A New Progressive Era?

Dear Readers,

Thank you those of you who have stayed the course and those new readers who have been waiting an eternity for a new post. Most of my creative flow has been stolen by the mental weight of living through yet another historic moment (shout-out to my fellow Millennials!), and what little I have has been spent making slow progress on history articles on the Progressive Era.

It’s been almost 4 years since I started this substack, with my first post being on the agriculture and food (or rather, hunger) relationship between Ukraine and Russia. It’s hard to believe that conflict has been slogging along for four years now. Why do military leaders always think invasions will be short?

And now the Trumpian US is contemplating its own invasions - in Venezuela and Greenland. They’ve already started in Minnesota.

While I could go on at length about banana republics in comparison to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel’s visions of techno-fascism, I don’t have the time or energy.

Instead, I’m spending my time on historical comparisons that might benefit us. There really are so many historical parallels right now it’s not even funny.

I realized the other day that the 2010s were not our century-later Progressive Era, and the 2020s are not our Roaring 20s. Instead, I think the 1990s were the 1870s, when Reconstruction lifted millions out of poverty and helped usher in a new era of racial progress, even as it failed to live up to the expectations of 40 acres and a mule. Of course, the growth of the 1990s was built on exploitation - while we made progress on environmental and labor exploitation, we also hurtled toward the planned obsolescence, privatization, and corporate consolidations and monopolies that came with the 2010s, mirroring the 1870s’ slide from Reconstruction into the Gilded Age. Remember how the election of Barack Obama was hailed as the end of racism? I’m sure the newly-elected Black Senators from Southern states in the 1870s felt similar levels of victory. Victories that reactionary white conservatives quickly unraveled (with the Daughters of the Confederacy/KKK mirroring the Tea Party movement). The 1870s profited off of stolen land from Indigenous people (the Western “frontier”) and cheap fossil fuels. The 1990s profited off of the new Internet frontier and less-cheap fossil fuels. The crash of 2009 was our version of the Depression of 1893. The 2010s and 2020s were (and are) our Gilded Age.

But while people associate the Progressive Era with the 1910s, magically happening thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, the reality is that the Progressive Era was a culmination of a long slog, as is all progress.

Think for a moment about the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. It’s famous for protecting American foods and drugs from dangerous adulterations. But the first book about food adulteration was written in 1820. And the push for federal regulation of food started in the 1860s, as Temperance-minded, upper-middle-class white women fought swill milk dairies that were killing babies with contaminated milk. Even the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, victory that it was, wasn’t given any way to enforce the laws until FDR’s Administration in the 1930s. So over 100 years between first identifying the issue and actually doing something about it.

And of course, today, we have RFK Jr. trying desperately to please his corporate overlords by loosening or delaying restrictions on food contaminants and additives (formaldehyde and forever chemicals, anyone?), and prop up the struggling American beef and dairy industries with his new “nutrition” guidelines.

My point is not to depress or frustrate, but to recognize that progress is a long, slow slog. I’ve been working a lot with the history of the American Revolution at my day job. And that was a much longer, slower slog than anyone likes to admit. Over a decade between the first protests and actual revolution, with the roots of revolution going back much further than that. A civil war that lasted 8 years of official conflict, where families fought each other in their back yards, and burned each others’ houses, and stole each others’ property.

We’ve never lived up to our high-minded ideals, but I’m actually more hopeful now than ever that we might someday make them a reality. Historian Jon Meacham said on Stephen Colbert last night that the Declaration of Independence is our mission statement and the Constitution is our guidebook. I don’t know that I agree with the first (people forget that the Declaration includes 13 grievances, few of them pretty or idealistic), but the second is certainly true.

Trump is not the first president to risk the Constitution, although he is the first to treat it with such contempt. But I think about the years of the First World War, where Americans who called for peace were derided as “slackers” and cowards, or even seditionists and traitors, some of them blackballed by their businesses or neighbors.

I also think of the Progressive Era marred by anarchist bombings, and the use of “socialism” and “bolshevism” as a scare tactic to keep the “lower orders” in line, even as it was used to justify progressive legislation, the better to prevent socialism from taking over entirely.

I have long thought that we can learn so much about ourselves, and our future, by looking to the past. To that end, I’ve got two in-progress articles I hope to have out in the coming weeks (or months, depending on what life throws at me). One is on the first “boy mayor” of New York City, elected in 1913. The other is on the most famous Black food demonstrator of the war. Both will add nuance and context to the book I hope someday to finish.

I still have hope that a Progressive future, where everyone has the same rights and opportunities, is possible. The people getting involved now, pushing back against ICE invasions, protecting their neighbors, contributing to their community however they can - this gives me hope.

A lot of times when people talk about American history, they talk about all the negative things that have happened - slavery, stealing Indigenous land, oppressing women and children, violence, war, etc. And while all of that is true and needs to be acknowledged, I still have hope. Because I know that for as long as people have been fighting to oppress others, people have also been fighting to free them. From the beginning of enslavement, we had abolitionists, from the beginning of colonization, we had people who argued for peace and just treatment of Indigenous people, people who treated women and children and people of color like human beings and fought to protect them, people who protested against war, against violence, against exploitation. They were mostly not the majority, but they still fought however they could. Most of them did not live to see the difference their efforts made.

Like Carsie Blanton sings, “A hundred years, a hundred more, we throw our weight against the door, and even if we don’t survive, we keep the little flame alive.”

I was raised to think that all people were created equal, and that anyone could do anything they put their mind to. And while I’ve realized that in this day and age, that isn’t true, I hope someday it will be.

And if, like me, you’re finding the life and energy sucked out of you by living through times that try our souls, I hope you can get some rest and regroup.

Here’s to a new Progressive Era growing out of the ashes of fascism in America. Let’s work to make it sooner rather than later.