But to a surprising degree they did not have a national blueprint in mind at the start. In stark contrast to the prescriptive ideology of socialism, which was also gaining adherents at the turn of the last century, Progressive reformers were instead intensely pragmatic, using the new methods of social science to test the merits of different solutions. Such methods, Walter Lippmann had argued, would be the key to mastery. Indeed, true innovation requires openness to experimentation that is not premised upon ideological beliefs.
