I am re-reading some books on the Progressive Era and need to look through once again Gabriel Kolko's classic "The Triumph of Conservatism." The older narrative of the Progressive Era is woefully inadequate for a factual discussion of the politics and politics of the early 20th Century. In reading more revisionist histories like David Sarasohn's "The Party of Reform" the bias of most historians against the Democrats and in favor of the more "respectable" insurgents within the Republican Party is clear. Even during the Progressive Era there was a bias in which respectable middle class oriented reformers looked down at the Democratic Party as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion." That a party with such strong ties to the agrarian and racially conservative South could elect politicians that were progressive on a host of economic issues was unfathomable to the more Republican-leaning reformers. Across the North to be respectable meant to be a Republican and reformers, and later historians working off of the reformers' own work, put blinders on to the fact that on the whole the Democratic Party, not the Republican Party, was the more reform-oriented of the two parties. This gap between insurgents within a conservative Republican Party and the more consistently reform-oriented Democratic Party also plays out in creating clear disagreements over what is and isn't a progressive issue, ranging from trusts to prohibition to foreign policy.

There was a divide, now often overlooked in mainstream narratives, between the Democratic and Republican parties over the issue of trusts and the concentration of economic power. "They [supporters of Roosevelt] are unable to understand that the thousands of millions of capital which they propose to regulate will as certainly seize the government as the slave-holding oligarchy seized the government," penned the New York World. On the other hand, Herbert Croly wrote in defense of the large trusts, "The new organization of American industry has created an economic mechanism which is capable of being wonderfully and indefinitely serviceable to the American people." While Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressives believed in "good trusts" managed by scientific regulation the Democrats rejected outright the belief that such a concentration of economic power wedded to government agencies could ever be good.

So on two sides of the aisle you had two movements claiming to be reformers. On some issues, such as reducing the tariff, the income tax, election of Senators, and more paternalism economic regulations (child labor laws), there was a fair degree of agreement on what the "progressive" stance was. However, the two parted ways on several other defining issues of the era. In addition to trusts, the emphasis on a bellicose foreign policy by Theodore Roosevelt stands in sharp contrast to the more restrained foreign policy of the Democrats who from Cleveland to Bryan had opposed the imperialism of the GOP. Only Woodrow Wilson, who's personal Anglophilia helped push the country into the Great War, represents a deviation from this tradition. Prohibition and nativism, two causes of middle class reformers afraid of the immigrant "other," were certainly not causes embraced by the Democratic Party to the same degree.

The standard narrative views Woodrow Wilson as a progressive hero dragging his outdated agrarian Democratic Party into the 20th Century. David Sarasohn's "The Party of Reform" casts serious doubt on this narrative. Wilson, a conservative at heart, embraced progressivism to the extent that he had to as a candidate for the Democratic Party nomination. The Democratic Party, as illustrated both by William Jennings Bryan's continued domination of the party and the party's legislative record after winning a Congressional majority in 1910, was the more "progressive" of the two parties. If Wilson had not embraced progressivism the outcome would have most likely have been President Champ Clark. Personally, based on Wilson's racial conservatism and bellicose Anglophilia, I think a President Clark would have been a better outcome.

The enigma that remains after revisionist history corrects our view Woodrow Wilson and his Democratic Party in Congress is how the agrarian Jeffersonian party was able to embrace such an activist vision of government. That's a big question that I think has been unanswered so far in my readings. Some issues, such as opposition to a protective tariff, seem entirely consistent throughout the history of the party (up to recent times at least). Others, such as the direct election of Senators, fit well within the Jacksonian spirit of the party. But it seems there's a question as to why the party came to embrace economic paternalism in general. I think the answer lies largely in the party having a base in the South that, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, was little more than a economic colony or dependency. Within this climate I can understand how the party embraced more statist policies in hopes of breaking the stranglehold Northeast capital had on the nation. Breaking up trusts, unlike regulation of trusts, fits within the Jacksonian distrust of the concentration of power even if it seems like a deviation from the Jeffersonian desire for limited government and free markets. The big picture makes it questionable that William Jennings Bryan actually changed the party but argues instead that he benefited from trends outside of his control.