The Progressive Movement, 1898-1914 - by Arnold Kling
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The Progressive Movement, 1898-1914<br>lecture 3 in our series
Arnold Kling<br>Jun 10, 2026
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America 1898–1914<br>Lecture Three<br>The Progressive Impulse: Reform and Its Discontents<br>Part One: Philadelphia, February 2, 1912
The Setting
It is an election year, and the Republican Party is in trouble.<br>William Howard Taft sits in the White House, a large, amiable, judicially-minded man who has spent three years disappointing the reform wing of his own party. He is not a reactionary. His antitrust record is stronger than his predecessor’s by the numbers. He has signed railroad regulation into law, supported the income tax amendment, moved the direct election of senators forward. But he has also signed a tariff that Progressives regard as a capitulation to corporate interests, sided with the old guard against Progressive insurgents in Congress, and managed the split with Theodore Roosevelt over conservation policy with a clumsiness that has turned a personal friendship into an open feud. He inspires no one. His party’s progressive base looks elsewhere.<br>Theodore Roosevelt has declined to run. He has said so repeatedly and with apparent conviction. His hat is not in the ring. He is a former president honoring the two-term tradition, writing and traveling and insisting that his political career is behind him. Progressive Republicans who cannot stomach Taft have taken him at his word and turned their enthusiasm toward the one serious alternative — the Senator from Wisconsin, Robert M. La Follette.<br>La Follette has spent twenty years fighting the railroad and corporate interests that once controlled Wisconsin politics as completely as any feudal lord controlled his peasants. He has rebuilt his state’s government from the ground up — direct primaries, railroad regulation, workers compensation, tax reform, a civil service staffed by university-trained experts rather than party hacks. He has carried those battles to Washington, where his Senate speeches against corporate power run for hours and fill the galleries. He is difficult, uncompromising, occasionally exhausting, and entirely serious. Progressive Republicans who want a candidate who means it have organized behind him, formed the National Progressive Republican League, and begun building a national campaign.<br>By the winter of 1912 the campaign is running. But it is running on enthusiasm and commitment rather than money, and La Follette himself is running on fumes.<br>His daughter Mary has been seriously ill, and he has spent nights at her bedside while managing his Senate duties and a national campaign simultaneously. The strain is visible to those who know him well. He is a man of formidable physical energy who has been drawing on reserves that are no longer there. His supporters know it. Some of them are beginning, quietly and with guilty conscience, to have conversations about what happens if Roosevelt changes his mind.<br>The Dinner
On the evening of February 2nd, La Follette arrives at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington to address the annual dinner of the Periodical Publishers Association — the owners and editors of the major magazines and newspapers of the country. It is not a friendly audience. La Follette has spent years arguing that the American press has been corrupted by its dependence on corporate advertising, that publishers suppress news unfavorable to their major advertisers, that the free press enshrined in the Constitution has become in practice the servant of the same concentrated wealth he has been fighting his entire career. He is going to make that argument tonight, to the men he is arguing it about.<br>The room is full of powerful and skeptical men. Some are openly hostile. Some are curious. Some are supporters who have come to see their candidate perform and go home reassured. La Follette’s speeches are legendary for their forensic power and their command of detail — he prepares with an obsessiveness that reflects both his legal training and his temperament. Tonight he has his notes. He has his argument. What he does not have is the physical and mental reserves to deliver it.<br>He begins, and something is immediately wrong.<br>The speech is about press corruption, about the suppression of news, about the way corporate money flows through advertising into editorial decisions and out the other side as silence on the things that matter. It is an argument La Follette knows as well as he knows his own name. But tonight the argument will not come out straight. He loses his place. He returns to passages he has already delivered and delivers them again, with the same emphasis, as though for the first time. The speech that was meant to run perhaps an hour runs past ninety minutes and then past two hours. Members of the audience begin to stir. Some rise quietly and leave. Others exchange glances across the table — the particular glance of people witnessing something they will be...