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It's not commonly recognized that Progressivism is a very old movement that developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, about 1890.

WHO'S A PROGRESSIVE? Michigan & Bay City Wellspring of Movement

Citizens United Ruling Said at the Root of the Nation's Ills

February 9, 2016       Leave a Comment
By: Dave Rogers

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," --George Santayana in The Life of Reason, 1905.

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Progressivism is all the rage these days in the Presidential primary election campaigning.

But it's not commonly recognized that Progressivism is a very old movement that developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, about 1890. It was then that politicians realized the power of populism, to help ordinary people cope with the dehumanizing aspects of technology and industry.

The muckrakers like Ida Tarbell and Lincoln Steffens exposed the evils of meat packing, Standard Oil's monopoly, and Tammany Hall politics, leading to governmental controls and important reforms.

However, the main thrust of the Progressives was eliminating corruption in government.

Born in Lansing in 1870, Ray Stannard Baker, a graduate of Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), became the first prominent journalist to examine the racial divide.

Intrepid reporter Nellie Bly went undercover to expose the abuses of the mentally ill in the madhouses of New York.

The muckrakers spearheaded the Progressive Movement and those of their ilk are sorely needed today.

Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton sparred over the term Progressive in the Democratic debate last week. Each said they were more progressive than the other.

If reports from New Hampshire are accurate, Donald Trump has even taken a page from Bernie Sanders' book and is showing concern, real or contrived, to the needs of common people.

But how many voters really know what being progressive means?

Teddy Roosevelt became known as a Progressive Republican in his bid to reclaim the Presidential mantle in 1912. He supported such "socialist" platform planks as unemployment insurance, workers' compensation, antitrust and government regulation of business.

"Roosevelt sought to return the Republican Party to its high moral purpose and once again make politics respectable for a rising generation of high-minded reformers," wrote author Jean M. Yarbrough.

But if we look back more than a century the same kind of reaction to the power of unfettered wealth was being experienced.

"Wealth Against Commonwealth" was an 1894 book by muckraking reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd that caught the public fancy long before the Progressive Movement began.

And Hazen S. Pingree, Detroit's Republican mayor, became the leading progressive in Michigan, at least, ten years before the Progressive Era is supposed to have begun.

John D. Macoll, in a book review in the Indiana Magazine of History, insightfully wrote about Pingree:

"His successful fight for the three cent trolley ride was a national event that was duplicated in other cities. He demanded and won equal taxation on business. Pingree fought for the people-the have-nots and the new immigrants and they never abandoned him at the polls. When he left the statehouse in 1901, Pingree had blazed the trail to be followed by the more famous progressives, such as Robert La Follette."

The launching of Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party in Bay City in 1912 marks perhaps the high point of political history here.

Progressive Republicans rioted at the National Guard Armory here when TR's backers were excluded from the Michigan State GOP Convention by supporters of the conservative William Howard Taft. It took the governor's call for troops to quell the violence; unfortunately, we can only guess at the extent of the uproar since no cameras caught the scene, although we have still pictures of the throng outside the armory.

Bay City Mayor Roy O. Woodruff was a Progressive, a dentist who rode the movement to a 32-year-long career in Congress.

Teddy Roosevelt spoke in Osawatomie, Kansas, in 1910 in which he advocated banning corporate contributions to candidates.

Roosevelt said: "It is necessary that laws should be passed to prohibit the use of corporate funds directly or indirectly for political purposes; it is still more necessary that such laws should be thoroughly enforced. Corporate expenditures for political purposes, and especially such expenditures by public-service corporations, have supplied one of the principal sources of corruption in our political affairs."

We are seeing the type of corruption that TR warned about in Michigan right now -- piles of secret corporation money and scads of funds from billionaires pouring into our elections which should be as sacred as we consider the constitution.

The Huffington Post points out that for more than a century, the Roosevelt position prevailed in our country. Corporate money was barred from being used in federal elections. Our national policy was based on a simple proposition: only individuals and groups of individuals were allowed to contribute or spend money to influence federal elections.

"Then on January 21, 2010, five Supreme Court Justices reached into the sky and pulled out something that had not existed for the past 219 years: a constitutional right for corporations to spend money to influence federal elections.

"These five Justices, whose decision will be harshly judged by history, threw out more than a century of national policy established by Congress, tossed out decades of Supreme Court precedents and eviscerated a bulwark of anti-corruption laws in the blink of an eye.

Citizens United cited a Michigan case that went up to the high court. OLR Research summarizes: "In a 5-4 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations and unions have the same political speech rights as individuals under the First Amendment."

In January 2008, Citizens United, a nonprofit corporation, released a 90-minute documentary entitled "Hillary: The Movie" (hereinafter Hillary). The movie expressed opinions about whether then-senator Hillary Clinton, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was fit for the presidency. Citizens United distributed the movie in theaters and on DVD, but also wanted to make it available through video-on-demand. It produced advertisements promoting the film and wanted to show them on broadcast and cable television. To pay for the video-on-demand distribution and the advertisements, Citizens United planned to use its general treasury funds.

As amended by ยง 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA), federal law prohibits corporations and unions from spending their general treasury funds on "electioneering communications" or for speech that expressly advocates the election or defeat of a candidate.

The high court "found no compelling government interest for prohibiting corporations and unions from using their general treasury funds to make election-related independent expenditures. Thus, it struck down a federal law banning this practice and also overruled two of its prior decisions. Additionally, in an 8-1 decision, the Court ruled that the disclaimer and disclosure requirements associated with electioneering communications are constitutional."

Fred Werthheimer of Huffington Post comments persuasively:

"The disastrous consequences of the Citizens United decision, a decision that will not stand the test of time, are now unfolding in our national elections. They include the ability of corporations to spend as much of their trillions of dollars in resources as they want to influence federal elections; a return of large amounts of secret money to federal elections for the first time since the Watergate era; and the creation of Super PACs and candidate-specific Super PACS that can raise unlimited amounts from influence-seeking corporations, wealthy individuals, labor unions and others, and spend them to influence federal elections.

"Unlimited money and secret money in our elections are a formula for corruption and scandal, which are coming our way. (So far in this election cycle a total of $431 million has been donated to candidates, with Republicans at $238 million and Democrats trailing at $192 million.)

"However, corruption and scandal also create opportunities for major reforms and those opportunities are also coming.

"We need to build a national movement for reform of the current corrupt campaign finance system for electing the President and members of Congress.

"We need to end secret money in federal elections by passing new disclosure legislation.

"We need to give candidates an alternative way to finance their campaigns without having to depend on influence-seeking money, an alternative that is based on empowering citizens by matching small donations with multiple public matching funds.

"That means we need to fix the presidential public financing system that served the nation well for most of its existence and we need to create a similar public financing system for congressional races."

Macoll sums up: "A period of reform depends upon men and circumstances that call forth the best in leaders who support a legitimate public interest, not a perverted private right."

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Dave Rogers

Dave Rogers is a former editorial writer for the Bay City Times and a widely read,
respected journalist/writer in and around Bay City.
(Contact Dave Via Email at carraroe@aol.com)

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