this belief was the labor theory of “scientific management” propounded by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911. In hisPrinciples of Scientific Management, Taylor laid out the steps by which factory labor could be made most productive by micromanaging the training and motions that individual workers were required to perform. Historian Siegfried Giedion has provided an excellent analysis of the invidious implications of Taylorism in his monograph, Mechanization Takes Command. Scientific management, Giedion argues, emerged as the dominant labor model in the 1900’s. Efficient production, at any and all price, demanded the scientific study of the human body and the determination of its limits. As Giedion says, “The human body is studied to discover how far it can be transformed into a mechanism.” From the point of view of the workers themselves, this meant that their movements needed to be calculated to the finest degree, and that the rote memorization and repetitive motions that factory work demanded literally dehumanized them and transformed them into extension of industrial machinery. Unfortunately, Northern Progressivism had both positive and negative effects on the workforce.

The effects of Progressivism in the South were much more subtle, and were not so much tied to the industrial economy as they were to trade. Perhaps no president of the Progressive era did more to bolster the position of Southern businessmen than Woodrow Wilson, who assumed office in 1913. Wilson made one of his top priorities a revision of the trust-busting laws of previous years, and in particular he established the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Though the history of this institution is long and complex, simply put it was given significant power to determine and eliminate what it called “unfair trade practices.” For Progressivists, this should have meant decentering economic power away from the hands of a small cohort of elite businessmen. However, in practice the early power of the FTC was severely watered down by Southern lawmakers, who amended most of its bills with language that made injunctions against certain trade practices ambivalent. Thus, under Wilson, Southern businesses could still engage in “tying” agreements, price discrimination, the acquisition of competitor business stock, and other practices that gave them an unfair economic advantage.

However, more than anything, Wilson failed at extending Progressivist principles of social justice to Southern black people. A common expression that historians use to characterize the situation under Wilson was “Progressivism for whites only,” as the president was outwardly unconcerned with the plights of Southern blacks. Although Wilson was putatively against the violence of the Ku Klux Klan, he was generally against giving blacks the right to vote, viewing them as an ignorant and inferior race. Many Southerners that he appointed to his cabinet were uncompromising racists, and the Wilson administration was very unwelcoming to consultancy by black social leaders.

The Progressive movement failed to take root in the South since that part of the country was much less industrialized than the North, and much less reliant on immigrant labor. Most of the central concerns of the Progressive movement were in some way related to a variety of social problems that arose from mass immigration. And as the vast majority of new immigrants settled in the urban centers of the industrialized North, it was difficult for the Progressive movement to make much headway south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

That's not to say that there weren't any social problems in the South which needed to be addressed; far from it. But the South's agrarian economy had a completely different structure to that of the industrialized Northern economy. For one thing, it was more traditional, more paternalistic, which made it more difficult for Progressives to go into rural communities and organize themselves and those they wished to help.

In the North, Progressives entered immigrant communities as paternalistic figures, seeing themselves as teachers as much as reformers. They were helped in this regard by the fact that they spoke English, whereas many immigrants did not. In the South, however, the structure of society was much less fluid, more rigidly hierarchical. Furthermore, the people that the Progressives wished to help in this neck of the woods could already speak English and so were much less amenable to being influenced and instructed than Northern immigrant workers.

Among other things, this meant that Progressives were unable to exercise the same degree of control over Southern workers as they did over their Northern counterparts. And so, Progressivism never put down the kind of roots there that it did elsewhere in the United States.

The Progressive Movement in the United States had its origins in the intellectual and philosophical Age of Enlightenment (Age of Reason) in eighteenth-century Europe—when the importance of science and reason began to eclipse the mandates of religion and the ideals of social equality and progress for all began to make their way into the public consciousness.

The early twentieth-century Progressive Movement in the United States espoused some elements of this philosophy, with an emphasis on curbing the power of corporations and re-evaluating the role of the agricultural sector in the nation's progress. New social concerns came into place with the rapid industrialization of cities, the mass migration of workers from rural to urban areas, and the need to put checks and balances on the excesses of industry. For the agriculture-based southern states, the Progressive Movement promoted ideas of modernization that were not generally welcomed in a society still reeling from the changes brought about by the Civil War.

President Theodore Roosevelt came to be seen as a fore-runner in the Progressive Movement due to his corporate trust-busting actions. On the rural front, he established the Commission on Country Life, which was tasked with gathering statistics and making recommendations for modernization to farmers—who did not take well to what they saw as interference in their affairs and a paternalistic attitude from government representatives who knew little about the realities of farming life.

The beginning of the twentieth century was still a time of transition from the social upheaval brought to the country by the Civil War—especially for the South. The urban centers of the northern states had long been industrialized and had cultural attitudes and societal needs more aligned with the goals of the Progressive Movement than the rural South did. The southern states still maintained a predominantly agrarian culture, though it was only a shadow of its former antebellum self. Still suspicious of government interference in their long-held way of life, the rural South did not take well to the reformist ideas of the Progressive Movement.