American Corruption and the Decline of the Progressive Ethos

Abstract

There is a loss of faith in the United States of America today in public institutions because of the sense that they do not work as intended for they either have been corrupted or are run by nincompoops. This means a rejection of a particular way of looking at government that was set during the Progressive Era, the multi-faceted reform movement that took off at the start of the twentieth century and was later embraced within President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Though not all of a piece, Progressives laid out a critique of corruption and successfully pressed for ways of containing it. The early twentieth century Progressive movement was energized by political and corporate corruption. Richard L. McCormick's classic essay on the 'Origins of Progressivism,' published in 1981, emphasized that it was the explosion of findings that 'business corrupts politics' that set the most important Progressive wheels in motion.' Progressive reformers responded to corruption by attempting to rationalize government processes and procedures. Their core beliefs were an amalgam of scientific management and moral uplift. Many businesspeople shared in these beliefs. As a number of historians and political scientists have pointed out in their studies of this remarkable period in American history, scientific management was not unamenable to those from the corporate sector. In fact, a great deal of historical work has taken up the issue of where business actually stood in the great age of business reform. Not surprisingly, some studies found that corporate officials were pleased with governments' new-found passion for routinizing activity; it mirrored what corporations were doing internally. Others have gone further, arguing that the locus of Progressivism was 'in the drive of newly formed business and professional groups to achieve their goals through organization and expertise.'2 Progressives, of whatever ilk, saw corruption as the result of disorganization which encouraged the hidden clutching hand of avarice. They supposed that public education, systematic and open governance overlaid by scientifically managed commissions,3 and the containment of capitalism's excesses