1900 to 1909
After the major economic crisis of 1873, the banking system of the Union was struggling to deal with the distribution, and free flow of cash in large enough numbers to allow banks to satisfy the public demand for physical currency in times of economic duress, while allowing the banks to still invest the money interred in their vaults.
The leadership and executives of these many large banks like the Warburgs, and the wealthy business tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Warren Delano, worked to correct for the bank runs and panics by forming private connections between banks that would have liquidity in high enough amounts to alleviate the stresses of any possible bank runs. By 1900, the banking industry was making such associations, called clearing houses, whose job it was to clean the mess of a bank run, quite commonly, but in the beginning rumblings of a possible war, and some level of economic uncertainty caused by many problems of corruption and collusion between leaders of corporations and various state actors involving the steel, meatpacking, oil, and railroad businesses most severely. The Expediting Act, passed by the 57th Congress in 1903, moved the antitrust cases against those industries to the top of the pile of cases for Theodore Roosevelt to deal with.
This rise in corruption scandals, like those of the major railroads at this time, combined with the recovery of the US economy from the panic of 1893 by 1897 under the presidency of William McKinley through very stringent opposition to inflation and highly protectionist economic policy, with various military and diplomatic acquisitions of new territories, the Union was set up for Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency with a rather vicarious and indecisive lean towards either further growth and continued opposition to class warfare of guys like William Jennings Bryan and other radicals.
In September of 1901, William McKinley was assassinated for his politics by an “anarchist” named Leon Czolgolsz. The presidency of Theodore Roosevelt begins with a great tumult, but has him posturing to tackle the great difficulties of assuring continued American safety and supremacy on the high seas so as to have a good domestic economy. Being a rather progressive man, he was successful in implementing antitrust laws, negotiating labor strikes, like that of the Coal Strike of 1902, and decided to found the Food & Drug Administration to ensure the quality of food for the average American. Roosevelt mainly went after bad trusts, corrupt labor unions, and corrupt political machines, making the Department of Commerce and Labor with a Bureau of Corporations to counter the growing power of Standard Oil and J. P. Morgan’s companies.
By 1905, many of the major increases in government power and authority brought about by the attempts to root out corruption had already taken place, with the Interstate Commerce Commission (I.C.C.) having a much greater authority under the Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 and Hepburn Act of 1906. These many actions of economic regulation, while having positive aspects, also allowed for a relative economic destabilization, which culminated in a panic and bank run in 1907, wherein many of the various concerned parties, both private and public, conservative and progressive, decided to pledge their own money to avert severe economic crisis. J. P. Morgan, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, Theodore Gilman, Paul Warburg, Frederic Adrian Delano, Benjamin Strong Jr., Prescott Bush, and many other bankers coordinated a massive push to nationalize the banking system under the National Monetary Commission (NMC), before succeeding under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, though that is a bit after the time covered here.
During the run of the NMC, most of the powerful bankers, investors, oil moguls, and old money families met, and created the corpus of connections that became the establishment, with many being later integral to the creation of the intelligence agencies and the F.B.I. The final major act of the Republican progressive of the years covered was the Federal Employers Liability Act which was composed to protect and compensate individual who worked for railroads that got injured on the job.