I. Introduction
It is important to get Progressivism right. The authors of its leading ideas founded the modern American university and created its disciplines and the journals that codified their thoughts. They completed the transformation of sectarian American Protestantism, begun before the Civil War, into an embracive, liberal, and evangelical civil religion. They created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state, and founded and supplied a mass national journalism independent of political party and church. They witnessed and helped legitimate the creation of a national financial and industrial corporate economy that soon became the engine driving the international economy, transforming America into the dominant world power. In the process, they sought to transform an older American liberalism anchored in natural rights and constitutional jurisprudence into a new socialized liberalism anchored in visions of evolutionary progress and the socialization of the self. If Americans cannot understand Progressivism on these terms, they have little hope of understanding themselves and the place of contemporary America in the world.
This essay represents some generalizations about Progressivism exemplified by three figures: Lyman Abbott, Albion Small, and Simon Patten.1
See Eldon J. Eisenach, ed., The Social and Political Thought of American Progressivism (Cambridge, MA, and Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2006), for a collection of thirty-eight Progressive writings by twenty-five authors.
Lyman Abbott (1835–1922) was chiefly known as the editor of Outlook (1881–1922), a weekly that began as Christian Union. The son of a New England Congregational minister, Abbott studied at New York University, and began his career as a lawyer. Under the influence of the renowned preacher Henry Ward Beecher, however, Abbott left law practice to study theology, first serving churches in the Midwest during the Civil War and then directing the Freedmen's Union Commission that provided aid to white war refugees and black freedmen. Under Abbott's editorship, Outlook achieved a circulation of 100,000, becoming the preeminent nonsectarian Protestant publication of its day. Following his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt became an associate editor. Booker T. Washington,2
Washington (1856–1915), born into slavery, became president of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an industrial and agricultural training center for freed slaves. He accepted the necessity for legal and social segregation in the South, maintaining that the best path was economic and educational advancement as a prerequisite for claiming civic and political equality. He was a strong supporter of Theodore Roosevelt.
Riis (1849–1914) was a Danish-born American journalist. His book How the Other Half Lives (1890), illustrated with his own photographs, documented life in the slums of New York City. The book brought him to the attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who was then serving as the city's police commissioner.
Hale (1822–1909) was a clergyman and popular writer, most notably of The Man without a Country (1863). Married into the Beecher family of prominent abolitionists, he later became a prominent advocate of modernist theology and the “social gospel” movement.
Ely (1854–1943), a German-educated professor of political economy at the University of Wisconsin, was a founder and early president of the American Economic Association and of the American Association for Labor Legislation, and author of many books on the relationship between the new industrial economy and political and social reform.
Lyman Abbott, The Rights of Man (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 100 and 165.
Albion Small (1854–1926) was professor of sociology at the University of Chicago at its founding in 1892 until his death. He was a founding member of the American Sociological Society, serving as its president (1912–1914), and the founder and editor of The American Journal of Sociology (1895–1926), a leading venue for Progressive scholarship and reform causes. Albion Small's father was a Congregational minister in Maine; his mother, Thankful Lincoln Small, was a descendant of Samuel Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln's earliest American ancestor. After earning degrees from Colby College and Newton Theological Institute, Albion Small studied in Germany and then returned to receive his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, whose social science faculty also trained in Germany. Albion Small was more influential as founding editor of The American Journal of Sociology than as a major sociological thinker. For more than thirty years, Small used his journal as a sort of clearing house for progressive ideas, welcoming Jane Addams,7
Addams (1860–1935) was the founder of Hull House in Chicago, a famous neighborhood settlement house and social laboratory serving the needs of new immigrants. Its volunteer residents, mostly college-educated young women, led many reform movements for factory legislation, municipal reform, the abolition of child labor, and scientific social work. With Florence Kelley, Addams drafted the social and industrial justice planks of the 1912 Progressive Party platform.
Kelley (1859–1932), an early resident volunteer at Hull House in Chicago, was a founder and longtime president of the National Consumers League and associate editor of Charities, a journal advocating scientific social work. She was active in organizing women's trade unions, in factory safety legislation, and in the abolition of sweatshops and child labor.
Gilman (1860–1935), a descendant of the Beecher family, supported herself and her children as an editor, lecturer, and writer. Her most notable writings are Women and Economics (1898) and a play, Yellow Wallpaper (1899).
In 1894, the University of Chicago had twenty-five women and eighty-five men enrolled in graduate study in the departments of political economy, political science, and sociology. Ellen Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 13, 29–30.
Simon Patten (1852–1922) was born in Illinois, the descendant of eighteenth-century Scotch Irish settlers in New York. Educated at Northwestern University and at the University of Halle, where he received his Ph.D., Patten was one of the many German-trained founders and early presidents of the American Economic Association. Along with Albion Small and six of Patten's doctoral students, he was also one of the founders of the American Sociological Society, serving as its president as well. Patten followed Edmund J. James, another son of Illinois and a Halle Ph.D. (and, later, president of the University of Illinois), to the University of Pennsylvania, where they were professors in the Wharton School, the newly founded professional business school that combined the study of economics, public finance, and business management. Together, Patten and James founded and led the American Academy of Social and Political Science and edited its publication, the Annals. This journal became a high-level meeting place not only for German-trained academics in America, but also for leaders in business, finance, and government. Patton's analysis of wages, profits, and rents provided the basis for Charles Beard's analysis of the sources of political conflicts in America, starting with the Antifederalists and Federalists over the adoption of the Constitution, and continuing through party conflicts to the present day. Patten's basic argument that underlay Beard's political party analysis was simple: the major battle is not between workingmen and capitalists, but between the productivity and profits of the industrial economy and the somewhat parasitic benefits from rents, that is, unearned income from rising land values and local market monopolies that typified small-producer capitalism. The lesson is the one preached by William McKinley against William Jennings Bryan in the presidential election of 1896: the interests of workingmen lie in a thriving industrial capitalism producing economic surplus and not in a class alliance with marginal farmers, main street shop owners, and Southern rentier interests against capitalists. Herbert Croly, whose book The Promise of American Life (1909) became the definitive statement of national Progressivism, used this same argument in his discussion of the emergence of a permanent class of industrial wage earners. Patten's many graduate students (called “Patten Men”) included Walter Weyl of The New Republic, Edward Devine, general secretary of the New York Charity Organization Society, and two individuals who later made major contributions to the New Deal: Rexford Tugwell and Frances Perkins. Patten is credited with inventing and popularizing the term “social work.”
Three features animate the thought of Abbott, Small, Patten, and other major Progressive figures. The first is the primacy of a narrative. This narrative was historicist in its outline of America's national history and destiny. This historicism, in turn, was grounded in Protestant Evangelical theology and Hegelian philosophy, seeing the structural changes in American social and economic life as signs of an emerging morality and spirit that would lead in the reconstruction of American society. It was this shared narrative, I suggest, that fused together Progressivism and Protestantism, providing the moral, intellectual, and institutional basis for political mobilization. A second feature of Progressive thought flows directly from the primacy of narrative, namely, its hostility to “principled” or abstract-philosophical forms of political and social thought because these were thought to be major barriers to democratic reform. This hostility took many forms, but its chief targets were classical economic theory and prevailing forms of constitutional jurisprudence, both of which treated rights as preexisting, fixed, and free-standing entities that stand outside of social, economic, and political life. The third feature of Progressive thought is its confidence that historical modes of social and political inquiry would produce “laws” of progress that should guide practice and provide a set of values that would integrate self and society on a democratic foundation.
The analysis that follows addresses five topics central to Progressivism that contain these animating features. Section II addresses the Progressives' intense national patriotism. The Progressives believed that the American nation, if it prepared itself, was destined to become a world-historical actor, shaping the history of the modern world. Section III examines the new industrial economy and its centrality in the new social sciences. Progressives believed that organized social knowledge would make manifest the relationship between material and spiritual progress. Section IV considers the Progressive call for new ethical and civic values required of this new economic and social order. These values were thought to be immanent in the new industrial economy and in the path that social knowledge was taking. Section V explores the religious dimension of this same evolutionary argument, expressed by the term “the social gospel.” Finally, Section VI examines the Progressive attack on principles, with particular attention paid to the role of constitutional jurisprudence and law in American political institutions and practices. I conclude with some reflections on the achievements and ironies of Progressive political thought both in terms of the path of academic political theory after the Progressive era and in terms of the rise of conservative political thought in the last quarter of the twentieth century.
II. America as a Democratic Nation
Progressive intellectuals were children of staunch Republican Party parents who saw Lincoln as the defining figure in American life. Herbert Croly identified Lincoln as the one American political leader who had the intelligence and courage to see that the issue of slavery in the territories was not resolvable inside the bounds of the Constitution and laws as currently understood. Because Lincoln forged a new understanding of the Constitution, slavery was destroyed and America was refounded on a more national and democratic basis. The challenge in confronting the new industrial economy was a direct parallel to that of slavery.11
Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1909), chapter 4.
Vida Dutton Scudder, Social Ideals in English Letters (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 205 and 210. The first two episodes were the colonization of New England by the Puritans and the American Revolution.
It was this address against the extension of slavery that galvanized Lincoln's campaign for the Republican Party nomination for president later that year.
“What is the choice of the American people? Do they prefer Communism or Industrial Democracy? The life and teaching of Abraham Lincoln make perfectly clear his answer to that question….” Lyman Abbott, Silhouettes of My Contemporaries (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1922), 309.
Lincoln and the Civil War symbolized for the Progressives a new commitment—they would say “covenant”—of the American people to create a democratic nation. The period following the Civil War was largely a betrayal of that commitment, as American political life retreated back into a politics of electoral corruption, party patronage, and the dominance of powerful economic interests.15
This era has been termed a regime of courts and parties. See Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982); and Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).
In his article “The Bonds of Nationality,” Albion Small nicely summarized what was required to create a real nation. National bonds primarily consisted of four elements: (1) a common language, (2) race solidarity, (3) a coherent family type, and (4) a convincing religion.16
By “race,” Small was referring to cultural and moral agreement, or consensus, not biological or genetic identity. By “religion,” Small did not mean membership in a common church organization or subscription to a particular theological creed, but rather a nationally shared sense of transcendent purposes and projects. For a similar formulation, see Lyman Abbott, America in the Making (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1911), chapter 5. For similar understandings by contemporary scholars, see Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); and Sidney Mead, The Nation with the Soul of a Church (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).
Albion Small, “The Bonds of Nationality,” The American Journal of Sociology 20 (1915): 629–83.
Croly, Promise of American Life, 267, 269, 271, and 273.
Academics like Small and Patten, and journalists like Abbott, placed extraordinary faith in the capacity of national institutions like the universities, public education, churches, professional associations, national magazines, and national reform organizations to become effective schools for national democratic citizenship. From this base, they thought, it might even be possible to transform political parties into nationally oriented institutions instead of temporary and expedient coalitions of local and special interests to capture the national government and reap the spoils of victory. To break through the institutional and legal barriers to reform first required emancipation from “traditional illusions,” chief among them, according to Croly, the “tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest detail.” If this emancipation were not achieved, Croly wrote, “the American ideal [would] have to be fitted to the rigid and narrow lines of a few legal formulas; and the ruler of the American spirit, like the ruler of the Jewish spirit of old, [would] become the lawyer.” To affirm a new covenant between nationality and democracy—what Croly termed a fusion between Hamilton and Jefferson—would be “in truth equivalent to a new Declaration of Independence” because it would affirm the right of the American people “to organize their political, economic, and social life in the service of a comprehensive, a lofty, and far-reaching democratic purpose.”19
Ibid., 278–79.
III. The New Political Economy
Nowhere were democratic values more lacking than in the organization of the industrial economy. As talented as they were, both business and labor “bosses” wielded undemocratic power to serve narrow and self-interested ends. The existence of a permanent and rapidly expanding class of wage-laborers was the central theme in all branches of the social sciences in the new research universities. Whether the issues were public education, city government, assimilation of new immigrants, public health, or the broader issues of political democracy and social justice, the new industrial economy was central in their analysis. Two formative books giving shape to this perspective were Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society and Outlines of Economics, both by Richard T. Ely. Interestingly, these books were first published as part of a “home reading series” of the Chautauqua Movement, a Methodist-inspired summer camp, and later a national lecture series, dedicated to melding together nondoctrinal Christianity, family life, ethical values, and responsible citizenship. Outlines of Economics became the standard text in college economics courses, published continuously, in many revisions, between 1893 and 1939. A central thesis of both books is this:
The multiplying relations of men with one another give us a new economic world. These relations require regulation, in order to preserve freedom. The regulation by the power of the state of these industrial and other social relations existing among men is an essential condition of freedom.20
Richard T. Ely, Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society (Chautauqua, NY: Chautauqua Press, 1903), 98–99; and Ely, Outlines of Economics (Chautauqua, NY: Chautauqua Press, 1893).
Behind that simple thesis lies a much more complex understanding of what constitutes social knowledge and how that knowledge is to be obtained. Ely and Simon Patten largely drafted the statement of principles adopted at the formation of the American Economic Association in 1895. They might well have been speaking of the Progressive ideals of the social sciences generally:
- We regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress.
- We believe that political economy as a science is still in an early stage of its development. While we appreciate the work of former economists, we look, not so much to speculation as to the historical and statistical study of actual conditions of economic life for the satisfactory accomplishment of that development.
- We hold that the conflict of labor and capital has brought into prominence a vast number of social problems, whose solution requires the united efforts, each in its own sphere, of the church, of the state, and of science.
- In the study of the industrial and commercial policy of governments we take no partisan attitude. We believe in a progressive development of economic conditions, which must be met by a corresponding development of legislative policy.
Albion Small seconded the primacy of the new industrial economy to the study of sociology:
A large part of the confusion in the present stage of transition is due to our acquiescence in conceptions of capital as an exclusively economic phenomenon, and in corollaries from those conceptions which act as automatic adjusters of conduct to those unmoral conceptions. Conflicts centering around capital press for convincing analysis of capital as a social phenomenon… .
The clue to a primary analysis of capital from the social standpoint may be found in the question: To what extent is the effectiveness of capital in the economic process due to unaided acts of the owner; and to what extent is its effectiveness conferred by acts of others than the owner?
When the answer to this question is partially made out, it shows that there are three distinct types of capital, considered as a social phenomenon, viz., first, capital which is used solely by the owner; second, capital which is used by the owner in some sort of dependence upon the acts of others; third, capital which is employed, as such, wholly by others than the owner, and under conditions which he does not and could not maintain by his individual power.21
Albion Small, “The Social Gradations of Capital,” The American Journal of Sociology 19, no. 6 (1914): 722, 725, and 726.
The most original and far-ranging of the new German-trained political and social economists was Simon Patten. He took as given the superiority of large-scale, integrated economic organizations, and was little troubled by either European cartels or American trusts. What did concern Patten were the social and political implications of these new entities, most especially the implications flowing from their ability to produce ever-cheaper and more abundant goods and services. “In modern nations,” he maintained, “the productive power is more than sufficient to produce the minimum of existence. There is a social surplus above the costs of production in which every worker has a right to share.”22
Simon Patten, The Theory of Prosperity (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 224.
The rights upon which political freedom depends have already been worked out. They were obtained by picturing a primitive society where men were so isolated that their relations were simple and plain. The problem of economic freedom is to find a modern equivalent for the rights that in earlier times went with land. The workman of to-day should have all that the landowner of the past enjoyed. Freedom consists not merely of political rights, but is dependent upon the possession of economic rights, freely recognized and universally granted to each man by his fellow citizens. These economic rights measure freedom in proportion as there is a mutual agreement concerning their desirability, and as complete adjustment makes their realization possible. Only those rights that American conditions permit and the impulses of unimpeded activity may attain can be properly considered ideal… .23
Ibid., 215.
The kinds of rights Patten had in mind were all tied, directly or indirectly, to protecting the production of abundance and to the wise use of the social surplus. These rights fall into four categories in Patten's view. The first set of rights are “Public or Market Rights,” including rights to an open market, to publicity (transparency), to security, and to association. Among “Social Rights” are rights to a home, to personal development, to wholesome moral standards, to homogeneity of population, and to decisions by public opinion. Among “Rights to Leisure” are provisions for recreation, clean air and water, and a pleasing visual environment. Among “Exceptional Rights” Patten calls for family provision in the event of unemployment or industrial accidents and for rights to an income both for single women and for women whose husbands have been injured or killed in the line of work.24
Ibid., 216–29. See also Florence Kelley, Some Ethical Gains Through Legislation (New York: Macmillan, 1905); and Seth Low and Richard T. Ely, “A Programme for Labor Reform,” Century Magazine 39, no. 6 (1890): 938–51. Abbott, The Rights of Man, has two chapters summarizing these same rights of labor.
Behind these programmatic proposals lay Patten's larger theory of human progress, best summarized in his book on the changing requirements of charity and social work, The New Basis of Civilization:
There can be no permanent progress until poverty has been eliminated, for then only will the normally evolving man, dominant through numbers and keen mental powers, force adjustments, generation by generation, which will raise the general level of intellect and character. And when poverty is gone, the last formidable obstacle to the upward movement of the race will have disappeared.25
Simon Patten, The New Basis of Civilization (New York: Macmillan, 1907), 197.
For Patten, ideals are not outside of material life and history, but are immanent in the phenomenal world. This lesson is particularly difficult for philanthropists and charity-workers to learn. “The means of progress are material; its ends are ideal.”26
Ibid., 213.
IV. The New Democratic Ethic
Behind Patten's theory of material progress and the means of its achievement is an evolutionary ethical theory that informed theological speculation as well. The transition that marks the coming age is from a pain and scarcity economy to a pleasure and abundance economy. According to Patten, a Hobbesian world of law backed by fear of punishment required a Judeo-Christian God as ruler and punisher. These beliefs and doctrines are now barriers to God's continuing revelation. The new Christ “comes not as the ruler of men, but as their servant.” In a society of plenty, the greatest dangers are not external persecution and exploitation, but internal temptation: we need “a model for imitation, one who remains pure even though subject to the passions and temptations of men.” In the coming era, “intelligence and self-control will be the great virtues” spread through imitation and inspiration. This process is already evident in America, the most economically advanced nation on earth.27
Simon Patten, A Theory of Social Forces (Philadelphia, PA: American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1896), 85, 90, and 107.
Many other Progressives voiced this call for a new democratic ethic. In one of his earliest essays, John Dewey sought to identify the specifically ethical dimensions of democracy. Any ethical conception, on his view, must reject from the start an abstract and mathematical conception of democracy, reducing men “into merely numerical individuals, into ballot-projecting units.”28
John Dewey, “The Ethics of Democracy,” Philosophical Papers, Second Series, No. 1 (University of Michigan, 1888): 8.
[s]ociety and the individual are really organic to each other…. [The individual] is not merely [society's] image or mirror. He is the localized manifestation of its life. And if, as actually happens, society be not yet possessed of one will, but partially is one and partially has a number of fragmentary and warring wills, it yet follows that so far as society has a common purpose and spirit, so far each individual is not representative of a certain proportionate share of the sum total of will but is its vital embodiment. And this is the theory, often crudely expressed, but none the less true in substance, that every citizen is a sovereign, the American theory, a doctrine which in grandeur has but one equal in history, and that its fellow, namely, that every man is a priest of God.29
Ibid., 14.
In a socialized and ethical democracy, social progress and personal development are interdependent because both require “a unified and articulate will.”30
Ibid., 16 and 22.
A common end which is not made such by common, free voluntary coöperation in process of achievement is common in name only. It has no support and guarantee in the activities which it is supposed to benefit, because it is not the fruit of those activities. Hence, it does not stay put. It has to be continually buttressed by appeal to external, not voluntary, considerations; bribes of pleasure, threats of harm, use of force. It has to be undone and done over.31
John Dewey and James Tufts, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt, 1908), 304.
The effective embodiment of a common moral will requires a coherent and consensual “public opinion.” The many Progressive social scientists who wrote on public opinion shared this view of its crucial role in democratic theory. In the words of Charles Horton Cooley, one of Dewey's early colleagues at the University of Michigan, “public opinion is no mere aggregate of separate individual judgments, but an organization, a coöperative product of communication and reciprocal influence. It may be as different from the sum of what the individuals could have thought out in separation as a ship built by a hundred men is from a hundred boats each built by one man.”32
Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909), 121.
Franklin Giddings, Elements of Sociology (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 315. See also Edward A. Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 93–105.
The increased role of public opinion not only marks the progress of democratic government, it signals a higher moral consciousness. Cooley's social psychology textbook put it this way:
The present epoch … brings with it a larger and, potentially at least, a higher and freer consciousness…. The general or public phase of larger consciousness is what we call Democracy. I mean by this primarily the organized sway of public opinion. It works out also in a tendency to humanize the collective life, to make institutions express the higher impulses of human nature, instead of brutal or mechanical conditions.34
Cooley, Social Organization, 116 and 118. Cooley's 1909 social psychology textbook was the founding book in this new field, and was in continuous publication through 1929.
Jane Addams was the most eloquent spokesperson for a new democratic ethic. Famous for the establishment of Hull House in Chicago, whose female residents were soon to lead a host of Progressive reform organizations and causes, Addams was also a prolific and influential writer. In an early essay, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements,” her starting point is educated young people who “are seeking an outlet for that sentiment of universal brotherhood which the best spirit of our times is forcing from an emotion into a motive.” Educated young people especially feel a great gap between their impulses and their actions:
They feel a fatal want of harmony between their theory and their lives, a lack of co-ordination between thought and action…. These young men and women, longing to socialize their democracy, are animated by certain hopes…. These hopes may be loosely formulated thus: that if in a democratic country nothing can be permanently achieved save through the masses of the people, it will be impossible to establish a higher political life than the people themselves crave; that it is difficult to see how the notion of a higher civic life can be fostered save through common intercourse; that the blessings which we associate with a life of refinement and cultivation can be made universal and must be made universal if they are to be permanent; that the good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life… .35
Jane Addams, “The Subjective Necessity of Social Settlements,” in Henry Carter Adams, ed., Philanthropy and Social Progress (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1893), 2.
Addams arranges the impulses behind these hopes and ideals in an ascending hierarchy:
The first contains the desire to make the entire social organism democratic, to extend democracy beyond its political expression; the second is the impulse to share the race life, and to bring as much as possible of social energy and the accumulation of civilization to those portions of the race which have little; the third springs from a certain renaissance of Christianity, a movement toward its early humanitarian aspects… .36
Ibid., 7.
V. The New Social Gospel
Progressives not only acknowledged the importance of moral and religious vanguards, they made identification with this vanguard a large part of their appeal. This, I think, is most evident in those who explicitly combined Protestant evangelicalism and Progressive social reform.37
Dewey incorporated these same millennialist hopes into his ethics textbook when he stated that the increase in rights has been accompanied by an increase in personal responsibility as social norms become internalized and widespread in democratic societies and where “the external control of force has been replaced by the moral control of duty.” Dewey and Tufts, Ethics, 153.
“Evangelizing” America by establishing new churches and colleges in the west had long been a project of New England and, later, Midwestern Protestants. Additionally, pre–Civil War “evangelical united fronts” created many ecumenical national reform movements, most notably, the temperance and antislavery movements. New England “theocrats” like Horace Bushnell and Henry Ward Beecher had outlined projects of “Christianizing America,” projects that included many moral and ethical components. Post–Civil War “social Christianity,” which came to be called “the social gospel,” was unique, however, first in its alliance with the new social sciences, and then in its equanimity at the prospect of having much of the church's social mission taken over by governmental or other secular institutions.
These two features were not begrudged concessions to something called “modernity” or “secularization,” but were welcomed and, indeed, more or less implicit in liberal-evangelical theology and in its evolutionary theory of history. Lyman Abbott wrote three books on the evolution of Christianity. The first traces the history of Christianity as a spiritual force, the second, as a social development, and the third as an evolving ethical system.38
Lyman Abbott, The Evolution of Christianity (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1892); Abbott, Christianity and Social Problems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1896); and Abbott, The Theology of an Evolutionist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1897).
Abbott, The Rights of Man, and Abbott, America in the Making. The latter was part of the Yale Lectures on the Responsibilities of Citizenship series; previous lecturers included James Bryce, Charles Evans Hughes, Arthur Twining Hadley, Elihu Root, and William H. Taft.
His contemporary John Bascom (1827–1911), president of the University of Wisconsin, wrote four books that almost exactly parallel those by Abbott: Bascom, A New Theology (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1891); Bascom, An Historical Interpretation of Philosophy (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1893); Bascom, Evolution and Religion; or Faith as Part of a Complete Cosmic System (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1897); and Bascom, Growth of Nationality in the United States: A Social Study (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1899).
Abbott's evolutionary historicism—the theory that higher and more democratic ideals were immanent in the development of new forms of social, economic, and religious life—fed into and reinforced the “myths America lives by.”41
Richard T. Hughes, Myths America Lives By (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004). Some of the myths discussed, in roughly chronological order, are America as a chosen nation, as nature's nation, as a Christian nation, as a millennialist nation, and as an innocent nation. Abbott's America in the Making is a restatement of many varieties of these myths discussed by Hughes, beginning with the Puritan migration and ending with our new international responsibilities.
There were also those who received their German scholarship through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the manner of Horace Bushnell, one of Abbott's early heroes. On the influence of German scholarship in this period, see Jurgen Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Louise L. Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
Because it had its origin in the colleges and seminaries of New England Protestantism,43
For the crucial role of Yale College and its German-trained faculty, see Stevenson, Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends. Yale College went on to produce the founding presidents of Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the University of Chicago.
Lyman Abbott, Amory H. Bradford, et al., The New Puritanism (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1898).
New Theology is neither new nor a theology … [but] new only in contrast with the Puritan theology out of which it has sprung, and from which it is a reaction. It is not truly a theology, since its chief inspiration is a deep desire to get away from the questions of the purely speculative intellect, the answers to which constitute theology, to the practical questions of the Hebrew seers, the answers to which constitute religion…. The church, then, is coming more and more to conceive of God, not as some one outside of his creation ruling over it, but as some one inside his creation ruling within it.45
Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 109–10.
In this perspective, experience of the spirit takes place in time and history; for each age of man, authentic religion “is always new” and must find new forms of articulate expression. Christianity is evolutionary because God “manifests himself [to man] in growth.”46
Ibid., iii and v.
Ibid., 254.
Ibid., 237 and 247. This analysis is also found later in the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch, the social gospel theologian most known today by historians of America political thought. See, for example, Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 201–10.
Most striking in Abbott's religious historicism is his contrast of pagan Rome and holy Israel. While this contrast is central to his analysis of the history of the Church after Constantine and up to the Reformation, its larger meaning is theological and political.49
Abbott, Evolution of Christianity, 154: “The history of the church down to the period of the Reformation is the history of the way in which Christian principles and the Christian spirit pervaded and transformed pagan institutions, and in which Christian institutions were moulded and pervaded by pagan principles … an empire partially christianized, and a church partially paganized.”
When Abbott wrote in support of America's entry into the First World War, he repeated this argument: what was at stake for mankind was the victory either of “Rome” or of “Israel.” Germany and its Kaiser represented a soulless, external, and authoritarian Rome. America, represented by Lincoln and Wilson, stood for the union of reason, matter, and spirit—what Abbott termed Hegel and Christianity. “He who believes that history is anything more than merely a series of accidental happenings, who believes that there is any continuity and coherence in history, who believes in any ordered social evolution, should find it difficult to believe that this march of the century toward liberty will be halted.” Lyman Abbott, The Twentieth Century Crusade (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 99.
Interwoven in Abbott's political-ecclesiastical history is a history of ideas, a Geistesgeschichte. Luther, Calvin, and Cromwell are joined by Copernicus and Bacon, who are soon joined by Rousseau, Voltaire, and Hegel. Abbott's lectures, published as The Rights of Man, are accompanied by a list of books that inform each chapter. Hegel is the first listed, joined by John Stuart Mill and his major followers, John Morley and Frederic Harrison, the liberal statesmen William Gladstone, and social reformers Sidney and Beatrice Webb. The American churchman Josiah Strong is listed alongside prominent Progressive intellectuals Franklin Giddings, Richard T. Ely, and H. D. Lloyd, who are, in turn, joined by political leaders Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington.
The “New Theology” is a social and not a theological gospel because religion is seen to migrate from out of the constraints of creed and church in order to permeate the larger society with its higher ethic and advancing social knowledge. America, as the highest embodiment of democracy, is also the highest embodiment of Christianity, for the two are one.51
The last chapter in Abbott's The Rights of Man is subtitled “To what extent and in what sense democracy and political Christianity are synonymous.” The Hegelian element becomes clear when paired with the subtitle of the previous chapter: “The grounds for believing that democracy in some form is the ultimate and permanent form of government.” John Dewey posited this same conflation in an early essay, “Christianity and Democracy,” in John Dewey, The Early Works, vol. 4 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 3–10.
A key paradox of [American] liberal Protestantism—one that must be a cornerstone of any history of liberal Protestantism—is that its goal has always been, in part, to sanctify the secular, to bring forth out of the natural and human worlds the divine potential contained within them. Secularization can be seen, in some of its forms, as a sign of success for liberal Protestantism, not a marker of defeat.52
Richard W. Fox, “Experience and Explanation in American Religious History,” in Harry S. Stout and P. G. Hart, eds., New Directions in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 400. Susan Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 131, adds that “a revitalized politics promised new life to religion as social gospelers conceived it. A political system responsible for social service and public morality extended the influence of churches into the secular arena and restored the relevance of religion to everyday life. Most important, progressive politics demanded social gospel Protestantism.”
The millennial and utopian strains in Progressive political thought came largely from an alliance of social gospel writers with the emerging science of sociology. Indeed, sociology was seen as the special voice of God's progressive revelation.53
Albion Small, in “Bonds of Nationality,” wrote: “The crucial problem at the present stage of religious development is not whether this, that, or the other doctrinal formula or system is correct; but the incalculably more radical problem is whether religion is a hand-out from an external authority or a deposit of the evolving output of men's objective experience and subjective interpretations and valuations….” He concluded that it fell to sociology “to represent among scholars the conviction that the world's knowledge, in the degree in which it approaches objectivity, must be capable of demonstrating its objectivity in part by its composability into an organization of knowledge, each portion of which shall corroborate and vitalize every other portion. Nothing less than this is conceivably adequate intellectual support for a religion that should convince all men” (675–76).
Quoted in David Paul Thelen, The New Citizenship: The Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1890 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1972), 108–9. George Herron, one of the more influential social gospel ministers, added: “Sociology cannot be dissociated from theology. Sociology and theology will ultimately be one science. Society depends upon theology. Men will be what they think God is. We need a Christian theology that we may have a Christian society.” George Herron, The Christian Society (Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1894), 32.
Samuel Zane Batten, The Christian State: The State, Democracy, and Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: Union Press, 1909), 215; Herron, The Christian Society, 110; Patten, quoted in Ronald White and Charles Hopkins, eds., The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1976), 133. Batten and Herron were among the most popular social gospel writers and lecturers in America. The centrality of national consensus to achieving “the brotherhood of man” also impelled an attack on existing party-electoral politics. Batten declared that the system of parties and electoral spoils “stands between the people and the government and makes a fully democratic government impossible…. A good partisan cannot be a good citizen” (The Christian State, 239–40).
The calls for a new political economy, a new social ethic, and a revitalized social Christianity combined to constitute a deep indictment of America's commitment in the “Gilded Age” to constitutionalism and a rights-based discourse. Whether the issue was states' rights, the claims of private property, the sanctity of contract, or, more generally, the power of courts to intervene in industrial disputes and overturn legislative will, Progressives now had an armory of weapons to challenge these prevailing legal values. More broadly, their project was to transform and to reconstitute the older liberalism on a new ethical and social basis.
VI. The Progressives' Problem with Principles
With the exception of Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), whom Theodore Roosevelt appointed to the Supreme Court in 1902, Progressives displayed a thinly disguised contempt for the American legal mind and its institutional expressions in the upper bar and the courts.56
Richard T. Ely dedicated Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society (1903) to Oliver Wendell Holmes, with the inscription, “In appreciation of the enlightened philosophy so conspicuous in his opinions, which is laying a firm foundation for a superstructure of industrial liberty.”
Croly, Promise of American Life, 135–37. Croly argued that, in alliance with corporate business, lawyers manipulated popular Constitution worship for their own selfish ends.
Public opinion can no longer be hypnotized and scared into accepting the traditional constitutionalism, as the final word in politics….
The Law in the shape of the Federal Constitution really came to be a monarchy of the Word…. Thus the aspirations and the conviction of the early democrats that popular political authority should be righteously expressed hardened into a system, which consecrated one particular machinery of possibly righteous expression… .
The Constitution was really king. Once the kingdom of the Word had been ordained, it was almost as seditious to question the Word as it was to plot against the kingdom. A monarch exists to be obeyed. In the United States, as in other monarchies, unquestioning obedience was erected into the highest of political virtues.58
Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 25, 44–45, and 131.
Croly admits that, like European monarchy, American constitutionalism initially served educative political purposes:
The monarchy of the Constitution satisfied the current needs and the contemporary conscience of the American nation. Its government was at once authoritative, national and educational. It instructed the American people during their collective childhood. It trained them during their collective youth. With its assistance the American people have become a nation. They have been habituated to mutual association and joint action.59
Ibid., 145–46.
This age has now passed. Democracy and the monarchy of the Constitution are now in conflict, and monarchy must give way:
The ideal of individual justice is being supplemented by the ideal of social justice…. Now the tendency is to conceive the social welfare, not as an end which cannot be left to the happy harmonizing of individual interests, but as an end which must be consciously willed by society and efficiently realized. Society, that is, has become a moral ideal, not independent of the individual but supplementary to him, an ideal which must be pursued less by regulating individual excesses than by the active conscious encouragement of socializing tendencies and purposes.60
Ibid., 148–49. Charles Beard's textbook American Government and Politics, which dominated collegiate instruction in American politics from its inception in 1910 through the 1930s, made this same historical argument:
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?
Charles Beard, American Government and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 100–101.
Behind this critique of the Constitution and law lay a social science that posited the growing power of “public opinion” and internal moral controls as the evolutionary mark of democracy. As the sociologist Edward Ross explained:
Public opinion has the advantage of a wide gamut of influences. By thus supplementing the coarse and rough sanctions of the law, society avoids putting itself into such undisguised opposition to a man's wishes, and is not so likely to raise the spirit of rebellion. Its blame does not exclude moral suasion, and its ban does not renounce all appeal to the feelings.
Public opinion is less mechanical in operation than law. The public can weigh provocation better, and can take into account condoning or aggravating circumstances of time, place, motive, or office. The blade of the law playing up and down in its groove with iron precision is hardly so good a regulative instrument as the flexible lash of public censure… .61
Ross, Social Control, 93–94; emphasis in original. Ross adds that public opinion is a progressive force not only with the growth of popular intelligence and character, but when members of the public defer to “the ascendency of the wise” (102).
Charles Horton Cooley saw a relationship between the supremacy of legalism and stunted social and individual character development:
Underlying all formalism, indeed, is the fact that it is psychically cheap; it substitutes the outer for the inner as more tangible, more capable of being held before the mind without fresh expense of thought and feeling, more easily extended, therefore, and impressed upon the multitude…. The effect of formalism upon personality is to starve its higher life and leave it the prey of apathy, self-complacency, sensuality and the lower nature in general. A formalized religion and a formalized freedom are, notoriously, the congenial dwelling-place of depravity and oppression.62
Cooley, Social Organization, 343 and 347.
In a 1924 essay, “Logical Method and the Law,” Dewey drew out the implications of this argument. At the forefront of his analysis were the writings of Justice Holmes; in the background lay an evolutionary theory of history and human development. Logical systemization in legal decisions, on Dewey's analysis, is a necessary part of any instrumental reasoning and, “while it may be an end in itself for a particular student, [logical systemization] is clearly in last resort subservient to the economical and effective reaching of decisions in particular cases.” Legal logic, then, “is ultimately an empirical and concrete discipline” but, by a process of natural selection “of the methods which afford the better type of conclusion,” those selected become clarified by logical analysis and hardened into scientific formulas.63
John Dewey, “Logical Method and the Law,” Cornell Law Quarterly 10 (1924): 19.
Despite this underlying experiential practice, courts must justify their decisions through exposition. The logic of exposition is, however, quite different from the experimental logic of search and discovery:
It is at this point that the chief stimulus and temptation to mechanical logic and abstract use of formal concepts come in. Just because the personal element cannot be wholly excluded, while at the same time the decision must assume as nearly as possible an impersonal, objective, rational form, the temptation is to surrender the vital logic which has actually yielded the conclusion and to substitute for it forms of speech which are rigorous in appearance and which give an illusion of certitude.64
Ibid., 24.
Dewey concludes his argument on a historicist note. Most contemporary principles of law, especially those regarding property and contract, were shaped in and through the experience of the eighteenth century, when “the great social need was emancipation of industry and trade from a multitude of restrictions which held over from the feudal estate of Europe.” Now, however, one sees “in the present reaction against the individualistic formulae of an older liberalism” an “intermittent tendency in the direction of legislation, and to a less extent [sic] of judicial decision, towards what is vaguely known as ‘social justice,’ toward formulae of a collectivistic character.” Those who continue “the sanctification of ready-made antecedent universal principles as methods of thinking” are “the chief obstacle to the kind of thinking which is the indispensable prerequisite of steady, secure and intelligent social reforms in general and social advance by means of law in particular.”65
Ibid., 27.
The “kind of thinking” that Dewey had in mind already lay at hand in the new social sciences. In the 1890s, the political economist Henry Carter Adams wrote a definitive article in which he charged that contemporary legal thinking was so far removed from the realities of contemporary economic relationships that resort to force by both capital and labor became inevitable.66
Henry Carter Adams, “Economics and Jurisprudence”; another article by Adams, “The Relation of the State to Industrial Action,” was equally influential. Both essays are in Joseph Dorfman, ed., Two Essays: The Relation of the State to Industrial Action and Economics and Jurisprudence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). The latter essay was Adam's presidential address to the American Economic Association.
Albion Small, “The State and Semi-Public Corporations,” The American Journal of Sociology 1 (1895): 398–410.
Pound was succeeded by James M. Landis, drafter of legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and author of a book justifying the use of regulatory agencies rather than courts to regulate most economic relationships. James M. Landis, The Administrative Process (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1938).
Roscoe Pound, “Law in Books and Law in Action,” American Law Review 44 (1910); Pound, “Liberty of Contract,” Yale Law Journal 18 (1909); and Pound, “Mechanical Jurisprudence,” Columbia Law Review 8 (1908).
Let us look to economics and sociology and philosophy, and cease to assume that jurisprudence is self-sufficient. It is the work of lawyers to make the law in action conform to the law in the books, not by futile thunderings against popular lawlessness, nor eloquent exhortations to obedience of the written law, but by making the law in the books such that the law in action can conform to it, and providing a speedy, cheap and efficient legal mode of applying it. On no other terms can the two be reconciled.70
Pound, “Law in Books and Law in Action,” 36.
The energy and tenacity of the Progressive attack on prevailing juridical and constitutional thinking eventually had its intended effects. By the 1920s—well after the electoral energies of Progressivism had been spent—the key assumptions and values of Progressivism were institutionalized in the curricula of elite law schools, in the federal regulatory bureaucracy, and eventually in the judiciary. By the time of the great realigning election of 1932, the New Deal not only found a well-developed administrative branch to serve its ends, but it found a court system that increasingly deferred to the will of legislative majorities and expert administrators.
VII. Conclusion: Achievements and Ironies
In the national election campaign of 1844, the Whig Party declared:
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 affinity from any and other [sic] nations, kindred and people on earth…. We have all the elements of becoming a greater people, a mightier nation, and more endurable government than has ever held a place in the annals of time. The civilized countries of the old world will yet do homage to the wisdom and learning, and science and arts of our people; and the combined powers of all Europe shall bow before the majesty of our power.71
American Republican, November 7, 1844.
Thanks to the antislavery movement, the victory of the Union armies in the Civil War, and the hegemonic electoral victory of the Republican Party in 1896, the intellectual, moral, and political leadership of the Progressives at the turn of the twentieth century led to a substantial fulfillment of this early Whig national vision. Adding to the Whig call to nationalize existing institutions, however, the Progressives created many new and more embracive ones. While many of these institutions were “top down” in organization and leadership, an equal number were “bottom up” federations, joining local and regional organizations to national ones.
This nationalization—including the nationalization of governmental institutions—had a curious two-edged effect. First, it “politicized” private and local activities to the extent that they voiced ends that were explicitly tied to larger national purposes. In the earlier world of the Whigs, this transformation was largely within Protestant churches and the ecumenical reform organizations they created. The Progressives went much further in creating a nonsectarian, nationally oriented and richly complex “civil society” with these same politicized features. And second, like the Whigs, the Progressives “moralized” many political organizations and activities by infusing them with quasi-religious purposes.
The election of 1912 represented the highpoint of Progressive ideas in popular political culture. All three parties, but especially the Progressive Party, a newly formed breakaway from the Republicans, touted various aspects of a Progressive agenda. While all three presidential candidates won a substantial share of the vote, the Democratic candidate, Woodrow Wilson, prevailed with more than 6.6 million votes. Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive candidate, however, received 4.13 million votes, more than half a million more votes than the Republican Party regular, William Howard Taft. The Progressive Party nominating convention, held in Chicago in August 1912, was a curious affair. In the style of Protestant sects, every delegate was given five minutes for political testimony. Theodore Roosevelt's address was titled “Confession of Faith.” Periodically, the delegates would break out singing “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Following the keynote address by former Senator Albert Beveridge, the audience sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” as they paraded through the hall—led by the head of the New York delegation, Oscar S. Straus, a prominent Jewish political leader. The party's platform documented the success of more than three decades of Progressive political and social thought—especially the platform's planks on social and industrial justice, drafted largely by Florence Kelley and Jane Addams. Addams seconded Roosevelt's nomination.72
There were two notable exceptions to this triumph, both involving blacks in the South. The first was the failure to condemn in the party platform violence against blacks, their increasing loss of civil and political rights, and their increasing social segregation. The second involved the refusal to accept and seat a racially mixed delegation from a southern state. See Robert Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization, 1889–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), chapter 7.
This highpoint was no accident: the major institutions of Progressive ideas, along with the new industrial economy, were thriving. Mass journalism, the new universities, citizen-oriented book series, women's clubs, and the infrastructure of reform organizations, churches, social workers, teachers, and professional and academic associations, each with their magazines and journals, were at the peak of their energies and morale. The combined effect was to infuse all three contesting political parties with the language of reform.73
Three books, all published in this period, reflect this optimism: Benjamin Parke De Witt, The Progressive Movement (New York: Macmillan, 1915); Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914); and Walter Weyl, The New Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1912).
In addition to shaping and institutionalizing a national language of democratic reform, a second major Progressive achievement was to link the systematic pursuit of social knowledge to political reform and thereby to tie higher education and the learned professions to the cause of national democracy. Given the undeveloped administrative capacity of the national government, this tie did not yield European “statism,” but it did set up durable patterns of cooperation between the universities, the national government, large business corporations, and, later, national charitable foundations, labor unions, and the military.74
See Olivier Zunz, Why the American Century? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). When the national media is added, these networks later came to be called “The Liberal Establishment.”
Stuart D. Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
Crunden, Ministers of Reform.
Lastly, the combined effects of Progressive ideas, organizations, and energies helped to complete a new national self-consciousness and national identity. In a recent book on regime periods in American history, Michael Lind, a prominent liberal journalist and public intellectual, distinguishes between “government framers” and “people founders” in terms of their roles in shaping new political regimes.77
Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995).
Recent books by political theorists and public intellectuals on the left have reasserted the relevance of the Progressive tradition for our own times.78
Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Dawley, Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003); Jonathan Hansen, Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); E. J. Dionne, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Lind, Next American Nation; Michael Tomasky, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (New York: Free Press, 1996). Jeffrey C. Isaac, The Poverty of Progressivism: The Future of American Democracy in a Time of Decline (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003) critiques much of this literature. For the most complete overview of contemporary writings on the Progressive period, see Robert D. Johnston, “Re-Democratizing the Progressive Era: The Politics of Progressive Era Political Historiography,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era l, no. 1 (2002): 68–91.
There is, however, a deeper reason for this call, and it involves narrative. The rise of “value-neutral” readings of liberal democracy beginning in the mid-twentieth century,79
Two of the most notable are David Truman, The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf, 1951), and Robert Dahl, Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). For an analysis of the rise of a value-neutral conception of the liberal democratic state in America, see David Ciepley, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
The opening line of Richard Rorty's 1997 Massey Lectures at Harvard reads: “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals: a necessary condition of self-improvement.” Lamenting “a widespread sense that national pride is no longer appropriate” among left intellectuals, Rorty draws a sharp contrast between contemporary and early twentieth-century leftist thought as that between “spectators” and “agents.” The agency of these earlier reformers (he cites Herbert Croly) was anchored in the earlier national patriotism of Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman.80
Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 3 and 10.
Ibid., 19, 91, and 106.
A more complex attempt to create a liberal national narrative is made by the political theorist Rogers Smith, in his book Stories of Peoplehood.82
Rogers Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
Two organized sections of the American Political Science Association (Politics and History and Foundations of Political Theory) gave the book the association's annual award. The Social Science History Association made it a co-winner of its annual book award, as did the Organization of American Historians in the category of American intellectual history. Outside of academic organizations, the Association of American Publishers gave the book its highest award in Government and Political Science. Given the number and breadth of the accolades bestowed on the book, to his credit its author was seemingly less satisfied with its conclusions than most of his readers.
Civic Ideals was a mea culpa, cataloging the constitutional and legal ways by which African Americans, Native Americans, and women were denied full membership in the political community. Smith posits that these exclusions flow logically from the practice of defining the political community in “ascriptive” terms, that is, terms not based on the universal principle of equal individual consent. The persistent worry in Civic Ideals is why Americans seem so willing and able to heed the siren calls of ascriptive national identity in the face of their foundational liberal and civic republican principles. Smith's answer is simple but troubling. In a political democracy, “aspirants to power require a population to lead that imagines itself to be a ‘people’,” driving “political leaders to offer civic ideologies, or myths of civic identity” in order to achieve power.85
Smith, Civic Ideals, 6.
This would be a party with a built-in arrogance as well: we brave/fearless few risk hard and principled choices in a society of intellectually and morally lazy citizens all too willing to support illiberal values and policies. See Smith, Civic Ideals, 502.
In Stories of Peoplehood, Smith revisits the issues raised in Civic Ideals, but with a decided shift in emphasis. All political regimes, even liberal-democratic ones, are now said to require “ethically constitutive stories”:
The problem is not only that, politically, we probably cannot hope to shape communities that can long endure unless people see them as expressing more than their procedural agreements and senses of abstract justice…. On these accounts, so long as one preaches democracy, particular memberships then can be expected to emerge rather organically out of fundamentally extra-political factors. But since those “extra-political” forms of intersection and mutual effect need to be articulated in politics as bases of collaboration … the pressures and dangers that impel reliance on ethically constitutive accounts of whole particular political societies cannot be escaped…. Citizens are at a minimum morally entitled to understand the commitments of those to whom they are entrusting their political destinies.87
Smith, Stories of Peoplehood, 152. There are two other forms of constitutive stories: economic ones that celebrate the material flourishing of a people (ibid., 60–62, 79–80, and 82–83), and political power stories, celebrating the power of citizens in the government, the popular achievement of independence or revolution, etc. (ibid., 62–64 and 93–95). These two kinds of stories, however, are much less binding and long-lived than ethically constitutive stories, which “are more likely to be religious or quasi-religious, kinship-like, and gendered than economic or political power stories” (ibid., 69). Smith does not see that these other stories can be combined into one larger national narrative, a sacred narrative that I argue the Progressives succeeded in creating.
Even though “the politics of people-making … involves continual … often invidious, and always exclusionary processes centered on stories and force … these processes also do much to make us who we are and to make it possible for us to flourish on this earth.” The philosophical requirements of political life seem now to include a national narrative at its very center. “I therefore doubt,” Smith concludes, “that any kind of politics of peoplehood … is likely to get far in transforming the world for the better if it simply takes the form of an assault on or dismissal of American national identity.” These assertions are in direct response to those who would constrain democratic discourse to that which meets philosophically fixed standards of “public reason.” These constrainers “appear to deny, either hypocritically or foolishly, that their own views also express controversial ethically constitutive accounts of human beings that are far from self-evident truths.”88
Ibid., 56, 177, and 183. Here Smith comes closer to the pragmatic position in Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapters 9–11.
Whatever implications the arguments by Rorty and Smith have for the philosophical foundations of contemporary liberal-democratic political theory, there is no question that their calls for national narrative are in response to the rise of a coherently conservative Republican Party over the past three decades. This rise suggests an irony in contemporary American political thought, namely, that the rise of contemporary conservatism bears some close resemblances to the rise of Progressivism. Like Progressivism, contemporary conservatism began as an intellectual “counter-culture” against a prevailing set of frozen possibilities and static visions. It was now liberalism that seemed frozen, first in its static models of “interest group pluralism,” and then in its legalistic formulas of identity group pluralism.89
Theodore Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969) is the definitive critique of interest group pluralism; Lind's The Next American Nation is an effective critique of multiculturalism as a national purpose.
What this conclusion suggests is that contemporary conservatism in America might owe the Progressives more than it acknowledges, both in shaping public policy consistently oriented to national purposes and in enlisting the political, moral, and spiritual energies of those who wish to participate as public-regarding citizens of their country. The Progressives drew their core values from Lincoln's conception of the American people as a nation with shared substantive purposes. How and through what means these purposes were to be achieved was not preordained and fixed for all time because the nation was a living and evolving organism. In the fight against slavery, for example, Lincoln depended less on prevailing constitutional truths and more on the moral energies and historical visions of his compatriots.90
Lincoln responded to the charge that his decree emancipating slaves in areas under Union military occupation violated the Constitution by asking, “Was it possible to lose the nation, and yet preserve the Constitution?” Letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864, quoted in Ronald C. White, Jr., Lincoln's Great Speech: The Second Inaugural (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), appendix II, 207.
