ABSTRACT
As with populism, the historiography of progressivism is extremely complex, so much so that some historians have proposed discarding the very term as conceptually useless. Progressivism, though heir to a good deal of populist rhetoric and ideology, was primarily an urban, middle-class phenomenon. The Progressive movement set the United States well along the road toward the modern, centralized, bureaucratic state. To some extent, reform liberals today might be said to be living still on the intellectual capital of progressivism. In fact, a caricature of progressivism as being, like populism, a kind of morality play, with the people pitted against corrupt interests, has a certain limited plausibility, as long as one remembers that the corruption was indeed quite real and the interests often quite genuinely malign. In spite of Wilson's Jeffersonian roots, the New Freedom, like the New Nationalism, implied a substantial alteration in the structure of the federal system in favor of the national government.
