PROGRESSIVISM HAD ROOTS in late nineteenth-century populism; Progressivism was the middle-class version: indoors, quiet, passionless. Populists raised hell; Progressives read pamphlets. Populists had argued that the federal government’s complicity in the consolidation of power in the hands of big banks, big railroads, and big businesses had betrayed both the nation’s founding principles and the will of the people, and that the government itself was riddled with corruption.
