Progressivism

Progressivism is presented as both a political program and a promise whose language outlasts the institutions that first carried it. Associated with Theodore Roosevelt’s appeal to ordinary people, the Square Deal, and antitrust reform, it initially offers a way to oppose concentrated wealth without abandoning democratic politics. The novel then tests that promise against party maneuvering, corporate power, labor conflict, and the repression of dissent, showing how social justice can remain a rallying ideal even as its reformist sponsors lose credibility.

Rooseveltian Reform and the Progressive Party

In the 1912 campaign, Roosevelt returned to national politics as a progressive and champion of the Plain People, invoking the Square Deal and presenting reform as a fight against the influence of powerful interests. When the Republican Party’s leaders backed William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s supporters broke away and formed the Progressive Party. At the Chicago Colosseum, delegates who expected to restore democratic government sang a hymn through their tears. The scene gives the movement a forceful public entrance: a break with the established party is staged as both political revolt and a solemn act of faith.

That faith is not simply dismissed at the outset. The account of Paxton Hibben’s career shows how reform ideals could shape a diplomat’s understanding of his work. He believed in Roosevelt, righteousness, reform, antitrust laws, and the Big Stick as instruments for restraining grafters and wealthy malefactors and securing the common person’s due. His diplomatic service included helping to engineer a revolution that took the canal zone from the bishop of Bogotá, and he later defended Roosevelt in a libel suit. The account places his confidence in reform beside actions entangled with American power abroad, making the distance between a moral program and its political methods visible.

The Promise Loses Its Political Home

Hibben’s return to the United States for Roosevelt’s 1912 campaign is also a turning point. At the convention, he heard more than the immediate political meaning of the hymn: its voices seemed to gather the hopes of Russians, Mexican peons, and Colombian Indians, as well as the language of American independence. The imagined breadth of that sound captures the movement at its most expansive, when reform in the United States appears connected to struggles against oppression elsewhere.

The expansion collapses into disappointment. The novel says that talk of social justice dwindled, and that Roosevelt and the Bull Moose movement came to seem no better than the political establishment they had opposed. Hibben subsequently ran for Congress as a progressive in Indiana, but the European war had already displaced social justice from public attention. His campaign’s failure is thus linked not only to an individual result but to a change in what commands the country’s attention: reform loses political space as war takes its place.

The movement’s promise also becomes a target. At a reunion at Princeton University, Hibben’s classmates, drunk and perhaps treating the episode as an overdue college prank, put a noose around his neck. The threat is framed in explicitly political terms: there is said to be no place in America for change, social justice, progressivism, revolt against oppression, or democracy, and no money or jobs for the reds. The episode turns the earlier language of democratic renewal inside out. A reformer who once imagined a broad constituency for change now encounters a social world prepared to mark dissent as disqualifying.

Reform Ideals in the Labor Struggles

The labor scenes shift the emphasis from a presidential campaign to the conditions under which ordinary workers can organize. Webb and his companion visit a New Jersey textile strike, where the mills dominate the town and special deputies guard the gates. At the strike headquarters, Ben Compton urges Webb to speak about workers winning the world and the larger historical struggle. The meeting is moved to another town because the mills control the local conditions for hiring a hall; when strikers arrive, mounted police keep them out despite the meeting’s arrangements. Reform here is no longer chiefly a platform presented by a candidate. It is a demand made by workers who encounter employer power in the organization of everyday public life.

The response to that exclusion makes the limits of peaceful petitioning concrete. Compton speaks from a lamppost, describing the closed doors as an insult to the working class, and police drag him away. As the crowd retreats under pressure from mounted police, Webb climbs onto a hydrant and protests that the strikers had a right to use the hall. The demonstration offers a small but significant reversal: the student who had hesitated to speak takes up the argument in public, while the authorities’ response makes clear that asserting a right does not ensure its protection.

At the picket line the following morning, the conflict becomes bodily. In the cold dawn, under-policed conditions give way to clubs and dispersal; a young woman falls, and a policeman kicks her in the face. Her companion attacks the officer and is struck from behind and taken to a police wagon. The scene links the language of democracy to the uneven distribution of force: the workers’ presence and speech are treated as disorder, while violence against them is carried out by those empowered to police the strike.

From Reform to Organized Dissent

The later labor episodes widen that pattern beyond one textile strike. In Seattle, members of the Industrial Workers of the World travel to Everett to assert their right to hold a meeting. Deputies arrest them as they leave the boat, beat them with rifle butts and clubs, and take them away. The account places free speech not as an abstract constitutional guarantee but as a practical stake in collective action, one that workers must try to exercise in the face of organized opposition.

The Empire Casino meeting in the Bronx similarly joins political speech to surveillance and arrest. Organized to send greetings to Russia’s workers’ government, it takes place with federal agents and a stenographer in the audience; police close the doors and break up the crowd outside. Ben Compton speaks against a war that, he argues, benefits bankers and munitions makers, and the meeting ends with police converging on the speakers and arresting him and others. When offered release on bail if he will report for military training, he says he will continue opposing capitalist war until arrested again. His release on fifteen thousand dollars bail comes with an assurance that he will not agitate before trial, and the identity of the person who supplied the money is withheld from him.

Across these episodes, Progressivism is neither treated as a simple success nor erased when its electoral vehicle fails. Its language of reform and democratic government survives, but the novel places it under pressure from party institutions, corporate control, wartime priorities, and coercion against labor organizers. The contrast is pointed: the 1912 movement promises to make government answer to ordinary people, while later scenes show workers and speakers having to contest access to a hall, a street, or a meeting itself. What remains is an unresolved distinction between reform proclaimed from above and the organized demands of people who face power directly.