The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again

by Robert D. Putnam

The Progressive movement (and eventually Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party) embodied this discontent. By 1912 such third parties would receive 35 percent of the national popular vote for president, the high-water mark for third parties in American history and a symptom of public discontent with the polarized party system.11 The new issues jostling for a place on the national agenda included insurance for the elderly, the jobless, and the disabled; progressive income and estate taxation; environmental regulation; labor reform; the overweening power of big business monopolies; women’s suffrage; campaign finance reform; and universal health insurance. (The parallels to our contemporary political agenda are striking.) Initially, support for such reforms had been concentrated among progressive Democrats, but as the new century opened, Progressivism also found strong champions among liberal Republicans, like Teddy Roosevelt, and the Republican Party began to split into the “stand-patters” and the emerging “Progressive” wing. This cross-party Progressive movement had first surfaced at the state and local level in the 1880s and 1890s, but gained power at the national level with TR’s unexpected ascent to the presidency after McKinley’s assassination in 1901.