Louis Post as a Carpetbagger in South Carolina: Reconstruction as a Forerunner of the Progressive Movement

Abstract . Did the reforming zeal of the Carpetbaggers have much influence upon men who would later be involved in the Progressive movement? The experience of Louis F. Post, who served as a Carpet-bagging stenographer in South Carolina and who later became editor of the Chicago Public and Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Woodrow Wilson administrations, seems to indicate a continuity of interest not only in reform, but in racial equality. Post's unpublished autobiography, his article on his Carpetbagging experience which appeared in the Journal of Negro History and newspaper dispatches he wrote for the Hackettown Gazette in 1871 and 1872 provide the major pieces of evidence that the Carpetbaggers’ experience—often written off as job grabbing by political hacks eager to capitalize on the defeat of the South in the Civil War—was a wellspring of the Progressive movement in America.