At the turn of the 20th century, floods, fires, and waste plagued the United States. Industries burned through resources and blew toxins into the air, with few restrictions. States and federal governments were only beginning to approach questions of the environment and did so in piecemeal ways.

In 1907, responding to the need to improve transportation, President Theodore Roosevelt tasked the Inland Waterways Commission with studying how to better manage rivers. The commissioners recognized a need for interstate coordination in this effort. Two in particular—Gifford Pinchot and William John “WJ” McGee—went further. They asked Roosevelt to invite all the country’s governors to Washington to discuss the pressing issues of water and natural resources.

Roosevelt complied, inviting the governors of all the states and territories, along with representatives from hundreds of civic, economic, and media organizations, to the White House. The resulting Conference of Governors, beginning on May 13, 1908, and lasting three days, offered a glimpse of political and economic collaboration that extended beyond normal boundaries of party, state, industry, and even time. The conference represents a not-so-distant precedent for today’s need to extend our political thinking beyond narrow parameters.

According to the New York Times, the Conference of Governors’ unprecedented composition and purpose promised “history-making possibilities.” The paper reported 44 governors attending, though the published proceedings identified 36. Alongside them, four at-large members were invited to “represent the public,” which appears to have meant ensuring the discussion integrated economic concerns: steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie, railroad executive James J. Hill, labor leader John Mitchell, and Democratic mainstay William Jennings Bryan. Finally, 500-some representatives from myriad organizations—trade associations, unions, publications, and the like—joined as observers.

At the opening dinner, the attendees dined with Supreme Court Justices, members of the Cabinet and Congress, and other prominent officials in the White House’s state dining room while the United States Marine Band played.

Despite the night’s pomp, the tone of the following day’s conference was serious, even somber. According to Roosevelt’s opening address, “Conservation as a National Duty,” nothing less than the “continuance of the Nation” was at stake. During the 50-minute speech, interrupted by frequent nonpartisan applause, the president asserted the importance of cooperative planning and for elevating community rights over individuals’ pursuit of riches. “In the past we have admitted the right of the individual to injure the future of the Republic for his own present profit,” Roosevelt said. “The time has come for a change.”

Others shared this view. The following day, railroad executive James J. Hill spoke on “The Natural Wealth of the Land and Its Conservation.” Hill spent most of his allotted time offering chilling statistics of shrinking forests, diminishing ores, and declining soil fertility. He argued that these statistics represented not only a bleak economic future but also a potentially violent political one, borne out of desperation and poverty.

Hill believed that if industry leaders understood the dire resource situation, they would manage resources more carefully. Espousing a key element of Progressive conservation doctrine—that of applying sound business principles to resource management—he compared the nation to a corporation and the leaders gathered as a board of directors. The “board” needed to consider the resource wealth available and marshal it responsibly, he suggested, looking toward long-term investments over near-term profits, or they would ruin “a national patrimony that can never be restored.”

As the conference concluded, the governors approved a slate of resolutions and presented them to President Roosevelt. The declaration reiterated the themes of resources as foundational wealth, the importance of planning, and the need to cooperate. Its final line announced the governors’ intent plainly: “Let us conserve the foundations of our prosperity.”

By the end of the three days, the governors were also eager to discuss collaborating on other matters, such as extradition laws and divorce standards. They resolved to meet regularly thereafter. That commitment eventually turned into the National Governors Association, which now meets twice a year.

Another effect of the summit was that Roosevelt appointed the National Conservation Commission, which would inventory the nation’s resources. The commission produced a three-volume report that appeared in February 1909 and featured a detailed accounting of the nation’s dwindling stocks of various resources, including estimated dates for when they would be exhausted.

These achievements were all the more striking because the Progressive Era was no harmonious nonpartisan moment. Progressives saw themselves in a battle between good and evil on behalf of “the people” versus “the interests.” Muckraking journalists took down corruption from city halls to corporate boardrooms. Roosevelt used the power of government to tame big business. One of the biggest victims was James J. Hill himself: Roosevelt ordered the investigation that led to the 1904 Northern Securities Co. v. United States case that broke up Hill’s holding company. Roosevelt also invited his political rival Bryan to the conference.

Still, the participants overcame these differences and set their eyes on the nation’s shared future. As Secretary of State Elihu Root urged in his address to the group, they performed their duties not only for their parochial interests but also for “the common good.” Pinchot later wrote that the Conference of Governors “a conception of the land they lived in that was brand new,” and suggested history might remember the conference as one of history’s turning points. More measured historians have called it one of the “climactic moments” of Roosevelt’s presidency.

Today, Roosevelt’s concerns about the risks to the “continuance of the Nation” have transformed into warnings about global catastrophes. Twenty-first-century environmental concerns extend past accounting stocks of national resources. Now, researchers aim to identify thresholds of global ecological viability. Researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, for instance, have investigated planetary boundaries to determine the requirements for sustaining life. Our worries encompass the globe and question whether the planet can maintain its resilient capabilities.

Meanwhile, the “common good” is more elusive than ever. While pulses of reform have appeared—the rise of regional planning in the interwar period, the emergence of land-use planning for conservation and urban development in the 1960s and 1970s—coming together over future shared interests feels like a faraway ambition. Imagine a similar conference today, in which Joe Biden invited Gretchen Whitmer, Ron DeSantis, and Elon Musk to share a stage. Commitments to base politics and baser instincts would produce only vitriol and communicate only enmity.

In our hyper-partisan moment, looking beyond short-term advantage has become a dwindling resource. The 1908 Conference of Governors may not have been the grand historical turning point Pinchot imagined, but it can be a touchstone. A common focus and commitment beyond party, nation, personal interest, and the present has been possible and must be again for the good of the planet and all its people. As the stakes have risen beyond a nation’s supply of resources, so must the solutions and the seriousness with which policymakers, industrial leaders, and civic organizations approach the future.

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The price of the kosher meat that she and most of the half million or so Jewish homemakers on Manhattan’s Lower East Side fed their families had risen 50 percent over the previous few months, from 12 to 18 cents a pound. That suddenly put this staple out of the reach of most Russian and Eastern European immigrant Jewish families, whose breadwinners took home only about $10 a week in 1902.

Non-kosher meat was cheaper, of course, and widely available. But it was simply not an option for observant families like Sarah’s, duty-bound by history, culture, and religion to honor the exacting Jewish laws specifying which foods were permitted and how and by whom they had to be slaughtered and prepared. Nor was this 50-year-old mother of six, a resident of America for 34 years, willing to face a future of meatless meals.

Wholesale prices began to climb steeply for the several hundred kosher butchers in the Jewish quarter—then the most densely populated neighborhood in the nation—at the very beginning of 1902. Their patrons, mostly women, had fully supported the butchers when, on May 10, they staged a shutdown to pressure their local slaughterhouses into lowering rates. But although they were able to extract some modest concessions, they made no progress on the central issue, the price of meat. When the butchers reopened on May 14 and the women discovered that despite the givebacks they were being charged even more than before, they accused their butchers of price gouging and became enraged.

That same day, Sarah Edelson called a meeting at her family’s Monroe Street saloon to discuss the matter. She expected 50 fellow homemakers. When more than 500 showed up, the talk turned to activism. It was her neighbor, 35-year-old Fanny Levy, who summed up the mood in the room. “This is their strike?” she noted sarcastically of the butchers’ shutdown. “Let the women make a strike; then there will be a strike!”

And a women’s strike there was—or, rather, a boycott. By the wee hours of the next morning, some 3,000 housewives had assembled in squads of five on every block on the Lower East Side with a kosher butcher shop. When the businesses opened at 7 a.m., the pickets waved off all customers, imploring people to do without kosher meat until the butchers brought prices back down.

Crowd gather in front of a butcher shop. Courtesy of the Library of Congress/George Grantham Bain Collection.

What was supposed to be a nonviolent effort did not remain so for long. Those who insisted on entering the shops were heckled and, on their departure, assaulted. Their parcels of meat were confiscated, hurled into the gutters and sometimes doused with kerosene. Butchers were goaded into closing, and those who refused were attacked. Their inventory was destroyed and in many cases their windows and fixtures were smashed. Brutal blows from police nightsticks sent demonstrators to local hospitals and to court, but neither flesh wounds nor stiff fines deterred them.

The street protests ceased temporarily on Saturday, May 17, the Jewish Sabbath, but it was hardly a day of rest for the women. They used the respite to visit neighborhood synagogues and prayer halls in pairs. They challenged ancient traditions by interrupting worship services and mounting the platforms from which the Torah was read—normally off-limits to females—to solicit support from the mostly male worshippers. And although on one or two occasions they were greeted with hostility for this impropriety, for the most part their message was well-received, and the vast majority of congregants pledged to support the boycott.

After the Sabbath, they returned to the streets to make certain no meat was being sold. Their retail butchers laid the blame on higher wholesale prices being charged by the local abattoirs. But the real culprits—those responsible for most of the problem—were actually hundreds of miles away.

This was the era of the trusts—combinations of companies that banded together to control markets. And a “beef trust” had emerged, not unlike the trusts in steel, oil, and railroads. The cartel of Chicago-based meat packers, with names like Swift and Armour, had struck a secret pact to divide territory, control supply, and fix prices. These corrupt efforts were behind the big price increases in New York and elsewhere. The Justice Department of “trust-buster” President Theodore Roosevelt had taken note, and on May 10, the very day the kosher butchers had first shut down, took the packers to court to force them to cease their illegal practices.

Of course, not only kosher meat was affected. Prices rose for everyone. But the Jews were the first to feel the heat because kosher meat was more expensive. Prices had to reflect not only the wages of slaughterers and religious supervisors, but also the cost of transporting live cattle to New York. Because kosher meat had to be salted and soaked in the home within 72 hours of slaughter, it could not, like the non-kosher variety, be killed in Chicago and shipped more cheaply as a carcass.

Against this backdrop, the boycotters formed the Ladies’ Anti-Beef Trust Association and named Caroline Schatzberg, a well-spoken, 50-year-old Romanian-born widow, president. “It will be a question of endurance between us,” Schatzberg predicted. “If the retailers can afford to pay rent and do no business, I guess we can afford to do without meat. We can stand it as long as they can.”

And so the boycott grew. Committees were formed to distribute circulars throughout the tenements; seek support from benevolent societies, lodges, and trade unions; collect money to reimburse those arrested for fines paid; and reach out to other communities. In less than a week, Jewish homemakers in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem, and Long Island City had taken to the streets in solidarity and shared frustration.

Discussing the price of meat during the boycott. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The newspapers, by and large, were sympathetic. “It is impossible not to feel a touch of patriotic sympathy for the East Side housewives,” declared the New York World on May 16. “Their method was censurable, but their motive was unselfish and even heroic.” The socialist, Yiddish-language Forward cheered them on with the banner headline, “BRAVA, BRAVA, JEWISH WOMEN!” Only the New York Times, under the editorial control of assimilated German Jews inclined to see the protestors as threats to their own acceptance among America’s gentiles, dismissed them as “a dangerous class” who “do not understand the duties or the rights of Americans.”

The Times was certainly within its rights to censure them for the violence, which no responsible voice inside or outside the Jewish community condoned. But the paper was quite wrong in its assessment of their degree of Americanization. Although many of the women had been in the United States for only a short time and could not manage much English, they had already grasped the power of that most American form of expression: protest. With little experience and few resources at their disposal, but with steely determination and a clear understanding of the common threat they faced, they asserted their collective power as consumers, found their political voice, and challenged powerful, vested corporate interests.

As the Brooklyn Daily Eagle put it at the time, the women “seem to have imbibed a fundamental principle of Americanism as quickly as any earlier [immigrants] did. They decided that they were unjustly taxed, or charged, which amounts to the same thing for the person who pays, and they went out to find a means to remedy the injustice. They found it. Their proceeding was not within the letter of the law, but neither was the Boston Tea Party.”

Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, control over the boycott would pass into the hands of men. Husbands and fathers first got involved after seeing women clubbed and jailed by police. The Ladies’ Association’s efforts to recruit other Jewish groups to join them resulted in the formation of a second, male-led organization, the Allied Conference for Cheap Kosher Meat, on May 21.

The Allied Conference brought in several rabbis to negotiate directly with the local slaughterhouse bosses, who bore some responsibility for gouging and were now being vilified as the “Jewish Beef Trust.” Their goal in raising prices had been to raise profits, but, after three weeks of boycott, they agreed on June 3 to lower prices, although they refused to say for how long. Conference leaders then offered to permit those butchers who pledged to return retail prices to previous levels to reopen. Not everyone was entirely happy with the solution because it did not include a long-term commitment to affordable prices, but it did put kosher meat back on Jewish tables.

Their cause won, Sarah Edelson, Caroline Schatzberg, Fanny Levy, and their compatriots sank back into the obscurity from which they had emerged. Although they were not remembered, their boycott would linger in memory, and be recalled as the vanguard of homemaker-organized Jewish activism in America. After it was over, immigrant Jewish women needed no further persuading that they were capable of uniting and effecting change in their new homeland.

The spirit and grassroots tactics of the Great Kosher Meat Strike of 1902 would be applied successfully in the early decades of the century in rent strikes, community protests, labor actions, and suffrage demonstrations. Even today, their influence can be felt whenever consumers unite to protest an objectionable corporate policy, a lapse in ethical behavior or, as in 1902, a most unwelcome rise in prices.

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Yet Roosevelt’s colorful life and accomplishments distract us from an essential part of him: the profoundly moralistic worldview that fired his progressive zeal. Some recent biographers go so far as to overlook this element of his character completely, but Roosevelt’s friends and colleagues recognized in him, in the words of one friend, “the greatest preacher of righteousness in modern times. Deeply religious beneath the surface, he made right living seem the natural thing, and there was no man beyond the reach of his preaching and example.” As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge mused, “The blood of some ancestral Scotch Covenanter or of some Dutch Reformed preacher facing the tyranny of Philip of Spain was in his veins, and with his large opportunities and his vast audiences he was always ready to appeal for justice and righteousness.”

Lodge astutely singled out the Calvinist traditions in Roosevelt’s ancestry: the Dutch Reformed Church on his father’s side and the Scottish Presbyterian Church (whose Covenanters fought the tyranny of England’s Charles I) on his mother’s, not to mention his own upbringing in New York’s Madison Square Presbyterian Church. How significant Roosevelt’s religious origins were really struck home to me when I realized how many national leaders of the Progressive Era shared them. I had been looking at the denominational origins of major American environmentalists and already knew how dominant people raised Presbyterian, often with ministers in the family, were during its rise. Still, when I turned to progressivism I was unprepared for the extent to which Presbyterians ran the show. Non-Presbyterian presidents held office a mere eight-and-a-half years between 1885 and 1921. Of those born in the church, —Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson—two, Cleveland and Wilson, were sons of ministers. Only two Presidents before Cleveland were raised Presbyterian, and none after Wilson has been.

I wondered what all this Presbyterianism could mean for progressivism, a movement that included people of all faiths, and what this religious strain in politics meant for crusades that these days might be typically colored strictly “red” or “blue.”

Progressives grew up in an era in which big money corrupted politics, large corporations dominated the economy, and environmental crises threatened the natural world—forces that might rouse the ire of those on the “blue” side of the spectrum today. But the situation was a call to arms for those who were steeped in the Calvinist demand for a righteous society, a kind of moralizing that might be more considered on the “red” side of the current spectrum.

At this time in history, though, it was the progressives who were the evangelicals out to spread righteousness in the nation. Censorious Presbyterians attacked greed and avarice with a special vengeance, as the sins that prompted Eve to reach for the forbidden fruit and exile us all from the Garden.

I realized how easily Presbyterian evangelical righteousness translated from church pulpits to political podiums. This church imbued Roosevelt and his fellow progressive leaders with the moral courage to take on the concentrated wealth that corrupted American democracy and dominated the economy. When in 1901 Roosevelt found himself with “such a bully pulpit,” in his famous phrase, no wonder that he impressed people as a preacher of righteousness.

This same moral courage was necessary to drive American environmentalism. Calvinist churches fostered a particularly strong interest in nature and natural history; John Calvin himself regarded nature as a place where God drew nearest and communicated himself and he spoke of the natural world as the theater of his glory. To many Calvinists, nature study had an aura of sanctity as a moral occupation for men, women, and children alike. God, they said, gave natural resources to humans to use for the common good, but not sinfully to waste or turn to greedy or selfish purposes.

Under Harrison, Cleveland, Roosevelt, and Wilson, national government made dramatic strides in conservation. They expanded National Parks from one to two dozen, organized the Park Service, created millions of acres of National Forests, established the Forest Service, and named and promulgated conservation. They had essential assistance from their Secretaries of Interior (parks) and Agriculture (forests), who during the heyday of conservation between 1889 and 1946 were Presbyterians in three years out of four. For Wilson, a Southerner little interested in conservation, Interior Secretary Franklin Lane was prime instigator of major parks expansion and organization.

Roosevelt was the unexcelled exemplar of this passion for nature and moralism about its use. As a boy, he created a zoo in his home and learned taxidermy to preserve specimens. At Harvard, he originally intended to study natural history. After he chose a career in politics, he was an unusually knowledgeable ornithologist and published books on natural history, hunting, and his wilderness adventures. Aptly, as vice president, Roosevelt was climbing Mount Marcy in the Adirondacks when he learned William McKinley had died and he was now president.

Roosevelt believed government must protect nature and natural resources against the rapacious forces of self-interested avarice. “Conservation is a great moral issue,” he asserted. “I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few.” As president, he added five National Parks, created the first 18 National Monuments, quadrupled the acreage of National Forests, established the first 51 bird refuges and four game refuges, oversaw the first irrigation projects and several major dams, and made the new term “conservation” the cornerstone of his political agenda.

After he died in 1919, Roosevelt inspired many to carry on with his work. One was the fervent progressive Harold Ickes, who said of the moment he learned of Roosevelt’s death, “something went out of my life that has never been replaced.” Unsurprisingly, Ickes was a Presbyterian who once intended to go into the ministry. One friend even called him “furiously righteous.” Among his many acts as Secretary of Interior in the administration of Roosevelt’s cousin Franklin, he desegregated the National Parks and added the first four parks intended to remain as undeveloped wilderness: Everglades, Olympic, Kings Canyon, and Isle Royale. His career was a fitting capstone to the great era of progressive Presbyterianism.

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