all right this is open stocks u.s history chapter 21 section 4 progressivism in the white house so theodore roosevelt was the first progressive president so first progressive president now for the most part the federal government you know and again we have mentioned this in some of the previous chapters was that the progressive movement spread from local to state to the federal government and the federal government was kind of the last um last part of the government to respond to really this progressive impulse and so when roosevelt became president in 1901 this was the first time that you had someone who was reform-minded in the most powerful and highest office in the land now roosevelt himself actually came to that position via an assassination the president prior william mckinley was assassinated this is actually a photo of mckinley being shot uh teddy roosevelt who you see pictured right here was the vice president then became president and of course a lot of those politicians that were not reform-minded remarked you know that damn cowboy is now president meaning that here was a guy with a lot of these what what most traditional politicians might think is radical ideas progressive ideas was now in charge and as soon as roosevelt assumed the presidency via being the vice president and then filling in for mckinley who was shot and killed then began to enact his progressive agenda the department of commerce and labor was established by roosevelt this was to investigate trust again recall trusts we're really centers of economic power you know trust was a group of investors who owned owned multiple companies and were able to exercise pretty much monopolistic power that is they're the only people in that industry to produce and therefore can charge whatever prices that they want and so these trusts or these entities of you know groups of investors groups of owners really came to represent and symbol or became a symbol of centralized economic power and that's essentially what roosevelt set out to do by quote-unquote busting the trust he was successful in breaking up the northern securities company in 1904 so roosevelt broke up this trust which included people like jp morgan and john rockefeller who are amongst the most powerful people in the country economically and even politically and so for this roosevelt earned the nickname the trust buster he was known for being this president who is willing to take on big business however roosevelt distinguished between good trust and bad trust that there were some trusts that were good that benefited the united states but the bad trusts were the ones that were bad for the us overall so it wasn't that all trusts were bad it was that certain ones that exploited the nation's resources exploited the nation's workers etc etc and it was the bad trust really that should be broken up for this reason roosevelt was also really good at using what was called the bully pulpit and this might be the you know what we might call the media he often took to newspapers for examples made speeches in order to bully companies into doing what he wished and oftentimes this meant taking on the very rich and very powerful another good example of roosevelt's willingness to take on big business happened in 1902 when coal workers went on strike unlike previous presidents which had pretty much only favored the site of business roosevelt intervened and at least you know we might not say that he sided with the workers but he took a neutral position and in fact uh from this strike workers saw an improvement as a result you know you had never had a present we might say just from this just to make things simple first time a president sided with the workers right all throughout the gilded age whether it was the great railroad strike of 1877 or whether it was the uh the pullman strike of 19 or sorry the pullman strike of 1894 that whenever the federal government got involved uh it always sided with the interests of business now roosevelt became the first really the first president to side with workers even though he was more of a neutral position so you know he was something new in his uh willingness to take on big business and centers of concentrated economic power roosevelt called his progressive agenda the square deals this is roosevelt's we might want to distinguish teddy roosevelt he was called teddy's his nickname was teddy theodore roosevelt later on there's another roosevelt as president can sometimes be confusing so teddy roosevelt's progressive agenda and he called it the square deal because he said that all sides involved ought to have a square deal and like a square that meant even on all sides so when it came to for example the interest of business versus labor roosevelt just wanted to make sure that both business and labor were getting equal terms like a square equal signs no side was favored over the other so in addition to his willingness to take on big business roosevelt also offered protection to consumers uh this came in the form of two different laws the meat inspection act and the food and drug act both of these laws were inspired by upton sinclair the jungle upton sinclair was a muckraker author right so he was one of these individuals dedicated to bringing awareness to the issues presented in gilded age society he wrote a book called the jungle which was to expose working conditions in meat factories right so what he wanted to do was to create reforms that would make it easier for those who are working in the meat factories make it less dangerous higher pay etc etc however when his book was published people paid actually very little attention to the working conditions and instead paid attention to the food itself what upton sinclair revealed was that the meat that was being produced in these factories was disgusting it was rotten that there were dead animals that were going into like the sausage and stuff like that and uh you know sinclair famously said i had i had aimed or i wanted to reform people's minds but instead i hit them in the stomach and made them uh nauseous from reading this book and so uh roosevelt was one of the people who read the jungle and this spurred action he passed the meat inspection act of 1906 that is federal inspections for meat again to make sure that there's no dead animals and all this other gross stuff that sinclair talked about in his book going in there he also helped pass the food and drug act which 1906 which required food and drugs to label slash list all ingredients right that before essentially you had these companies that were producing food and drugs and tonics and medicines and they just lied about what the ingredients were the food and drug act made that illegal so that you had to list what was inside of those products on whatever product that was so both of these things fall under this umbrella of consumer protection right looking out for the little guy so to speak roosevelt was also part of his square deal and part of his progressive reform was his reform to public land roosevelt might be also one of the first major presidents concerned with the environment now he was concerned with the environment in kind of a different way roosevelt wanted to conserve natural resources that during the gilded age timber companies oil companies mining companies they were simply too big and too efficient and they were gobbling up all the nation's land roosevelt wanted to set aside some land and protect it to make sure that no businesses could go in there and mine for ore or dig for oil or you know cut down all the trees etc etc roosevelt helped to establish the u.s forestry service and during his presidency protected to 230 million acres of land so this was under protection of the government meaning that that land 230 million acres that land could not be commercially mined you couldn't build railroads through it you couldn't build an oil well on it on it and again the purpose was to conserve those national resources perhaps for another time this is a picture of roosevelt i believe this is actually the yosemite valley i want to say that's john muir of the sierra club right next to them the sierra club was the premier conservationist group and organization during the gilded age so roosevelt had a lot of things going for him in terms of uh his progressive agenda right when it came to his square deal it included you know busting up the trust the northern security company was broken up siding with workers in the 1902 coal strike it involved consumer protection with mean inspection act and pure food and drug act and it also meant protecting national land uh after his uh after eight years in office because he was a popular president he handed the baton off to william howard taft who was meant to succeed roosevelt as kind of his hand pick we might say hand picked progressive successor all right so uh willard hamiltoff or sorry william howard taft was supposed to be roosevelt's hand-picked successor and continue this legacy of progressive agenda however during the taft presidency progressives felt betrayed by taft that he wasn't a true uh uh what i don't know actually uh he wasn't a true progressive even though he actually did break up more companies than roosevelt did and actually has a pretty good progressive uh record it was more the perception of him and there were two things that taft did or that happened during his presidency that made progressives turn on him one had to do with tariff rates that is he raised tariffs recall that tariffs were synonymous with business so if you raise tariffs that essentially means that you are favoring business if you lower them you're favoring consumer and there's a scandal in which federal lands were sold to private companies again both of these feeling like betrayals and so uh when taft served his eight years from 1908 to 1912 when it came time for his re-election teddy roosevelt came back under a new political party the progressive party so a third party this is an in addition to the democrats and republicans right republicans ran taft he was already president uh theodore roosevelt had tried to get the republicans to nominate him but they wanted to go with the incumbent president instead and so when the republicans rejected teddy roosevelt who again was represented these you know represented these betrayed progressive uh constituents said look i'm gonna make my own party the progressive party uh this party was also called the bull moose party you can see this illustration of teddy roosevelt's face on a bull moose that term came from an attempted assassination against roosevelt in which he was shot he he was shot during a speech actually he continued to give a speech and said you know take more than a an assassin's bullet to kill a bull moose and so they called roosevelt's progressive party the third or sorry the bull moose party so this is teddy roosevelt uh with the republican split between half wanting roosevelt half wanting taft the democrats ran woodrow wilson so he was the democrat that was running in the 1912 election and wilson ii was a progressive right he still wanted a progressive agenda so he had three progressive presidents and uh really the way that the election uh played out was taft really just kind of faded to the background he didn't seem like he wanted the job so much and so it really became a contest between wilson and roosevelt and they had two competing ideas uh new freedom versus new nationalism so we'll go ahead and do let's do uh blue for oh no actually woodrow wilson's democrat will do yeah blue uh for uh new freedom this was woodrow wilson's idea more or less what freedom advocated again was a progressive position but small federal government and you might be able to read into this because wardrobe wilson was also from the south which voted very solidly democratic at the time meanwhile teddy roosevelt and maybe will use yellow to represent a third party the progressive party nationalism or new nationalism meant a strong national government right so when we think about the issue specifically of federalism right federalism is between the states and the national order let's use federal national uh essentially what both sides advocated for was that you know teddy roosevelt said look you know it's it's got to be the national government the whole united states that puts forward these progressive reforms whereas wilson said yes the reforms are good but you know maybe let's leave a little bit more up to the states and when things were all said and done when the election had taken place woodrow wilson ended up winning and when he became president he enacted a lot of various progressive reforms the revenue act or the underwood tariff lowered tariffs right recall that during taft he had raised tariff rates uh wilson uh you know turned the course on that went to lower them the 16th amendment allowed for a federal graduated i call also progressive income tax because one thing that tariffs did too we got to recall tariffs were the primary way for the united states to raise money right the tax on imported goods yes it protected businesses um but it also led to revenue and especially if you're going to have a government that does more things to help people that inspects factories that protects private land you need to have more money to do that so if you lower tariffs you're getting rid of you know some of this money well where are you going to get that extra money from well you're going to get it from the 16th amendment which is going to create an income tax and raise more revenue so you can think of the income tax as a replacement for the tariffs and ever since them actually has become the main source of revenue for the federal government even to this very day the federal reserve act was created this was a central bank again all this happening under wilson this could uh regulate monetary that means money policy control the amount of money that was in circulation this was done to avoid the boom and bust economy of the gilded age you know the gilded age experienced a lot of different depressions the depression of 1873 the depression of 1893 you actually had some depressions in the early 1900s it was very characteristic for the economy to boom and bust very frequently by creating a national reserve or sorry a federal reserve you could control the money supply hopefully avoid the economic depressions and also woodrow wilson the clayton anti-trust act which really doesn't need any sort of explanation again anti-trust much like roosevelt taking on the trust this was to replace the sherman antitrust act which was passed in the 1890s but was really weak so this made that a lot stronger now when wilson ran for re-election in 1916 the issues of progressivism were becoming more and more irrelevant and that was because something we'll talk about in a different chapter world war one and as soon as world war one broke out issues regarding progressivism began to fade a little bit more to the background and instead the war or the war to end all wars as they called it at the time became a much more important issue in which woodrow wilson would um you know exercise his power as the president on