This article examines the strategies used by charity applicants of the 1880s to present themselves in ways most likely to win relief from the Indianapolis Charity Organization Society (COS), while also preserving autonomy from an organization willing to use threats of starvation or institutionalization to force compliance from the poor. Investigators treated charity applicants as objects to be scientifically observed and categorized and then molded to conform to middle-class mores, but the applicants’ responses ranged from accommodation to complete defiance. Successful applications to the COS ultimately depended more on the vagaries of the investigator than on the strategies chosen by the applicant. Those applications often led to decisions that illustrate the draconian, punitive tendencies suggested by the leading theoretical treatises in the scientific charity movement. However, they also reveal instances where charity applicants guided investigators toward more generous decisions.

The nineteenth century was an era of perceptual certitude. Scientists collected and cataloged, explorers mapped and charted, artists rendered what they observed. The empirical approach to perception was grounded in the ideas that God had created an orderly and rational world and that the senses connected people to the intrinsic meanings of the things they contacted and observed. But by the 1890s, uncertainty about the reality of what people perceived was beginning to transform American popular culture. Among other things, the acceptance of perception as relative transformed attitudes to erotic displays and provided a foundation for the modernization of sexual attitudes. Anna Held was a prominent performer whose sexual play excited and challenged Progressive Era audiences. The public's response to her sexuality reveals the depth of the doubt that the questioning of Victorian certitude created. The progressive impulse, which sought to reaffirm certainty with regard to sexual identities and behaviors, can be seen as a reaction to the doubts that cultural modernists embraced and Anna Held's public enjoyed.

When Professor Benjamin Parke De Witt of New York University sat down to write the first history of the progressive movement in 1915, he promised “to give form and definiteness to a movement which is, in the minds of many, confused and chaotic.” Apparently it was a fool's errand, because confusion and chaos continued to plague historians of early twentieth-century reform long after Professor De Witt laid his pen to rest. The maddening variety of reform and reformers in the early twentieth century has perpetually confounded historians' efforts to identify what, if anything, the progressives had in common. Back in the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter charitably allowed that progressives were “of two minds on many issues,” whereas Arthur Link argued that “the progressive movement never really existed” because it pursued so many “contradictory objectives.” In the 1960s, Robert Wiebe concluded that the progressives, if they constituted a movement at all, showed “little regard for consistency.” In the 1970s, Peter Filene wrote an “obituary” for progressivism by reasserting Link's claim that the movement had “never existed” because it was so divided and diffuse. In the 1980s, Daniel Rodgers tried to recast the “ideologically fluid” progressive movement as a pastiche of vaguely related rhetorical styles. By the 1990s, so many competing characterizations of progressivism had emerged that Alan Dawley wondered if “they merely cancel each other out.” In 2002, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore declared emphatically that “historians cannot agree” on progressivism. In 2010, Walter Nugent admitted that “the movement's core theme has been hard to pin down” because progressivism had “many concerns” and “included a wide range of persons and groups.”

The conundrum of Progressive Era reform flowering simultaneously with the institutionalization of Jim Crow, the establishment of the Asiatic Barred Zone, and the introduction of European immigration restriction fascinates historians, even as it agitates them. From a contemporary, post-civil-rights-era perspective there is something deeply disturbing—and disappointing—about progressivism and racial and ethnic bigotry apparently going hand in hand. Was progressivism inherently racist and ethnically chauvinistic, or are we dealing simply with a case of practically minded politicians bowing to bigotry to achieve political results? An investigation of the ethnic and racial side of Robert M. La Follette Sr. hardly promises to answer this question fully. The progressive movement remains well-nigh impossible to pin down in exact analytical terms. Still, it may be argued that La Follette was an unusually uncompromising politician who proved willing, at least during the latter part of his career, to sacrifice practical results for idealistic principles. If La Follette's progressivism was of a purer strain than that of many a result-oriented pragmatic politician, was it less bigoted?

La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences is a remarkable primary document of the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1913, it remains in print today and has the dubious honor of being one of Richard Nixon's three favorite books. It illuminates the crucial role that La Follette's home state of Wisconsin played in molding La Follette as a man and as a politician, thereby influencing his national progressive agenda; but it also reveals much more.

Robert M. La Follette Sr. is a fabled character in the state of Wisconsin, and his name adorns streets and schools across the Dairy State. In the U.S. Senate, a bust of La Follette rests in the Rotunda, and La Follette is credited, by historians and senators alike, as being one of the greatest and most effective members who ever served in that body.