Speaking for whom?

Theodore Roosevelt was actually very much pro-business. He was a big supporter of tariffs, following the Whig tradition, but, like the Whigs, saw tariffs as a way to help business interests, not labor interests. The left at that time was the large force pushing for free trade, as you see later with Woodrow Wilson. Seeing Wilson and Roosevelt as part of the same 'Progressive movement' is not very helpful. The 'progressive' label had become popular so was co-opted by different people with different agendas. When I think of 'Progressive' I think of the original party under TR, and the 1912 platform.

You have to put what Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Progressives were trying to accomplish in historical context. Although Beck's image of him is as this extreme figure, the Democratic nominee he was running against, William Jennings Bryan, was the real extremist. Bryan, a Populist, not a Progressive, had a pretty radical agenda at the time: he called for things like prohibition on alcohol, nationalizing the railroads, a progressive income tax. Bryan wasn't interested in the limits of the Constitution and one part of his rhetoric was criticizing the fallibility of the Supreme Court.

Roosevelt objected to Bryan's politics, but was frustrated by what he called the 'reactionary' tendencies of conservatives in his own party. He argued that it was possible to make progress within the boundaries of the Constitution and while maintaining conservative values. Hence the term 'progressive'. His argument was generally for moderation and centrism.... Of course, this led Taft to call him a radical and Bryan to attack him for being pro-business.. John McCain wasn't so wrong when he compared himself to TR. Like TR, he tries to be a centrist, and is also attacked by both the left and right.

Most modern conservative critics of the Progressives don't disagree with most of the 1912 platform. They don't want anti-trust laws repealed, they don't want child labor laws or other labor laws repealed, they don't want lobbyist registration laws repealed, they don't want equal suffrage repealed. Most don't want to repeal the 17th amendment either, though I don't think that was a part of the 1912 platform. The biggest area of disagreement would be the call for a national health insurance program.

What modern progressives try do is use the original progressives as a platform to ground their own agenda. However, again, the original Progressives saw themselves as centrist and committed to the Constitution. Modern progressives see themselves as leftist (and have no patience for centrists), they're much more anti-business, dismiss conservative morality, and believe the Constitution has to be interpreted subjectively. In many ways, they're much closer to the William Jennings Bryan position. They just adopt the rhetoric of Progressives, which meant something different 100 years ago from what it does today.

Calling for more regulations on business in 1912 made sense. Most conservatives today support the same regulations. Calling for more regulations in 2010 doesn't make sense.

Sorry Simon, I'm having a problem with writing at the moment, so thats why my responses can get long winded and not address the point directly. What I'm saying is I disagree that modern progressives have the same animus... I feel the similarities between progressives then and now are superficial and mainly based on similarities in rhetoric; and that rhetoric made sense 100 years ago but not today.

Do you think 20th century liberals really were faithful to liberalism in the classical sense of the term?

Or maybe I'm unsure what you mean by the changeover from liberal to progressive. How I see it is that liberals today adopted the term 'progressive' in order to appeal to moderates. The term 'liberal' became a liability, so they wanted to point to Roosevelt as a reference. In doing that, they also tried to put a different moral character behind their positions.