Introduction

The period 1890–1916 in United States history, encompassing what is commonly called the Progressive Era, was both an age of reform and the age of the corporate reconstruction of American capitalism. Other ages of reform have punctuated the nation's history. It was, however, the intersecting of broad and lasting reform with the rise of corporate capitalism that made the years covered by this book historically distinctive and, more particularly, that made them the directly formative birth-time of basic institutions, social relations, and political divisions of United States society as it evolved toward and beyond the mid-twentieth century. In one and the same period were laid down and intermeshed the foundations of the corporate-capitalist economy, of the regulatory state, of internationalist foreign policy, and of modern political liberalism, as they would develop in mutually reinforcing and conflicting ways over the next several decades in the United States.

In marking the period as distinctive, the interrelation of reform and the ascendancy of corporate capitalism has also made the Progressive Era an intriguing object of historical inquiry, above and beyond its being, like any other time in the nation's history, a contested interpretive terrain. If the period was both an age of reform and the age of the ascendancy of corporate capitalism, how is the interrelation of the two best to be understood?