wide knowledge of history or science or philosophy; they ask rather that they shall be honest, that they shall be brave.… They know well that conscience is no exceptional privilege of the great or the cultivated, that to be generous and unselfish is no prerogative of rank or intellect.
We of to-day who stand for the Progressive movement here in the United States are not wedded to any particular kind of machinery, save solely as means to the end desired.
Our aim is to secure the real and not the nominal rule of the people. With this purpose in view, we propose to do away with whatever in our government tends to secure to privilege, and to the great sinister special interests, a rampart from behind which they can beat back the forces that strive for social and industrial justice, and frustrate the will of the people.
For this purpose we believe in securing for the people the direct election of United States Senators, exactly as the people have already secured in actual practice the direct election of the President. We believe in securing for the people the right of nominating candidates for office, from the President down, by direct primaries, because the convention system, good in its day, has been twisted from its purpose, so that the delegates to the conventions, when chosen under the present methods by pressure of money and patronage, often deliberately misrepresent instead of representing the popular will. We believe in securing to the people the exercise of a real and not merely a nominal control over their representatives in office, this control to include the power to secure the enactment of laws which the people demand, and the rejection of laws to which the people are opposed, if, after due effort, it is found impossible to get from the Legislature and the courts a real representation of the deliberate popular judgment in these matters.
But these and kindred measures are merely machinery, and each community must judge for itself as to the machinery which its needs make necessary.
The object, however, must be the same everywhere; that is, to give the people real control, and to have the people exercise this control in a spirit of the broadest sympathy and broadest desire to secure social and industrial justice for every man and woman, so that the work of all of us may be done and the lives of all of us lived under conditions which will tend to increase the dignity, the worth, and the efficiency of each individual.
If in any State the courts, in addition to doing justice in the ordinary cases between man and man, have striven to help and not hamper the people in their efforts to secure social and industrial justice in a far broader sense for the people as a whole, then in that community there may be no need for change as regards them. But where, in any community, as in my own State of New York, for instance, the highest court of the State, because of its adherence to outworn, to dead and gone systems of philosophy, and its lack of understanding of and sympathy with the living, the vital needs of those in the community whose needs are greatest, becomes a bulwark of privilege and the most effective of all means for preventing the people from working in efficient fashion for true justice, then I hold that the power, after due deliberation and in Constitutional fashion, to have their judgment made efficient and their interpretation of the Constitution made binding upon their servants the judges no less than upon their servants the legislators and executives?
Every man who fights fearlessly and effectively against special privilege in any form is to that extent a Progressive. Every man who, directly or indirectly, upholds privilege and favors the special interests, whether he acts from evil motives or merely because he is puzzle-headed or dull of mental vision or lacking in social sympathy, or whether he simply lacks interest in the subject, is a reactionary.
Every man is to that extent a Progressive if he stands for any form of social justice, whether it securing proper protection for factory girls against dangerous machinery, for securing a proper limitation of hours of labor for women and children in industry, for securing proper living conditions for those who dwell in the thickly crowded regions of our great cities, for helping, so far as legislators can help, all the conditions of work and life for wage-workers in great centers of industry, or for helping by the action both of the National and State governments, so far as conditions will permit, the men and women who dwell in the open country to increase their efficiency both in production on their farms and in business arrangements for the marketing of their produce, and also to increase the opportunities to give the best possible expression to their social life.
The man is a reactionary, whatever may be his professions and no matter how excellent his intentions, who opposes these movements, or who, if in high place, takes no interest in them and does not earnestly lead them forward.
When, in deference to the reactionaries in Congress, the President put a stop to the work of the Country Life Commission, so that for three years the National Government has done little but mark time, or indeed to step backward, as regards this movement, then, no matter how good his intentions, his actions ranged him against the Progressive side. When the President supports those courts which declare that the people have no power to do social justice by enacting laws such as those I have above outlined, and when he opposes the effort to give to the sober judgment of the people due effect, as against the decisions of a reactionary court, then he shows himself a reactionary.
When the President characterizes a moderate proposal to render effective the sober judgment of the American people, as against indefensible and reactionary court decisions in favor of the privileged classes, as “laying the ax at the foot of the tree of well-ordered freedom,” then the President is standing against the sane and moderate movement for social justice; he is standing in favor of privilege; and he thereby ranks himself against the Progressives, against the cause of justice for the helpless and the wronged, and on the side of the reactionaries, on the side of the beneficiaries of privilege and injustice.
Four years ago the Progressives supported Mr. Taft for President, and he was opposed by such representatives of special privilege as Mr. Penrose of Pennsylvania, Mr. Aldrich of Rhode Island, Mr. Gallinger of New Hampshire, and Messrs. Lorimer, Cannon, and McKinley of Illinois; and he was opposed by practically all the men of the stamp of Messrs. Guggenheim and Evans in Colorado, Mr. Cox in Ohio, and Mr. Patrick Calhoun of San Francisco. These men were not progressives then, and they do not pretend to be Progressives now. But, unlike the President, they know who is a Progressive and who is not. They know that he is not a Progressive. Their judgment in this matter is good. After three and a half years of association with and knowledge of the President, these and their fellows are now the President’s chief supporters; and they and the men who feel and act as they do in business and in politics give him the great bulk of his strength. The President says that he is a Progressive. These men know him well and have studied his actions for three years, and they regard him as being precisely the kind of Progressive whom they approve—that is, as not a Progressive at all.
Now, the progressiveness that meets and merits the cordial approval of these gentlemen is not the kind of progressiveness which we on our side champion. However good the President’s intentions, I believe that his actions have shown that he is entitled to the support of precisely these men. Take the most important bit of legislation enacted by the last Republican Congress—the Rate Bill. When this bill was submitted by the Administration, it was a thoroughly mischievous measure, which would have undone the good work that has been accomplished in the control of the great railways during the last twenty years. In that shape it was reported out of the Senate committee by its ardent champion, Senator Aldrich. In that shape it was championed by all those gentlemen whom I have mentioned who had it in their power to give such support.
But the Progressives in the Senate amended the bill, against the determined opposition of the reactionary friends of the Administration. They made it a good bill by striking out the chief features of the bill as the reactionaries framed it. They made but one mistake. They left in the bill the provision for a Commerce Court; and in its actual workings this feature of the bill has proved thoroughly mischievous, and should be repealed.
The gentlemen in question and their allies cordially approve the administration of the Pure Food and Drugs Bill during the last three years, which has resulted in Dr. Wiley’s resigning, because, as he says in print, the situation has become intolerable, and “the fundamental principles of the Food and Drugs Act had one by one been paralyzed and discredited.” He specifically mentioned among the interests engaged in the manufacture of misbranded or adulterated foods which had escaped from the control of the Bureau the interests engaged in “the manufacture of so-called whisky from alcohol, colors, and flavors.” The gentlemen I have named and the great interests back of them, and their allies, like- Mr. Tawney, of Minnesota, were responsible for the President’s abandoning the Country Life and Conservation Commissions, which had cost the Government nothing and had rendered invaluable service to the country; and they also cordially approved the nomination of Mr. Ballinger to the position of Secretary of the Interior.
For two years the Administration did everything in its power to undo the most valuable work that had been done in Conservation, especially in securing to the people the right to regulate water power franchise in the public interest. This effort became so flagrant and the criticism so universal that it was finally abandoned even by the Administration itself. As for the efforts to secure social justice in industrial matters, by securing child labor legislation, for instance, the Administration simply abandoned them completely.
Alike in its action and in its inaction, the conduct of the Administration during the last three years has been such as to merit the support and approval of Messrs. Aldrich, Gallinger, Penrose, Lorimer, Cox, Guggenheim, and the other gentlemen I have mentioned. I do not wonder that they support it, but I do not regard an Administration which has merited and which receives such support as being entitled and to call itself Progressive, no matter with what elasticity the word may be stretched.
No men have been closer or more interested students of the career of President Taft than these men, no men better understand its real significance, no men better appreciate what the effect of the continuance of this Administration for another four years would mean. I believe that their judgment upon the Administration and upon what its continuance would mean to the people can be accepted, and I think that their judgment, as shown by the extreme recklessness of their actions in trying to secure the President’s renomination, gives us an accurate gauge as to what the Administration merits from the people, and what the action of the people should be.
There is no question that in many States these gentlemen and those now allied with them are well aware that the majority of the people are against them, but they have set themselves to work by hook or by crook to overcome that majority. Under ordinary circumstances, in an ordinary political contest among politicians of substantially the same stamp, they would undoubtedly prefer to follow the majority of the people. They do not do so in this instance because they realize fully that the interests they champion are antagonistic to the interest of the people, and that on this occasion the line-up is clean-cut between the people on one side, and on the other the political bosses and all who represent special privilege and the evil alliance of big business with politics.
The Republican party is now facing a great crisis. It is to decide whether it will be, as in the days of Lincoln, the party of the plain people, the party of progress, the party of social and industrial justice; or whether it will be the party of privilege and of special interests, the heir to those who were Lincoln’s most bitter opponents, the party that represents the great interests within and with out Wall Street which desire through their control over the servants of the pubic to be kept immune from punishment when they do wrong and to be given privileges to which they are not entitled.
The big business concern that is both honest and far-sighted will, I believe, in the end favor our effort to secure thorough-going supervision and control over industrial big business, just as we have now secured it over the business of inter-State transportation and the business of banking under the National law. We do not propose to do injustice to any man, but we do propose adequately to guarantee the people against injustice by the mighty corporations which make up the predominant and characteristic feature of modern industrial life.
Prosperity can permanently come to this country only on a basis of honesty and of fair treatment for all. Those men of enormous wealth who bitterly oppose every species of effective control by the people, through their Governmental agents, over the business use of that wealth are, I verily believe, most short-sighted as to their own ultimate interests. They should welcome such effort, they should welcome every effort to make them observe and to assist them in observing the law, so that their activities shall be helpful and not harmful to the American people. Most surely if the wise and moderate control we advocate does not come, then some day these men or their descendants will have to face the chance of some movement of really dangerous and drastic character being direct against them.
The very wealthy men who oppose this action illustrate the undoubted truth that some of the men who have the money touch, some of the men who can amass enormous fortunes, possess an ability as specialized and non-indicative of other forms of ability as the ability to play chess exceptionally well, or to add up four columns of figures at once. The men of wealth of this type are not only hostile to the interest of the country, but hostile to their own interests; their great business ability is unaccompanied by even the slightest ability to read the signs of the times or understand the temper of the American people.
I stand for the adequate control, the real control, of all big business, and especially of all monopolistic big business where it proves unwise or impossible to break up the monopoly.
There is a grim irony in the effect that has been produced upon Wall Street by the complete breakdown of the prosecutions against various trusts, notably the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, under the Sherman Law. I have always insisted that, while the Sherman Law should be kept upon the books so as to be used wherever possible against monopoly, yet that it is by itself wholly unable to afford the relief demanded by the American people as against all the great corporations actually or potentially guilty of anti-social practices. Wall Street was at first flurried by the decisions in the Oil and Tobacco Trust cases. But as regards the Sherman Anti-Trust Law, Wall Street has now caught up with the Administration.
The President has expressed his entire satisfaction with the Anti-Trust Law, and now that the result of the prosecutions under it has been to strengthen the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trusts, to increase the value of their stocks, and, at least in the case of the Standard Oil, to increase the price to the consumer, Wall Street is also showing in practical fashion its satisfaction with the workings of the law, by its antagonism to us who intend to establish a real control of big business which shall not harm legitimate business, but shall really, and not nominally, put a stop to the evil practices of evil combinations.
The President has stated that he distrusts “impulsive action” by the public. I certainly greatly prefer deliberate action by the public, and in every proposal I have ever made I have always provided for such deliberate action. But I prefer even impulsive action by the public to action by the politicians against the interests of the public, whether this action be taken in tricky haste or with tricky deliberation. The President has warned us against soap-box primaries. At least these primaries are better than the primaries which represented the “impulsive action of the postmasters in States like Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina, when these “impulsive” postmasters held their conventions at the earliest possible date, so as to affect the result in other States of the Union where there is a genuine Republican party.
I see by the press that in your own State [Kentucky] the postmasters have been warned to resign their leadership in the party committees; but, if the statements in the press are correct, the resignations are not demanded with any “impulsiveness.” On the contrary, they have been asked with such leisurely deliberation that the day for holding the primaries will have passed before the request becomes effective. Now, gentlemen, if the newspaper reports are correct, such a request is a good deal worse than a sham.
We are in a period of change; we are fronting a great period of further change. Never was the need more imperative for men of vision who are also men of action. Disaster is ahead of us if we trust to the leadership of the men whose hearts are seared and whose eyes are blinded, who believe that we can find safety in dull timidity and dull action, The unrest cannot be quieted by the ingenious trickery of those who profess to advance by merely marking time. It cannot be quieted by demanding only the prosperity which is to come to those who have little. There must be material prosperity; they are enemies of all of us who wantonly or unwisely interfere with or disregard it; but it can come in permanent shape only if obtained in accordance with, not against, the spirit of justice and of righteousness.
Clouds hover about the horizon throughout the civilized world. But here in America the fault is our own if the sky above us is not clear. We have a continent on which to work out or destiny. Our people, our men and women, are fit to face the mighty days. If we fail, the failure will be lamentable; for not only shall we fail for ourselves, but our failure will wreck the fond desires of all throughout the world who look toward us with the eager hope that here, in this great Republic, it shall be proved, from ocean to ocean, that the people can rule themselves, and, thus ruling, can give liberty and do justice both to themselves and to others.
The present contest is but a phase of the larger struggle. Assuredly the fight will go on. Our opponents, representing the brute power of ceded privilege, can win only by using the led captains of mercenary politics, and the crooked financiers who stand behind those led captains, and those newspapers which those financiers and politicians own, influence, or control. They can win only by playing upon the timidity or the shortsightedness or the mere lack of knowledge of worthy citizens, and by misleading them into supporting for the moment the powers that prey, the powers that pillage, the dread powers that exploit the people for their own purpose, and that turn popular government into a sinister sham.
Certain big men, who, alas have sometimes perverted the courts to their own uses, now tell us that it is impious to speak of the people’s insisting upon justice being done by the courts. We answer that with all our might we will uphold the courts against lawlessness; and that we also intend to see that in their turn the courts give justice to all. We say, in the words of Lincoln, that we must prevent wrong “being done either by Congress or courts. The people of these United States are rightful masters of both Congress and courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who prevent the Constitution.”
Again, Lincoln stated our case today when he said, in the course of his joint debate with Douglas, “That is the real issue. That is the issue which will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time. The one is the common right of humanity, the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says: You toil and work and earn bread and I’ll eat it. No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who bestrides the people of his own nation and lives from the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”
And of course this applies no more to the slave-owner or to the foreign despot than to the present-day American citizen who oppresses others by the abuse of special privilege, be his wealth great or little, be he the multi-millionaire owner of railways and mines and factories who forgets his duties to those who earn him his bread while earning their own, or be he only the owner of a foul little sweatshop in which he grinds dollars from the excessive and underpaid labor of haggard women.
We who stand for the cause of progress, for the cause of the uplift of humanity and the betterment of mankind, are pledged to eternal war against tyranny and wrong, by the few or by the many, by a plutocracy or by a mob. We stand for justice and for fair play; fearless and confident we face the coming years, for we know that ours are the banners of justice and that all men who wish well to the people must fight under them. We fight to make this country a better place to live in for those who have been harshly treated by fat; and if we succeed, it will also be a better place to live in for those who have been treated? None of us can really prosper permanently if masses of men and women are ground down and forced to lead starved and sordid lives so that their souls are crippled like their bodies and the fine edge of their every feeling is blunted.
I ask that those of us to whom Providence, to whom fate, has been kind, remember that each must be his brother’s keeper, and that all must feel their obligation to the less fortunate who work beside us in the strain and press of our eager modern life.
I ask justice for the weak for their sakes, and I ask it also for the sake of our own children, and of our children’s children who are to come after us. This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in if it is not a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.
When I plead the cause of the crippled brakeman on a railway, of the overworked girl in a factory, of the stunted child toiling at inhuman labor, or all who work excessively or in unhealthy surroundings, of the family dwelling in the squalor of a noisome tenement, of the worn out farmer in regions where the farms are worn out also; when I protest against the unfair profits of unscrupulous and conscienceless men, or against the greedy exploitation of the helpless by the beneficiaries of privilege—in all these case I am not only fighting for the weak, I am also fighting for the strong.
The sons of all of us will pay in the future if we of the present do not do justice in the present.
If the fathers amuse others to eat bitter bread, the teeth of their own sons shall be set on edge.
Our cause is the cause of justice for all, in the interest of all.
Surely there was never a more noble cause; surely there was never a cause in which it was better worth while to spend and be spent."
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/who-is-a-progressive
