Businessmen and Reform: A Study of the Progressive Movement

by Robert H. Wiebe

In this perceptive, influential book, Robert Wiebe shows how businessmen helped to shape and were shaped by social reform in the early years of the 20th century. The Progressive Era served as a way station between agrarian and urban America: into it came men and women, institutions, and values born on the farms and in the towns; out of it emerged the first practical experiments in social reorganization for an industrial era. Although this exciting, noisy, and hopeful period contained much lost motion, beneath the tumult it contributed lasting changes in American life. In particular, demands came largely from a wide range of middle-income Americans whose arrival as organized, articulate, and demanding citizens reordered the social structure. Privileges of leadership were redistributed to accommodate these challengers. In the process, as Mr. Wiebe shows, businessmen took the lead in demanding reforms but divided into bitterly hostile factions and shied away from movements to extend democracy and public welfare. "Gracefully written, thoroughly researched, and imaginative...Wiebe s approach to progressivism, through "content" rather than through personality, and through the organized group rather than through the individual, incontrovertibly has great value." American Historical Review.

297 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1988

About the author

A specialist in American business history, Robert Huddleston Wiebe taught at Michigan State University, Columbia University and Northwestern University.

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book, now over 50 years old, was one of the first to look at how business reacted to the Progressive movement. Unlike Gabriel Kolko, who made the Progressive movement look like an organized business conspiracy, Robert Wiebe shows that business was divided on almost every important issue of the era.

The book centers on two main organizations, the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. NAM had earlier organized to open up foreign markets for US manufacturers, but in 1902, a group lead by Indiana manufacturer David Parry, with his associates James Van Cleave and John Kirby, took over the organization in a plurality vote, and turned it into a rabid, but rapidly growing, anti-union shop. Still, the group, mainly of small, Midwestern businesses, often endorsed "progressive" aims. The NAM lobbied for Theodore Roosevelt's new Department of Commerce and Labor in 1903, since it thought ti would check the "trusts" that bothered many of its small members. Its "Pure Food Committee" actively lobbied for the Food and Drug Act, and its national convention endorsed it. They also endorsed an optional national incorporation law. Although NAM opposed most tariff reform, they also helped fund an "American Reciprocity Tariff League," with Herbert Miles, a Wisconsin wagon manufacturer, as its lead, which argued for both new reciprocity treaties and a special "tariff commission" to decide on correct rates. Its National Industrial Conference Board of 1916 helped unite many businessmen around "scientific management," and finally brought many of the large businesses (such as General Motors, General Electric, and Westinghouse) on board, with the promise of becoming closer to government.

The US Chamber of Commerce was actually the second attempt by the US Department of Labor and Commerce to organize business. When Department Secretary Charles Nagel called the Boston Chamber of Commerce, along with reporter John Fahey, and the Chicago Association of Commerce, represented by Harry Wheeler, to organize a national business group in 1912, the goal was to get business to help in politics, including for progressive reforms. The Chamber was able to use its regular mailed referendums to members to establish business policies on a host of issues. Its polled members ended up supporting the new Federal Reserve Act of 1913, and President Wilson even nominated Wheeler to the Board (he refused). It was also one of the first to organize business behind a tariff commission with its "National Tariff Commission League." Yet, despite regular polling on specific issues, the work of Wheeler and Fahey made sure the Chamber stayed surprisingly nonpartisan

The Chamber's nonpartisanship was the exception, however. As Wiebe shows, almost every business organization considered itself an adjunct of the Republican Party, and it regularly denounced any accommodation with the Democrats, or predicted untold disaster if the Democrats got power. Yet, as Wiebe also shows, after 1913 they were able to work with Democrats to pass some reforms, such as the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission of 1914, or the "Rainey Act" Tariff Commission of 1916. Again and again, "progressive businessmen," usually small businesses from the Midwest, worked to create these new commissions, which they hoped would stabilize business and listen to their pleas. It was an important, though still oft-forgotten, part of the Progressive movement as a whole. The fact that it still isn't included in most histories shows Wiebe's book still hasn't penetrated the consciousness of most historians, unfortunately.