Effecting a Progressive Presidency: Roosevelt, Taft, and the Pursuit of Strategic Resources

Abstract

While attracting ardent interest from social scientists on a number of fronts, the Progressive Era is insufficiently examined within presidential studies. Scholars have, instead, portrayed Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as prefiguring a later, modern presidency. For example, Sidney Milkis writes that the emergence of the modern presidency began in the Progressive Era, “especially as shaped by the statesmanship of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.”Sidney Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 8. William Leuchtenburg observes that Franklin Roosevelt contributed to the modern presidency by giving the office “an importance which went well beyond what even Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done.”William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963), 327. However, scholarship has not explained fully why these two Progressive Era presidents were precociously “modern.”