Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-fqc5m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T21:42:08.973Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

SOME SECOND THOUGHTS ON PROGRESSIVISM AND RIGHTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2012

Eldon J. Eisenach
Affiliation:
Political Science, University of Tulsa

Abstract

After summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding “big government.” Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between “government(s)” and “state,” derived from Tocqueville and Lincoln’s understandings of popular sovereignty. Secondly, this distinction is reinforced by their stress on an articulate and coherent public opinion that would provide democratic legitimacy to all forms of governing institutions, both “public” and “private,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Eisenach, Eldon J., “Why the Progressives Didn't Take Rights Seriously,” Unpublished paper, Conference for the Study of Political Thought, Yale University, 1991Google Scholar.

2 Croly, Herbert, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 25–26, 44, 131Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 145–46.

4 Ibid., 148–49. Charles Beard's textbook that dominated collegiate instruction in American politics from its inception in 1910 through the 1930s made this same historical argument in the 1928 edition: “No longer do statesmen spend weary days over finely spun theories about strict and liberal interpretations of the Constitution, about the sovereignty and reserved rights of states…. It is true that there are still debates on such themes as federal encroachments on local liberties, and that admonitory volumes on ‘federal’ usurpation come from the press. It is true also that conservative judges, dismayed at the radical policies reflected in new statutes, federal and state, sometimes set them aside in the name of strict interpretation. But one has only to compare the social and economic legislation of the last decade with that of the closing years of the nineteenth century, for instance, to understand how deep is the change in the minds of those who have occasion to examine and interpret the Constitution bequeathed to them by the Fathers. Imagine Jefferson … reading Roosevelt's autobiography affirming the doctrine that the President of the United States can do anything for the welfare of the people which is not forbidden by the Constitution! Imagine Chief Justice Taney … called upon to uphold a state law fixing the hours of all factory labor…. Imagine James Monroe … called upon to sign bills appropriating federal money for roads, education, public health … and other social purposes! … Why multiply examples?” Beard, Charles, American Government and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 100101Google Scholar.

5 Eisenach, Eldon J., The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Lawrence, KS: The University Press of Kansas, 1994), chaps. 1–3Google Scholar.

6 Quoted from Eisenach, Eldon J., ed., The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 274Google Scholar.

7 De Witt, Benjamin Parke, The Progressive Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1915)Google Scholar; Weyl, Walter, The New Democracy (New York, Macmillan, 1912)Google Scholar; Lippmann, Walter, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose our Current Unrest [1914] (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961)Google Scholar; and Croly, Progressive Democracy, all assume this ideological victory.

8 Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Balogh, Brian, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novak, William J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American StateAmerican Historical Review 113 (2008): 752–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation and Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

11 Milkis, Sidney M., Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Politics (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2009)Google Scholar.

12 Crunden, Robert M., Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization 1889–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), chap. 7Google Scholar.

13 Batten, Samuel Zane, The Christian State: The State, Democracy and Christianity (Philadelphia: Griffith and Rowland Press, 1909), 239–40Google Scholar.

14 Herron, George, The Christian Society (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1894), 110Google Scholar.

15 Dewey, John and Tufts, James, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 478Google Scholar.

16 Dewey, John, “The Ethics of Democracy” (1888), The Early Works, 1882–1898, vol. 1 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 231Google Scholar.

17 Cooley, Charles, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Scribner, 1909), 349 and 351CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 See discussions of Albion Small and Simon Patten in Eisenach, Eldon J., “Progressivism as a National Narrative in Biblical-Hegelian Time,” in Paul, Ellen Frankel, Miller, Fred D. Jr., and Paul, Jeffrey, eds. Liberalism: Old and New (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5583Google Scholar.

19 Milkis, Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Politics; Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism, 11–16. Simon Patten, a political economist at the Wharton school, coined the term “social work” to mark out one of the central tasks of modern government and administration. See Patten, Simon, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 201220Google Scholar.

20 de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, trans. Mansfield, Harvey C. and Winthrop, Delba (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), I, I, 4, p. 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

21 Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy, 237–39, passim. Emphasis added.

22 Follett, Mary Parker, The New American State: Group Organization in the Solution of Popular Government (New York: Longmans, Green, 1918), 137–38Google Scholar. Emphasis added.

23 See, for example, Stettner, Edward A., Shaping Modern Liberalism: Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1993)Google Scholar.

24 For examples, see Eisenach, Lost Promise of Progressivism, 150–56.

25 Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2224CrossRefGoogle Scholar, use the term “plenary authority” to argue that all sites of political change already possess such generalized authority, whatever its source. This is to counter the common misperception that the growth of government is the same as an increase in authority. Thus, “America in the nineteenth century was no less fully governed than America in the twentieth; more of some forms of authority indicates less of others” (23).

26 Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Orren and Skowronek, Search for American Political Development, 84.

28 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I, I, 4, p. 55. Emphasis added. And see Villa, Dana, Public Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), chap. 2Google Scholar, on Tocqueville's “decentered public sphere” in his conception of civil society. Like the argument here regarding the Progressives, Villa holds that, while Tocqueville (like Hegel), “saw individualism (or ‘atomism’) as premised on a faulty idea of freedom as independence … [they both] upheld individual rights as the basis of a distinctively ‘modern’ form of liberty…. [E]ach saw the right of ‘subjective’ freedom as central to … the ‘rational’ state and any morally defensible democracy” (50–51).

29 Hadley, Arthur Twining, The Relations between Freedom and Responsibility in the Evolution of Democratic Government (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1903), 139–40Google Scholar.

30 For examples, see Eisenach, ed., The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism, chap. 1.

31 See McClymer, John E., War and Welfare: Social Engineering in America, 1890–1925 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Schaffer, Ronald, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Vaughn, Stephen, Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism, and the Committee on Public Information (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Wynn, Neil A., From Progressivism to Prosperity: World War I and American Society (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986)Google Scholar.

32 Giddings, Franklin H., Elements of Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 156–57Google Scholar, and see 324–29 on equality and rights.

33 Rabban, David M., Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chaps. 6–7Google Scholar; on Dewey's changing position on civil liberties, see 335–41.

34 Pound, Roscoe, “Executive Justice,” American Law Register 46 (1907): 137–46Google Scholar; The Organization of the Courts (Philadelphia: The Law Association of Philadelphia, 1913)Google Scholar.

35 Thus, the Whig statement of principles reads: “We wish, fully and entirely, TO NATIONALIZE THE INSTITUTIONS OF OUR LAND AND TO IDENTIFY OURSELVES WITH OUR COUNTRY; to become a single great people, separate and distinct in national character, political interest, social and civil affinities from any and all other nations, kindred and people on earth” (American Republican, 7 November, 1844).

36 Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

37 Stears, Marc, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1896–1926 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

38 Diggins, John, Mussolini and Fascism: the View from America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972)Google Scholar; Goldberg, Jonah, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (New York: Doubleday, 2008)Google Scholar.

39 Brandes, Stuart D., American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Zunz, Olivier, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

40 Lustig, R. Jeffrey, Corporate Liberalism: the Origins of Modern American Political Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State: 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

41 For early expressions of these values, see Small, Albion, “The State and Semi-Public Corporations,” American Journal of Sociology 1 (1895): 398410CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Private Business Is a Public Trust,” American Journal of Sociology 1 (1895): 276–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Adams, Henry Carter, Relation of the State to Industrial Action and Economics and Jurisprudence [1887], ed. Dorfman, Joseph (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954)Google Scholar.

42 Huntington, Samuel, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar. Also at Harvard, Huntington (1927–2008) warned of populist “creedal passions” grounded in democratic ideals that periodically sweep across American politics and threaten national constitutional sovereignty and the rule of law. Both Elliott and Huntington were active in shaping national security policy.

43 Jefferson, Thomas, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 10, Ford, Paul Leicester, ed. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1899), 39Google Scholar.

44 Gabriel, Ralph H., Course of American Democratic Thought (New York: Roland Press, 1956)Google Scholar.

45 Discussed in Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 349–94.

46 Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), chaps. 8 and 9Google Scholar.

47 Dewey, John, The Public and Its Problems (1927), The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 2 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990)Google Scholar and A Common Faith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1934)Google Scholar; and see Rogers, Melvin L., The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality and the Ethos of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 See note 3 above.

49 Plotke, David, Building a New Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on how and why this alliance was necessary to effectively govern.

50 Ciepley, David, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

51 Boorstin, Daniel J, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Schlessinger, Arthur Meier, The Vital Center: the Politics of Freedom (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949)Google Scholar.

52 Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism, chaps. 15–16.

53 For a time, the term “entitlements” was used to distinguish welfare from civil and political rights. This term was, for obvious reasons, soon dropped.

54 The federal courts contributed to this new set of legitimating ideas by seeing itself as the special guardian of voices and interests that lacked electoral power or lacked enough respect in the larger culture to be given a fair say in the larger polity. See Shapiro, Martin, Freedom of Speech: The Supreme Court and Judicial Review (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966)Google Scholar; and Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism, chap. 14.

55 Lind, Michael, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar. An excellent example of justifying “overclass” rule as the extension of rights is Gutmann, Amy, Identity in Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

56 Rawls, John's Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993)Google Scholar and Dworkin, Ronald's Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978)Google Scholar seem particularly designed for courts and for hierarchical administrative and bureaucratic bodies rather than for legislators or electorates. The intended audience for Gutmann, Identity in Democracy, is precisely these leaders. Following a liberal colonial model of indirect rule, only after the larger society and electorate are properly educated in the leaders' democratic values can they be entrusted with self-government.

57 Except for a rough set of “rules of the game” to encourage bargaining and compromise, standard college textbooks in American government in this period put the discussion of rights at the end of the text, not at the start. The theoretical basis for this placement is found in Dahl, Robert, Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)Google Scholar and Pluralist Democracy in the United States (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1967)Google Scholar; and Truman, David, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951)Google Scholar.

58 Kersch, Ken I., “Ecumenicalism Through Constitutionalism: The Discursive Development of Constitutional Conservatism in National Review, 1955–1980, Studies in American Political Development 25 (April, 2011) 86116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59 Glendon, Mary Ann, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of American Political Discourse (New York: Free Press, 1991)Google Scholar and Sandel, Michael, Democracy's Discontent: America In Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

60 Teles, Steven, The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement: The Battle for Control of the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008)Google Scholar. This might be forgiven in the 1980s when Republican/conservative presidents confronted both Congress and the courts dominated by liberals.

61 Skowronek, Stephen, “The Conservative Insurgency and Presidential Power: A Developmental Perspective on the Unitary Executive.Harvard Law Review 122 (2009): 20702103Google Scholar.