Ok, but Progressives and Conservatives are English words that are entirely subjective. Teddy was a progressive for his time, I'll give him that. But the progressive movement that he identified with was MUCH older than he was, and he simply grabbed the flag and moved to the head of the march, he didn't actually start it. When he was a 7 year old boy in 1865 looking out his window in New York as the coffin of Abraham Lincoln rolled by, the Progressive Movement was already strong. Just because history books identify the "Progressive Era" as starting in 1901 doesn't mean that the Progressive Movement isn't older than that. It's much older than that. The American Revolution itself was a Progressive rebellion.

And Wilson was the nominee of the Democratic Party, not the Progressive Party. He had some progressive policies in his platform, but he was being led by progressives in Congress more than anything else, something that is forgotten today by too many.

The natural tendency of capitalism is to concentrate wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. The effort to reverse that trend and distribute wealth and power into more and more hands is at the core of the Progressive Movement, and the struggle between the two forces has existed for as long as money has been in existence.