The height of the Progressive movement, 18902 - 1920s, was a racist movement that wanted government to be all things except for blacks, asians and other none-whites in America as exhibited by Samuel Gompers, president and socialist of the AFL, statement that Philipinos were a "semi-savage population."
The Progressive movement was an idealized world built for whites and excluded non-whites as part of their plan. Jim Crow laws, segregation and lynching were taught in universities, hand-in-hand with courses of study that attacked capitalism, as the answer to "scientific studies", including eugenics, that showed non-whites to be inferior.
Progressive President Woodrow Wilson was proud to be quoted in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, in fact so proud that he had a private presidential showing of The Birth of a Nation in the White House. The film, and Wilson's support, reinvigorated a waning KKK into a national force (Indiana was home to the largest Klan) and many quoted Wilson when expressing the need of progressive policies to stop, not just the south, but the nation from being, “ruled by an ignorant and inferior race.”
One of the pinnacles of Progressive racism was Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), segregation in public accommodations so long as “separate but equal” facilities were given to non-whites, heralding laws throughout the country passed by Progressive legislatures that segregated blacks in every way possible from buses to beaches, train depots to drinking fountains. Benjamin “Pitchfork” Tillman, a leading Southern Progressive stated that, “When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.”
If you think that the Progressives are just a bunch of misinformed Democrats who hate individual liberty, think again.
