We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution

by Jill Lepore

Beginning in the 1890s, the Progressive spirit straddled both the Republican and Democratic parties and animated surprisingly vital third parties, too: the People’s Party, the Progressive Party, and the Socialist Party. The Progressive agenda centered on expanding the power of the federal government to regulate the economy and relations between labor and capital and to restrain the power of corporations. These goals required constitutional changes to which a great many people objected, including a deeply conservative Supreme Court. Progressivism can be understood as an attempt, as the editor Herbert Croly explained, to overthrow “the monarchy of the Constitution.” 8 The Progressive era renewed the American philosophy of amendment: the Constitution had become amendable again—to Progressives’ eyes, not amendable enough, and to the eyes of conservatives, far more amendable than it was ever intended to be.