The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge. Thomas J. Tacoma
continued when the Court ruled in Buttfield v. Stranahan (1904) that Congress could create and empower a Board of Tea Inspectors to recommend and enforce tea standards that would carry the force of law. This placed an essentially legislative power in the hands of an executive agency—and the Court upheld it.[72]
Abandoning constitutional formalism, the Progressives successfully expanded the scope of state and federal government regulations. In the federal structure established by the U.S. Constitution, the police powers to regulate for the health, safety, and welfare of the community were traditionally reserved to the state governments. This distinction was part of the reserved sovereignty of the states that the authors of the Federalist had argued was essential to the Constitution of 1787.[73] But the Progressives smuggled the police powers into federal regulations through their constitutional power to tax and to regulate interstate commerce.[74] In 1895, Congress passed a law prohibiting the interstate shipment of lottery tickets. In 1902, in a move clearly calculated to prevent further sales of a specific good, Congress raised the tax on artificially colored oleomargarine. The Supreme Court upheld these laws, validating Congress’s new experiments in national regulation. Other laws, such as the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 and the Mann White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, extended the federal government’s control over food production and over prostitution. Likewise, in 1898 Congress passed the Erdman Act, which sought to prohibit “yellow dog” contracts that aimed to prevent employees from unionizing. In 1906, the Employer’s Liability Act made rail carriers engaged in interstate commerce liable for on-the-job injuries or the death of their workers. In 1916, the Keating-Owen Act (the Child Labor Act) made illegal the sale of goods produced in factories that employed children for excessively long hours. The Adamson Act of 1917 provided for a mandatory eight-hour day for workers involved in interstate railroad business. Some of these laws were struck down by the Court as unconstitutional, but most were upheld.[75]
As a necessary corollary of the expanded scope of governmental regulation, the Progressives pushed for expert commissions, bureaus, and agencies who could manage the particular details of regulation from day to day. That President Roosevelt added over fifty thousand government jobs to the civil services list belongs to this trend, and the expert “Tea Commission” is but another example of the same phenomenon.[76] The old method of regulating giant corporations and trusts—breaking them up through lawsuits under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890—proved less desirable than “regulation by means of an administrative commission, staffed by experts and capable of adjusting the relations between business and government.”[77] Roosevelt had campaigned for this kind of regulation in 1912; Wilson incorporated it into the legislative and regulatory agenda of his own presidency. The Federal Trade Commission, for instance, was created in 1914 with the broad power to prohibit unfair methods of competition or deceptive practices in business. The law left it to the five-member Commission to define just what “unfair methods” meant. Similarly, under the newly created Department of Commerce and Labor, Congress had added the Bureau of Corporations in 1903. The creation of the Federal Reserve Board in 1913, with its general power to regulate monetary and credit policies for the whole nation, was part-and-parcel of this movement. During the World War, Congress went along with Wilson in creating many new agencies and commissions—the U.S. Shipping Board, the Federal Farm Loan Board, the Railway Labor Board, and in 1921, the Bureau of the Budget.[78]
Conclusion
The net effect of the Progressive reforms was to expand both size and scope of the federal government. At the same time, the exclusive power of the political parties to control candidate selection was broken, and the power of state officials was largely circumscribed. The candidate-centered elections that began to emerge as the norm after the election of 1912 indicated the rising influence of direct primaries, but the creation of new expert agencies and commissions set a precedent to be followed for the rest of the twentieth century. The new power of presidential leadership over national politics and in social or cultural matters was another remarkable shift away from the nineteenth-century Whig conception of the presidency.[79] Perhaps the greatest change brought about by the Progressives, however, stemmed from their critique of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. No longer would a strict interpretation of the Constitution guide the federal government or serve to limit its powers. Government must be made to work for the people, the Progressives believed, and legal or constitutional formalism must bend to empirical realities.[80]
Little of this would have been possible if not for the philosophical and intellectual revolution that preceded the political movement. Of course, the transformation of the American intellectual landscape at the end of the nineteenth century was aided by the enormous changes in the economic and cultural conditions of the nation. Any observer of the years from 1880 to 1900 would have noticed that the circumstances of the nation now appeared worse for labor, that the lot of farmers was as hard as ever, and that large-scale immigration to the United States was presenting new problems in the cities.
These observations, however, need not have led directly to the conclusions drawn by the Progressive reformers that a more active federal government was necessary. Perhaps the problems of industrial society and the capitalist order could be solved without turning to nonconstitutional measures. Indeed, perhaps some solutions beyond nationalizing economic regulations and new bureaucratic agencies could be found. Other currents in American political thought certainly did speak even to the myriad new problems now confronting the United States. Progressivism may have been the dominant public philosophy of the early twentieth century, but it was neither perfectly unified nor was it the only extant political tradition. Other strands in American political thought still spoke effectively to politicians and voters. It was primarily on these other strands that Calvin Coolidge drew.
Notes
1.
For a thoughtful explanation of the political theory undergirding the American founding, see Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). For a helpful interpretation of the governmental architecture created by the founding generation, see the third volume of Paul A. Rahe’s Republics Ancient and Modern trilogy, Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
2.
This chapter does not aim at originality, but seeks merely to synthesize and organize major interpretations of Progressivism from the past twenty-five years. See Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Charles Kesler, I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism (New York: Broadside Books, 2012); Bradley Watson, Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2009); John Marini, “Theology, Metaphysics, and Positivism: The Origins of the Social Sciences and the Transformation of the American University,” in Challenges to the American Founding: Slavery, Historicism, and Progressivism in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Ronald J. Pestritto and Thomas G. West (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 163–194; William Morrissey, The Dilemma of Progressivism: How Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson Reshaped the American Regime of Self-Government (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009); and Paul D. Moreno, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). I also draw on the classic studies of Progressivism: Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform (New York: Vintage Books, 1955); Arthur Link and Richard L. McCormick’s Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1983); and Robert H. Wiebe’s excellent study, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
3.
See Arthur S. Link, “What Happened to the Progressive Movement in the 1920’s?” The American Historical Review 64, no. 4 (July 1959): 833–851.
4.
On Taft, see Sidney Milkis, “William Howard Taft and the Struggle for the Soul of the Constitution,”