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By Root 921 0

of the country bequeathed by the industrial revolution—embraced institutions, and especially the state, as tools for progress. This faith created a new form of liberalism that departed from “classical liberalism.” While these two belief systems shared some of the same characteristics, including a respect for individual rights, the new liberal class was and remains distinctly utopian. It places its faith in practical state reforms to achieve a just society. Classical liberalism, while it embraced the goals of the Enlightenment, was colored by a healthy dose of skepticism about human perfectibility and acutely aware of the nature and potency of evil. Modern liberalism lost this awareness. Human institutions and government were seen as mechanisms that, under the right control, would inevitably better humankind.

Faith in human institutions was at the core of the Social Gospel, a Christian movement articulated at the turn of the century in books such as Christianity and the Social Crisis, published in 1907, and Theology for the Social Gospel, published a decade later, both of them written by the leading proponent of the movement, Walter Rauschenbusch. The Social Gospel replaced a preoccupation with damnation and sin with a belief in human progress. It spawned the Chautauqua movement, which had hundreds of chapters across the country. Chautauquan communities supported labor unions, collective bargaining, social services for the poor, hygiene programs, and universal education, although the movement was not free from many of the prejudices of its age and excluded Roman Catholics and African Americans. Organizations such as the Labor Temple in New York City, the University Settlement House in Chicago, and Washington Gladden’s crusades to better the working conditions in Columbus, Ohio, were part of this intoxicating fusion of religion and reform, the Christian churches’ version of the liberal class belief in the power of reform and human progress through good government. The Reverend Josiah Strong’s declamation “that Christ came not only to save individual souls, but society” turned churches into temperance societies, labor halls, and soup kitchens. Salvation could be achieved through human agencies. The Social Gospel secularized traditional Christian eschatology and fused it with the utopian visions of material progress embraced by the wider liberal class.

The years before World War I had offered hope to liberal reformers. It was Ida Tarbell who in 1902 exposed the ruthless business practices of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil in McClure’s Magazine. Her series, later published as a book, fueled a public outcry against Standard Oil. It was an important factor in the U.S. government’s antitrust actions against the Standard Oil Trust, which eventually led to its breakup in 1911. Samuel Hopkins Adams, a contemporary of Tarbell, wrote a series of eleven articles for Collier’s in 1905 called “The Great American Fraud.” He exposed many of the false claims made by the manufacturers of patent medicines. Adams found that in some cases these medicines damaged people’s health. The series led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Upton Sinclair’s exposé of inhumane conditions in the Chicago stockyards in 1906 in his muckraking novel The Jungle led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. These exposés, which included Lincoln Steffens’ exposure of municipal corruption, dovetailed neatly into the demands of those in the Social Gospel movement, labor unions, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, or university sociology departments, which, when they were founded, focused on practical steps toward social reform.

The muckrakers and the Social Gospel reformers had been joined by militant labor organizations, including the anarcho-syndicalism of the IWW or Wobblies, which organized strikes by unskilled workers in New England textile mills, the Minnesota iron mines, and the steel industry in Pennsylvania. Before the war, the Wobblies led hundreds of thousands of industrial workers