For most of its best-known publicists, progressivism always remained a set of largely unfulfilled aspirations. The precise character of these aspirations varied from individual to individual, although, as we have seen, they all sought a more equal and more cooperative – in their eyes, a more genuinely democratic – society. In the years before the war, they were also in broad agreement on the general direction change must take if this goal was to be achieved. For all their professed optimism, there were signs as early as 1914 that they were becoming frustrated by the difficulty of bringing about the sort of reform measures they thought necessary. By 1920, they were generally in a state of despair about the possibility of doing so in the foreseeable future.

Although the names of many of these writers and journalists often figure prominently in historical accounts of it, they constituted, of course, only one element in the progressive movement. Nevertheless, their experience does throw an interesting light upon the broader phenomenon. The general thrust of much of the revisionist historiography in the 1960s and 1970s has been to suggest that the real character of the political and economic reforms that were instituted in the early twentieth century revealed the democratic pretensions of progressive reformers to be misleading, if not dishonest. Those who have more recently sought to reconcile the traditional view of this period with the findings of the “organizational” school of historians have emphasized the distinction between the intentions of reformers and the character of the eventual outcome. This is a proper distinction, and one that seems to illuminate the history of some regulatory measures in particular.