For a moment Morgan continued to glare, then glanced at the piece
of paper. "What's the matter with it?" he asked, suddenly mild.

Steffens suggested a few changes.

"Yes," said Morgan, "that is better. You fix it." Steffens did so and left.
He later was told that Morgan sat watching him go, rapped for an asso-
ciate to find out the reporter's name, and remarked, "Knows what he
wants, and--and--gets it."

Times were changing in America. Restless young men who appeared
to know what they wanted were beginning to confront their powerful
elders with questions and proposals. They did not always do so in a spirit
of dissent. Like Steffens they shared with Morgan the bullish confidence
that a little reorganization here and there would permit the nation to
push on, to grow. Steffens was no reformer--yet. He had come merely to
inquire about progress from the man who embodied it. He was invited
to help the man "fix" it a little, and he did. In another twenty years, the
shoes would be reversed: the young inquirers into progress had become
its custodians, they had infused it with revolutionary principles and fresh
meaning, and they would now seek from the aged Morgans not advice on
how to fix it but an accounting of what had previously been done to it
that had required such a job of repair. In twenty years a new century had
replaced the old. Here it was that the concept of growth or progress
bestowed its name on an age. These years, for the reformers and the re-
formed alike, were the Progressive years.

The Progressive years present us at the outset with a puzzle. On the
one hand, signs of progress filled the landscape. On the other hand, dis-
content with the results had set loose the unquiet energies of criticism
and reform in every town and state.

To talk of progress was to cite tables of yearly gains--in population,
bank clearings, tons of sugar consumed. Merely to watch a century of
progress draw to a close generated extraordinary interest in the accelera-
tion of progress itself as the distinctive feature of the bright century just
begun. In the first new decade New York carved itself a subway system,
Chicago a $40,000,000 drainage canal to divert sewage away from the
lake, and San Francisco dug itself out from the rubble and ashes of an
earthquake and rebuilt a white city on golden hills. While William Van-
derbilt, Jr., drove his new French sports car from Newport to Boston and
back at an unheard-of forty miles per hour, a quiet engineer named Ford
had begun plans to put a cheap, serviceable automobile at the disposal
of every crossroads farmer who could afford the incredibly low price of
$600. In 1900 British scientists announced that a human voice had been
conveyed electrically six miles across the air. Three years later two Amer-
icans lifted themselves off a North Carolina sand flat in a manmade

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