History: Political Parties During Progressive Era

Nicole Guilbault

Political Parties During Progressive Era

During the progressive era there were quite a few differences between the democratic and republican parties. Two presidents during this era were Theodore Roosevelt, a republican, and Woodrow Wilson, a democrat. Both belonged to the era as important because of their willingness to embrace reform. Although both of their goals were to save America from many of the corruptions and excesses brought during the gilded age there were differences in how they wanted to achieve that.

 The gilded age was a time period in which everything looked like it was going well on the outside but deep down things were not as pretty as they seemed. This was an era of serious social problems masked by a thin golded gilding. It was an era of rapid economic growth, especially in the north and west, due to the industrial revolution. But it was also and era of extreme poverty and inequality as millions of immigrants poured into the United States, and wealth became highly concentrated to a select few.

Theodore Roosevelt said that the old laws that were once a custom and worked sufficiently to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth are no longer efficient. Because of such rapid growth these laws must be changed to accommodate the changes. There was a startling increase, not only in growth of wealth but also the number of individual and corporate fortunes, a change the United States wasn’t prepared for. Roosevelt wanted to simply recognize the importance of this material development by leaving it unhampered. He had reasoning behind why he believed we had to be cautious when dealing with corporations. This is because of the international commercial conditions of the time period. He said since the same business conditions that produced these great amounts of individual and corporate wealth have also made them very important factors in the international commercial competition. Theodore believed modern business was so delicate extreme caution must be taken to make sure its not interfered with.

        Woodrow Wilson admits the natural development of business conditions in the United States, and he also agrees that it would be a mistake to attempt to oppose the processes which have been built up by business. Wilson believed the only thing we should do is accept them as inevitable arrangement and just simply make the best out of them through regulation. He believed big business was necessary and natural. Also that the development of business is inevitable and maybe even desirable. But he believed trusts were not natural and were instead artificially created, instead they were put together, and not by natural processes. He took his stand where he believed every progressive should take his stand, which was on the proposition that private monopolies were indefensible and intolerable. Wilson believed these monopolies could and should be stopped by law. He wants to restore industrial freedom by by restoring competition by destroying monopolies. They said that it as just free completion that allowed the big to destroy the little but he argued that it was not free competition that has done that but instead illicit competition. It is the type of competition the law can stop and should stop. Big businesses can too easily destroy the little ones since the smaller ones cannot fight back unless they have unlimited capital or unlimited credit.  And that is the difference between a big business and a trust. See a trust is an arrangement to get rid of competition and big business is that survived completion by conquering others based on intelligence and economy. A trust doesn’t bring efficiency to the aid of business instead it buys the efficiency out of it.