Date
7-22-2025
Department
College of Arts and Sciences
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy in History (PhD)
Chair
Michael A. Davis
Keywords
Conservatism, Conservative, Republican, Republicanism, Progressive, Progressivism, Twentieth Century, Politics, Joseph Knowland, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Hiram Johnson, California
Disciplines
History
Recommended Citation
Cook, Ron, "The Regulars: Joseph Russell Knowland and the Roots of Contemporary Republican Conservatism" (2025). Doctoral Dissertations and Projects. 7169.
https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/7169
Abstract
The “regular” Republicans were the conservatives within the reform-dominated Republican Party at the dawn of the twentieth century. Heirs of the Republican “stalwarts” of the Gilded Age, they were the “machine,” “establishment,” and “old guard” Republicans in the Age of Theodore Roosevelt. Overall, they preferred traditional, “patron-based” and “service-oriented” party organization over the “issue-driven coalitions” of progressive reformers. Across most of the nineteenth century, American politics was rooted in simple party identity, and this traditional “politics of organization.” In the early twentieth century, however, progressives ushered in what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., later called a “politics of ideology,” grounded not in habits and spoils, but in ideas-- specifically, “a sharp sense of alienation from the business culture and by a belief in positive government as the instrument for national improvement.” While this “new politics” did not reach maturing until the New Deal of the 1930s, its adherents—including the early progressives-- were involved in politics “not to make office, but to make policy.”
In contrast, the “regulars” favored traditional party politics, and opposed most of the progressive agenda. Key “regulars” on Capitol Hill included Senators Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, Orville H. Platt of Connecticut, John Coit Spooner of Wisconsin, and William Boyd Allison of Iowa, and Congressmen Joseph (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon of Illinois and Joseph Knowland of California. Overall, one modern historian observed, they believed that the “best policy was to ‘let well enough alone’… and to ‘stand pat.’” Cannon, who served as Speaker of the House from 1903 to 1911 (and who was derided by his detractors as “Czar Cannon”), put it more bluntly. “I am god-damned tired of listening to all this babble for reform,” Cannon declared in 1906. “America is a hell of a success. Why tinker with it?” While the “regulars” indeed opposed the “insurgents” and reform, their identity was not merely rooted in their opposition to progressivism. They did, in fact, have traditional principles which they believed and advocated.
