Progressives, Not Socialists

Source:Crash Course- The Progressive Era.

"In which John Green teaches you about the Progressive Era in the United States. In the late 19th and early 20th century in America, there was a sense that things could be improved upon. A sense that reforms should be enacted. A sense that progress should be made. As a result, we got the Progressive Era, which has very little to do with automobile insurance, but a little to do with automobiles. All this overlapped with the Gilded Age, and is a little confusing, but here we have it. Basically, people were trying to solve some of the social problems that came with the benefits of industrial capitalism. To oversimplify, there was a competition between the corporations' desire to keep wages low and workers' desire to have a decent life. Improving food safety, reducing child labor, and unions were all on the agenda in the Progressive Era. While progress was being made, and people were becoming more free, these gains were not equally distributed. Jim Crow laws were put in place in the south, and immigrant rights were restricted as well. So once again on Crash Course, things aren't so simple." 

From Crash Course

100 years ago or so the Republican Party was the home of the Progressives and progressivism in America. There were exceptions to that like people like Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and a few others. But in the early 20th Century, the Republican Party was the home for Center-Right Conservatives, as well as Center-Left Republicans. 

The Republican Party was the dominant political party in America up until the 1930s, because they had these two popular political factions in it. They didn't agree on everything, but shared the values of individual freedom, limited government, private markets, property rights, the U.S. Constitution, fiscal responsibility, federalism, and other Republican values. 

The Republican Party (when they were the GOP) gave us Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, Dwight Eisenhower, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Richard Nixon was a Center-Right Progressive Republican as well, especially when it came to economic and foreign policy, but social policy, and was one of early Republican supporters of civil rights, Welfare to Work, and what became of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. 

When the Republican Party was the home of the true Progressives (as I call them) and even up to FDR's and LBJ's time and progressivism was about progress and using government to help create that progress. Not government control and government nationalization. And it still is today, even if that's not longer the popular (or pop culture) definition of what it means to be a Progressive in America. 

This page is about the real Progressives in America and what it means to be a Progressive. Not socialism and what it means to be a Socialist. With closeted Socialists trying to politically hijack progressive and progressivism, because they're terrified of the s-words. 

Progressive 

Theodore Roosevelt 

Nelson Rockefeller 

George Romney 

Progressive Party