Elvin T. Lim
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- February 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199812189
- eISBN:
- 9780199382606
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199812189.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics
This chapter examines the Progressive era, which started from the 1890s and spanned the 1910s. One cannot make sense of this kaleidoscopic movement unless one incorporates the missing piece to ...
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This chapter examines the Progressive era, which started from the 1890s and spanned the 1910s. One cannot make sense of this kaleidoscopic movement unless one incorporates the missing piece to conventional accounts of it: the movement’s debt to Anti-Federalism. Both the Democratic and Republican parties could claim the Progressive mantra at the turn of the twentieth century because it was Federalism and Anti-Federalism in more perfect equipoise than possibly any other movement in American history. Although the historical consensus appears to be that the era is to be remembered by the fierce “New Nationalism” of Theodore Roosevelt, it is just as well, if not better, understood by the romantic idealism of Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” and the philosophy and spirit of Anti-Federalism.Less
This chapter examines the Progressive era, which started from the 1890s and spanned the 1910s. One cannot make sense of this kaleidoscopic movement unless one incorporates the missing piece to conventional accounts of it: the movement’s debt to Anti-Federalism. Both the Democratic and Republican parties could claim the Progressive mantra at the turn of the twentieth century because it was Federalism and Anti-Federalism in more perfect equipoise than possibly any other movement in American history. Although the historical consensus appears to be that the era is to be remembered by the fierce “New Nationalism” of Theodore Roosevelt, it is just as well, if not better, understood by the romantic idealism of Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” and the philosophy and spirit of Anti-Federalism.
