ABSTRACT
Progressivism responded to a different condition: a conviction by many people, and some of their statesmen, that America was at a crossroad and about to make a fundamental change in its way of life. Socialists and quasisocialists foresaw a movement that would in effect Europeanize American politics. Steffens underrated American cynicism and, needing compassion, should have been more compassionate toward error and the harsh, unexpected turnings of social and political fortune. The famous Seaman’s Act of 1915, the “Magna Carta” of the common seaman, was an American Federation of Labor measure, tirelessly proposed and explained by Andrew Furuseth, a seaman of Norwegian extraction, and sponsored by La Follette in the Senate. As for the Clayton Act, labor’s “Magna Carta,” it failed to serve labor, which had given itself fully to the war effort and, in the great steel strike of 1919, under Wilson, suffered rigors of capitalistic response, which impartial commissions reported with horror.
