Progressive Generation

Members of the adaptive Progressive Generation, which include some of our ancestors, were born between 1843 and 1859; the youngest of that generation left the world's stage about 1939.¹ Their parents were either the last wave of the idealist Transcendental Generation or the first wave of the reactive Gilded Generation, who nurtured in a generally overprotective way. The Progressive Generation (of the Artist archtype in the Civil War Saeculum, or Cycle) grew up as overprotected and suffocated youths during a secular crisis (the Civil War), matured into risk-averse, conformist rising adults, produced indecisive midlife arbitrator-leaders during a spiritual awakening, and maintained influence (but less respect) as sensitive elders. This generation spent childhood shell shocked by sectionalism and war. Overawed by older "bloody-shirt" veterans, they came of age cautiously, pursuing refinement and expertise more than power. In the shadow of the Reconstruction, they earned their reputation as well-behaved professors and lawyers, calibrators and specialists, civil servants and administrators. In midlife, their mild commitment to social melioration was whipsawed by the passions of their youthful juniors. They matured into America's genteel yet juvenating Rough Riders in the era of Freud's "talking cure" and late-Victorian sentimentality. After busting trusts and achieving progressive procedural reforms, their elders continued to urge tolerance on less conciliatory juniors.²

The children during the Civil War crisis emulated adults and made few demands; unlike their next-elders, the Gilded, at the same age, they had little desire for early independence and adventure. "A hundred wills move at once simultaneously" with "an accuracy that was really amazing," observed one visitor to Civil War-era American schools. As the national mood veered toward war, youths understood that risky behavior could trigger adult rebuke--which, in turn, could bring lifelong penalties. Instead of describing American children as precocious or ill-mannered, as they had two decades before, foreigners began remarking how "the most absolute obedience and the most rigid discipline prevail in all American schools."³

Midlife Transcendentals demanded compulsory attendance laws (first enacted by Massachusetts in 1853 for all children under 10), led the "high school movement" in the late 1850s, and generally insisted on more orderly child behavior than earlier teachers had demanded of the Gilded. They also popularized the custom of issuing report cards in order to bring parental authority to bear on child discipline. The leading parenting guide, written by Transcendental Horace Bushnell, described children as "formless lumps" equally capable of good and evil, requiring careful guidance within the "organic unity of the family."⁴

The child environment--already becoming more planned and protected--was abruptly pushed to suffocation by the Civil War. This implosion in family life reflected what historian Joseph Kett calls the midcentury "desire of middle-class Americans to seal their lives off from the howling storm outside." The storm raged worse for Confederate children, many of whom lived with the fear of marauding armies--or who, as teenagers, became the homesick and traumatized kid soldiers of bloody campaigns late in the war. The extended wartime absence (or death) of fathers gave mothers a stronger role in the child's world. As the Transcendental Catharine Beecher warned against turning over children to "coarse, hard, unfeeling men," many a war-era ballad idealized "Mother" as the embodiment of social order.⁵

The Progressive Generation, endowed with an unusual sensitivity, assumed an other-directed mission and a collective identity of unusual malleability. Their lifecycle located them in an odd warp of history. They had been born at the wrong time for authentic catharsis--too late for freewheeling adventure, too soon for the youth-fired movements of the late Nineteenth Century. First-wavers were the keep-your-head-down teenagers of the Civil War; last-wavers came of age during the thickening social consensus of the 1870s. The shell-shocked children of the Civil War reached their twenties eager to please adults, who advised them (in the words of one Sunday-school spokesman) to show "neither excesses nor defects in your character, but a harmonious blending, a delightful symmetry, formed of fitting proportions of every high quality." Progressives passed from youth to adulthood between the late 1860s and the early 1880s, a time of mounting social consensus in favor of Victorian rectitude in personal (and sexual) behavior. "Within my own remembrance," recalled an older YMCA official, boys had to "go through fermentation before they could afford to be good." But now, he observed, "they are to carry from the cradle to the grave an unblemished name, with unblemished morals." Kett notes how "the old idea that youth was a time for sowing wild oats, that an excess of prohibitions in youth merely produced an erratic adult, had no place in the thought of midcentury moralists."⁶

As colleges regained the popularity and discipline they had lost during the antebellum decades, Progressives became the Nineteenth Century's most docile students--preoccupied with grades, prizes, school spirit, and newly practical coursework. Arming themselves with impressive credentials, they hoped to make up in expertise what they obviously lacked in ruggedness. The Progressives include the first sizable number of Americans to attend black colleges, women's colleges, and land-grant colleges. They were also the first to earn graduate degrees in America and provided the Ph.D.-credentialed faculties that elevated American universities to their circa-1900 era of maximum prestige--culminating later in the election of America's only Ph.D. President, Woodrow Wilson.⁷

In the late 1860s, while Gilded railroad barons were building powerful locomotives and designing luxurious Pullman cars, 22-year-old George Westinghouse invented an air brake to make them safe. A few years later, at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, the delicate inventions of 29-year-old Thomas Edison and 27-year-old Alexander Graham Bell drew more international acclaim than the huge Gilded steam turbines. Where the midlife Gilded liked to build things that rewarded society's strongest and richest, these young tinkerers targeted their efforts toward the disadvantaged. Edison designed his arc light to assist the visually impaired, Bell his crude telephone to audibilize voices for the deaf. Westinghouse, Edison, and Bell were part of the vanguard of the Progressive Generation, a cadre of fledgling experts and social meliorators, as attuned to the small as their next-elders were to the big. Their leading figures--such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson--liked to describe themselves as "temperate," their designs as "moderate." Like their inventor peers, Progressive politicians believed that calibration and communication would eventually make America a nicer country.⁸

Whether as clerks in growing corporations or as dry-land farmers along a disappearing frontier, these nice young Progressives generally failed to find authentic adventure--like Theodore Roosevelt, who arrived in the Dakota Territory "but little over half a dozen years since these lands were won from the Indians." Even the best-known Progressive outlaws, from Jesse James to Billy the Kid, were less loathed (and certainly less feared) than the original Gilded marauders. After the late 1860s, most indices of crime and disorder began falling well below their prewar levels. Few young Progressive men could bear a sullied conscience. After marrying at age 22, Roosevelt thanked heaven he was "absolutely pure. I can tell Alice everything I have ever done."⁹

The Progressive Generation underwent its conformist, risk-averse rising adulthood (ages 22-43) during the Reconstruction and Gilded Era of conformity and stability, when the triumphant ideals of earlier years were secularized and any spiritual discontent was deferred. The Progressives continued copying the dominant fashion of the age. For example, emulating the new vogue of Gilded rotundity in the early 1880s, Progressives read best-sellers such as How to Be Plump and worshipped the chubby "Lillian Russell" female. Through the 1880s, they became rising-adult partners to the Gilded in a fast-growing nation still gripped in a survivalist mentality. Their social role soon became clear: to apply their credentialed expertise toward improving what their next-elders had pioneered. They added "organization" to new corporations, "efficiency" to new assembly lines, "method" to new public agencies. Such value-free ideations would always define their life mission.¹⁰

The Progressives had small instinct for leadership, but they did have a refined taste for process and expertise (which sometimes made others impatient). What historian Joseph Kett calls "the burgeoning of certification requirements after 1880" made this the first generation of industrial leaders who rose "not from the workbench but through successive layers of management." The Progressives also accounted for the largest Nineteenth Century expansion in lawyers, notably corporate legal experts who could advise Gilded tycoons. In 1860, America contained only nine law schools requiring more than one year of training; by 1880, fifty-six required three years of training.¹¹

Through the 1870s and 1880s, the growing size and complexity of the industrial economy sparked a rising demand for the technical skills in which Progressives had been trained to excel. America was overrun with young lawyers, academics, teacher trainers, agronomists, and the first-ever cadre of "career" civil servants and Congressional staffers. Where the Gilded had gambled fortunes as rowdy miners, financiers, and self-made industrialists, the Progressives arrived as metallurgists, accountants, and "time and motion men" in the manner of Frederick Winslow Taylor. What Gilded young adults had achieved two decades earlier in capital goods, thirtyish Progressives achieved in retailing: H. J. Heinz's "57 varieties" of food, F. W. Woolworth's five-and-ten-cent stores, James Duke's dainty machine-rolled cigarettes, and Montgomery Ward's 240-page catalog for farmers (plus his new "money-back guarantee").¹²

Starting families at the height of the social and sexual conformism of the mid-Victorian era, they tried hard to take part in what they called "the progress of civilization"--progress that now required method over personality. "In the past the man has been first," declared Frederick Winslow Taylor in his world-famous Principles of Scientific Management; "in the future the system must be first."¹³

The children of the Progressives were either the idealist Missionary Generation or the reactive Lost Generation. They found these hardened offspring a source of disappointment and worry.

Between 1883 and 1893, four 34-to-37-year-olds produced several of America's most stirring paeans to patriotism: the Pledge of Allegiance (Francis Bellamy); America the Beautiful (Katherine Lee Bates); Semper Fidelis (John Philip Sousa); and the inscription on the Statue of Liberty (Emma Lazarus). As Bates wrote "confirm thy soul in self-control" and Lazarus about "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," their rising peers cautiously steered clear of electoral politics. In 1893, fifty years after their first birthyear, Progressives held only 39 percent of all national leadership posts (versus, at like age, 64 percent for Transcendentals, 60 percent for Gilded, and 48 percent for Missionaries).¹⁴

More alert to the risk of failure than the like-aged Gilded had been, Progressives became America's late-Nineteenth Century bet-hedgers, definers of social conscience, and organizers of risk-spreading associations. "Grangers" founded the first rural co-ops. Samuel Gompers, after taking part in a failed strike, "began to realize the futility of opposing progress" and founded the modern trade union movement.¹⁵

Progressives provided the initial memberships for an extraordinary number of enduring fraternal, labor, academic, and (to use a word they popularized) "professional" associations, including the Elks Club, Knights of Columbus, Daughters of the American Revolution, Modern Language Association, American Historical Association, American Economics Association, American Federation of Labor--and the first "professional" sports league, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs.¹⁶

Obsessive organizers, the Progressives invented the cash register, adding machines, carbon paper, mimeograph, and the first workable typewriter. They were the first generation to use time clocks at work and to carry timepieces on their person ("pocket" watches after 1870; "band" or "wrist" watches after 1900). In 1883, their young civil servants designed the federal system of four U.S. time zones.

A Progressive (John Gates) invented barbed wire in the 1880s. The subsequent "battle of the barbed wire" between cattle ranchers and wheat farmers was typically a dispute between tough-as-nails midlife Gilded and law-abiding ("Let's elect a sheriff") rising-adult Progressives.¹⁷

Writers such as Henry Demarest Lloyd (Wealth Against Commonwealth), Jacob Riis (How the Other Half Lives), and George Cable (The Silent South) exposed the costs of untamed economic growth and urged a weepy ethos of social cooperation--"a humane movement," wrote Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward, "a melting and flowing forth of men's hearts toward one another."¹⁸

In return, while proper young ladies suffered under stultifying sex-role definitions, dandified young men were accused of being what historian Geoffrey Blodgett calls the "Gelded Men" of the Gilded Age. Until they reached the midlife years, they let the Gilded Generation hold all the real power. Only when economic depression struck did the core of this fortyish and fiftyish generation directly challenge their war-veteran elders. Then they staged the realigning elections of 1894 and 1896, sweeping the McKinley Republicans--and his Progressive peers--into power. The Progressives underwent a transformation; elder-focused conformists early in life, they now became junior-focused pluralists.¹⁹

The Progressives were stricken with their indecisive midlife (ages 44-65) during the Missionary Awakening (also called the "Third Great Awakening" or the "Age of Reform" or the "Age of Revivalism" or the "Age of Labor Radicalism"), 1886-1903. Pulled in competing directions by more powerful generations on either side, the Progressives underwent a midlife "passage," an abrupt and liberating personality shift. They shifted their attention from age to youth. Stifled by the narrowed purpose of their younger years, they envied the passion of younger Missionaries while expressing relief in a newfound "liberty" that Wilson defined as "a process of release, emancipation, and inspiration, full of a breath of life . . . sweet and wholesome."²⁰

Past age 40, many Progressives embraced new causes with joyful vigor, from political reform (Robert LaFollette) and organized feminism (Harriot Blatch) to world peace (David Starr Jordan), temperance (the WCTU), and health foods (John Harvey Kellogg). Some of the change was due to immigration: Progressives included the large influx of Nordic immigrants who settled the upper Midwest and Great Plains late in the century; these states witnessed many of the Progressives' midlife experiments in "populist" government and "liberal" Republicanism. Having spent half their lifecycle adapting to a Gilded-built world, Progressives entered midlife taking their cues from the young. In the mid-1890s, McKinley resolved to follow "the best aspirations of the people" by siding with young "jingoes" in a war against Spain. He and his three White House succesors entangled themselves in position shifts by alternately urging and then hedging on subsequent Missionary causes, from child labor and woman's suffrage to Prohibition and immigration. Preoccupied with public opinion, they backed the genial procedural reforms of the "Progressive Era": initiatives and referenda, direct election of senators, the "open playing field" of antitrust, and expert-run regulatory commissions.²¹

By the standards of their next-elders, the Progressives lived a lifecycle in reverse. They set out as sober young parents in the shadow of Reconstruction--attired in handlebar mustaches and tight corsets--and ended up as juvenating midlifers in an era of Rough Riders and gunboats, evangelism and trust-busting, Model Ts and hootchie-kootchie girls, Freud's "talking cure" and Bergson's élan vital.²²

At the turn of the century, the term "middle age" began to indicate a phase of life (roughly, age 40 to 60) and soon appeared frequently in popular periodicals. Much of the interest focused on feelings of disorientation, in such articles as "On Some Difficulties Incidental to Middle Age" (1900), "On Being Middle-Aged" (1908), and "The Real Awkward Age" (1911). In their forties and fifties, many of the best-known Progressives experienced what would now be described as "midlife crises" or "nervous depressions"--including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Josiah Royce, G. Stanley Hall, Brooks Adams, and Frederick Winslow Taylor.²³

According to historian Nathan Hale, Jr., the Victorian ethos of continence and sexual purity weighed most heavily on Americans "born from the 1840s to the early 1860s"--making this a generation for whom the prim Anthony Comstocks set the early tone. The psychic cost of this smothering childhood first appeared in the late 1880s and 1890s--which, for fortyish Progressives, was an era of sharply rising divorce rates, and an epidemic of "neurasthenia" and female "hysteria" (often "treated" by uterectomies and hysterectomies).²⁴

Many Progressives, emerging as effete caricatures of late-Victorian manhood, continued to pursue what scientist Albert Michelson termed "the sixth place of the decimal"--or, like Melvil Dewey, precise systems for cataloguing knowledge. Others veered toward the other extreme. After leading younger "rough riders" up San Juan Hill, Theodore Roosevelt attacked the "men of soft life." Just after the turn of the century, he appointed a Commission on Country Life, led a youth-envying "cult of strenuosity," and encouraged Missionary zealots he labeled "muckrakers." Watching 40-year-olds take up youthful sports during the 1890s, the sixtyish Gilded Henry Adams likened the Progressives to "the bicycle-rider, mechanically balancing himself by inhibiting all his inferior personalities, and sure to fall into the subconscious chaos below, if one of his inferior personalities got on top."²⁵

Progressives spent midlife seeking such a "mechanical balance"--patching together Gilded realism with Missionary principle, blending the rugged West with the effete East. While Theodore Roosevelt demanded (in his late forties) an overcompensating manliness he labeled the "strenuous life," his soft-life peers defined what came to be known as "genteel" fin de siècle American culture. The result was a self-conscious mixture of primness and toughness. At the close of the century, Charles Sheldon warned his peers to "be free from fanaticism on the one hand and from too much caution on the other."²⁶

Taught young the importance of emotional self-control, they reached the new century probing desperately for ways to defy taboos, tell secrets, and take chances. In social life, the peers of Woodrow Wilson sought to expose scandal and "open up" the system by insisting "there ought to be no place where anything can be done that everybody does not know about." In economic life, the peers of Thorstein Veblen satirized the Gilded obsession with self-denial and savings, turning their attention toward leisure and consumption instead. In personal life, most of all, these uneasy midlifers spawned what historian Jackson Lears calls the "therapeutic world view"--a fear of "overcivilization," a longing for the primitive, an obsession with releasing inner energies. While "TR" hunted elephants, Brooks Adams praised "barbarian blood," and Populist leaders like Tom Watson goaded younger mobs to racial violence, psychologist G. Stanley Hall spoke of his peers' "unusual hunger for more life."²⁷

It was, admittedly, awkward to discover life at 50. "Faculties and impulses which are denied legitimate expression during their nascent period," Hall explained, "break out well into adult life--falsetto notes mingling with manly bass as strange puerilities." The older Gilded chided their midlife anxiety. During the 1880s, the Gilded Howells tweaked people who "now call a spade an agricultural implement" and wondered why "everyone is afraid to let himself go, to offend conventions, or to raise a sneer."²⁸

Entering midlife, many Progressives slimmed down to look more youthful; others tried dieting but failed--including the 300-pound William Howard Taft, the fattest President in U.S. history. Probably a more powerful concern, however, was the mind, or spirit. After the Spanish-American War, concern over "overstress" and "mental cancer" (what the Atlantic Monthly described as "our now universal disorder, nervous prostration") sparked a growing interest in mind-cure fads, from hypnotism and psychotherapy to dream analysis and rest cures. In 1909, the sixtyish psychologist G. Stanley Hall invited an eminent European peer to lecture in America. Sigmund Freud's tour was a media sensation.²⁹

Many midlife women broke free from convention and threw their support behind a budding feminist movement. Kate Chopin, widow and mother of six, wrote The Awakening, whose heroine protests the duality of the "outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions." Thanks to Progressive efforts, lonely dissenters found genteel protectors such as Clarence Darrow and Governor John Altgeld; "The Social Question" (even socialism itself) became a subject of polite dinner conversation; anticorporate populism gave birth to officious "regulations" and "commissions"; and anti-Gilded students discovered charismatic leaders willing to join their attack on Rockefeller ("the greatest criminal of the age," cried LaFollette) and Standard Oil ("bad capitalism," agreed Teddy Roosevelt).³⁰

Reaching the age of leadership, Progressives often fretted over their next-juniors' passion for reforms at home and crusades abroad. Then, overwhelmed by events and pushed out of power during World War I, Progressives entered elderhood trying to stay involved while nudging America back toward tolerance and conciliation. Having been the mediators between two pushy generations, Progressives won respect for their intelligence and refinement. Yet so too did they make easy targets for their prissiness and indecision. Their academics were teased as "Professor Tweetzers" and "Doctors of Dullness," their frontier settlers as "tenderfeet" and "greenhorns," their good-government types as "goo-goos" and "Miss Nancys," and their guilty liberals (such as Joseph Fels, who promised to spend his "damnable money to wipe out the system by which I made it") as "millionaire reformers" and "the mink brigade."³¹

Exclude the young Missionary zealots, and circa-1900 "Progressivism" stood for what historian Samuel Eliot Morison describes as an "adaptation . . . to the changes already wrought and being wrought in American society," or what Robert Wiebe calls "the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic means." Progressive Presidents founded the Bureau of Standards, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the first permanent Census office--and led the "Crusade for Standardization" during World War I. The last Progressive President, Woodrow Wilson, managed World War I in the complex manner of his generation--surrounded by diplomats, lawyers, journalists, statisticians, and public-private associations. Afterward, Wilson tried to secure a "peace without victory" in which multilateral process would forever replace violent conflicts of principle. Younger voters showed little interest in his League of Nations proposal, and a 79-percent Missionary Congress buried it for good.³²

The Progressives entered their sensitive elderhood (ages 66-87) during World War I and the postwar Prohibition ("Roaring Twenties") years. The 1920s did little roaring for those who, like writer Sarah Orne Jewett, were "wracked on the lee shore of age." Poverty remained high among the elderly, but their overall income distribution was more even than among the Gilded, and the younger public grew more willing to discuss their hardships sympathetically, especially the question of what to do with elderly "in-laws." As always, Progressives approached their economic status with foresight and planning (in lieu of the Gilded winner-take-all ethos). Around 1910, they began a vast expansion in private pension plans, and by the time they retired they became the first nonveteran generation to receive significant pension income.³³

Many elder Progressives--like Hall, who admired the young flappers and cultivated "zests" like walking barefoot--continued to watch and emulate the young. "Reversing age-old custom," notes Mark Sullivan, the chronicler of Wilson-era America, "elders strove earnestly to act like their children, in many cases their grandchildren." Their main message to juniors was to stay calm, keep faith in the democratic process, and listen to expertise. The eightyish Elihu Root kept lecturing the young on the importance of a "World Court," while Frank Kellogg promoted an arcane disarmament process (what one senator called "an international kiss") that would later impair America's response to Hitler.³⁴

"Neutral in fact as well as in name . . . impartial in thought as well as action." Spoken before the country was prodded into World War I by a younger Congress, Wilson's famous remark could be deemed the motto of this generation in public life. In politics as in family life, their inclination was to make life gentler and more manageable; their global credo (in Wilson's memorable words) was to make the world "safe for democracy." Their senior statesmen issued calls to humanity and fairness that were not always observed--for example, Franz Boas's defense of cultural pluralism against eugenics-minded Missionaries. "The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal," warned Louis Brandeis, stressing humility, displaying a sense of irony, defending "the process of trial and error," ever pursuing nonjudgmental fairness and openmindedness. Younger Missionaries scorned their caution, William Randolph Hearst belittling President Wilson as "a perfect jackrabbit of politics, perched upon his little hillock of expedience . . . ready to run and double in any direction."³⁵

Most Progressive leaders liked calling themselves "middle-class," just as they dreaded extremism and violence from either unions or corporations, Wobblies or Pinkertons. Far better, they thought, to push society forward through incremental consensus. "I do not believe you can do any good on an issue of this kind by getting too far in advance," Roosevelt said of Prohibition, explaining how the public "will ultimately come to the national suppression of the liquor traffic and I am heartily with them when they do." Even Wilson's "high ideals" had less to do with moral outcomes than with the fair process by which competing ideals are reconciled. "If my convictions have any validity," he declared, "opinion ultimately governs the world." So the Progressives behaved, spending a lifetime listening to--and adjusting to--others. At Versailles, Wilson remained undecided until he had heard what the experts had to say. "Tell me what's right," Wilson had told his aides en route to the conference, "and I'll fight for it."³⁶

In 1928, an elderly Progressive founded the (Robert) Brookings Institute. Its purpose was "to collect, interpret, and lay before the country in clear and intelligent form the fundamental economic facts concerning which opinions need to be formed."³⁷

Old John Dewey unflaggingly pursued "liberalism" as "committed to an end that is at once enduring and flexible." He searched for evidence to support his intuition that civilization could lead to happiness as long as it remained open to new ideas. He never ceased to delight in the "educative process." Likewise, William Howard Taft never ceased to delight in "interpreting" the law, Woodrow Wilson in "consulting the experts," and Booker T. Washington in "constructive compromise." Old Florence Kelley called herself "the most unwearied hoper." In their final years, the greatest Progressive thinkers lacked final answers about life--and had the humanity to admit it.³⁸

"The muddled state is one of the very sharpest of the realities," Henry James once observed. Indeed, his own generation remains saddled with a "muddled" image, often blurred together with the burly Gilded or zealous Missionaries. Combining a belief in fairness, openness, and what Ella Wheeler Wilcox called "just the art of being kind," Progressives gave the Gilded Age its human face and helped make the Missionary Awakening an age of reform and not revolution. Their fascination with process and detail provided a mediating link between their "build big" next-elders and their "think big" next-juniors. Much of their contribution hinged on their ability to see "out of the confusion of life" what James described as "the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt."³⁹

Yet they also waffled in the face of rapid social change. Vacillating on foreign policy and unwilling to forgo "cheap labor" immigrants, they invited a floodtide of jingoism and racism that swept over America at the turn of the century. Their accommodation of "separate but equal" Jim Crow laws sealed the fate of southern blacks. And their uncertain parental hand left Lost Generation children vulnerable to cruel economic abuse. But their irrepressible belief in human perfectibility gave a powerful boost to the liberal side of the modern American character. Collectively, Progressives shared a quality once affixed to Uncle Remus author Joel Chandler Harris: "the seal of good humor . . . and a pleasant outlook on the world."⁴⁰

The Progressives never saw themselves as heroes or prophets. Rather, they saw themselves as a modern cadre of value-free meliorators who could link progress to expertise, improvement to precision. "The science of statistics is the chief instrumentality through which the progress of civilization is now measured, declared Census chief Simon Newton Dexter North in 1902, "and by which its development hereafter will be largely controlled."⁴¹

Late in life, as the world lurched toward chaos, old Progressives sometimes questioned such certainty. In 1914, the 71-year-old Henry James wrote to a friend: "You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared the wreck of our belief that through the long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst become impossible. The tide that bore us along was then all the while moving to this as its grand Niagara." Yet what few Progressives ever lost--no matter how old--was their urge to stay involved and thereby overcome a feeling that they had missed something early in life. "I don't regret a single 'excess' of my responsive youth," added James. "I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn't embrace."⁴²

Birthyears for the Progressive Generation
(Linked names are ancestors of ours;
linked "G-" numbers refer to the family generations of those ancestors.)

• 1843:
  William McKinley, C. M. Doughty, Henry James, Edward Grieg, Hans Richter, Montgomery Ward
• 1844:
  Sanford B. Dole, Catherine Breshkovsky, Sarah Bernhardt, Robert Bridges, George W. Cable, Richard D'Oyly Carte, Anatole France, A. W. O'Shaughnessy, Anthony Comstock, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Eakins, Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov, Henry Heinz
• 1845:
  Elihu Root, Ludwig II, Mary Cassatt
• 1846:
  George Westinghouse, Carry Nation
• 1847:
  Paul von Hindenburg, Max Liebermann, Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman
• 1848:
  Arthur James Balfour, Ellen Terry, Paul Gaughin, Fritz von Uhde, Sir Hubert Parry, Otto Lilienthal, Belle Starr, Joel Chandler Harris, Laura Caroline Bean (G6)
• 1849:
  August Strindberg, Crazy Horse, Ella Josephine Mansfield (G6)
• 1850:
  Tomás Garrigue Masaryk, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, Guy de Maupassant, Robert L. Stevenson, Samuel Gompers
• 1851:
  Ferdinand Foch, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Leslie "Spy" Ward, Vincent d'Indy, Albert Lortzing
• 1852:
  Joseph Jacques Césaire Joffre, Herbert Henry Asquith, Paul Bourget, George Augustus Moore, Antoine Henri Becquerel, William Ramsay
• 1853:
  Cecil John Rhodes, Hall Caine, Carl Larsson, Vincent Van Gogh
• 1854:
  Arthur Rimbaud, Henri Poincaré, Engelbert Humperdinck, George Eastman, John Philip Sousa
• 1855:
  Ludwig Ganghofer, Marie Corelli (Mary Mackay), Percival Lowell, Robert La Follette, Andrew Mellon, William Fremont Findley (G6)
• 1856:
  Woodrow Wilson, H. Rider Haggard, Oscar Wilde, Christian Sinding, Sigmund Freud, Robert E. Peary, Keir Hardie, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Booker T. Washington, Louis Brandeis,
• 1857:
  William H. Taft, Joseph Conrad (Korzeniowski), Max Klinger, Edward Elgar, Emile Coué, Heinrich Hertz, Robert Baden-Powell, Ida Tarbell, Clarence Darrow
• 1858:
  Theodore Roosevelt, Selma Lagerlöf, Lovis Corinth, Giacomo Puccini, Max Planck, Beatrice Webb (née Potter)
• 1859:
  Jean Léon Jaurès, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Arthur Conan Doyle, A. E. Housman, Henri Bergson, John Dewey, Georges Seurat, Pierre Curie, Kenneth Grahame

See the next generation
See the previous generation

Back to the top

Notes:

Other sources
Back to the top
Close this window