Killing Off, and Resurrecting, the Progressives

Two historic moments from the run-up to the 2012 presidential election might well stir the interest of readers of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:

December 6, 2011: President Barack Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver what proved to be his signature speech about the economy. Indeed, former labor secretary Robert Reich called the address, “the most important economic speech of his or any modern presidency.” Obama castigated radical free marketeers, he vindicated communal bonds, and he upheld the great middle class. And the reason that the president traveled to the metropolis of Osawatomie? Because in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt had gone there to repudiate the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age and put forth his case for a progressive “New Nationalism” in an oration that White House press secretary Jay Carney characterized as “the speech that really set the course for the 20th century.”Footnote ¹

February 3, 2012: Glenn Beck presented a different take on the Progressive Era. Dressed in a military fatigue jacket, he announced that “today is the happiest day of the year for me…. Today is the day, in 1924, that Woodrow Wilson died, that son of a bitch, and I'm happy.” In an era, Beck groused, when Marxist university professors routinely lie about history and teach Howard Zinn even to his own daughter, Americans must reclaim the past from the liberal elite. So, rather than being one of the nation's best presidents, as surveys of professors routinely reveal, Wilson was—according to Beck—one of the worst. Along with fellow progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt (TR) and Margaret Sanger, Wilson was “one of the Founding Fathers of the new United States,” one of “the people that tore our country apart.” That is why “today I celebrate the day he died.”Footnote ²

What does it mean for our current political culture that, for the first time in such a sustained and concentrated fashion, the history of the progressives and the Progressive Era became key intellectual battlegrounds during a presidential election? Ever since the Revolution, historical references have enlivened American elections. In recent decades, the crucial historical conflict points have been either the New Deal or the 1960s. Those two landmarks have hardly fallen away, although the New Deal—after a brief rebirth in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis—does seem to be substantially declining in historical memory as well as in institutional form. Yet in 2012, politicians, pundits, and professors jumped back a full hundred years to fight about what mattered most in our past.

The result was a full-scale prosecution of the progressives by many on the right, along with a vigorous (although more limited) defense of historical progressivism from Democrats. Most at stake was the role of government, with both sides recognizing the early twentieth century as the birthplace of the modern philosophy and practice of the large-scale, activist state. During this contest between usable pasts, the entire, long-standing consensus on progressivism was up for grabs: not only whether or not the government should have a central role in regulating the economy, but even whether U.S. senators should be directly elected, whether child labor might be economically and morally valuable, and (admittedly less so, but including the notorious firebrand Ann Coulter) whether women should have their voting rights taken away. As one prominent conservative political theorist put it, critical tongue only partly in cheek, those on the right have “resurrected” and “summoned [the progressives] from their graves” as zombies, the “dangerous” living dead who need to be put down because they animate contemporary liberalism.Footnote ³

Historians of the Progressive Era should take delight that our time received such serious attention in the long season surrounding the 2012 election. How often do we get such a teachable moment, whether in the classroom or in the sphere of public dialogue? Yet as an avid supporter of many Progressive Era reforms—especially the more radically democratic ones that arose from middle-class activists—I initially worried about what this refighting of long-won progressive battles meant for our democracy. For goodness sake … child labor? I realize that those of us who read this journal recognize that “the Gilded Age” is a slippery (and censorious) term, but I was not sure that I wanted to travel all the way back there in order to debate the twenty-first century.

I am, however, now more confident that the recent public debate over the Progressive Era is good for scholars, for teachers, and for democracy. The arguments inspire genuine interest in and curiosity about the era. Through various Teaching American History grants, I have shown snippets of the Glenn Beck celebratory obituary to teachers and high school students, and it certainly shocks them to attention—and engagement. Furthermore, the contest between Left and Right over progressivism has deep roots in recent political thought that historians can learn much from exploring. Mocking Glenn Beck as a know-nothing reactionary who makes up his own history without regard for experts—or facts—is far too easy. Just as various well-regarded liberal historians have shaped Barack Obama's worldview, so too the ideas of Beck and his comrades flow out of an intelligent, coherent, and challenging school of scholarship.

In my view, the recent, right-wing take on the Progressive Era is not democratic. In many ways, it is a self-conscious departure from democracy. Still, I would argue, the entry of conservative ideas into the way Americans look at the history of the Progressive Era is democratic. Not only do contemporary right-wing ideas help illuminate the politics of a century ago, they also mean that we finally, and fortunately, have a politics of historiography that promises to mirror more closely debates in the public sphere that are actually occurring among ordinary citizens.

What If They Threw a Tea Party and Didn't Invite the Progressives?

It is best to start with—and dwell upon—the Tea Party critique of the progressives. This critique has been brewing longer, and received more forceful expression throughout the long 2012 election season, than its liberal counterpart. Not to mention: the conservative perspective is not nearly as familiar among the largely left-of-center community of academics.

So, what inspired Glenn Beck to disinter Woodrow Wilson's bones and dance an annual jig on his grave? We may be tempted to cringe when Beck speaks of how Wilson “fulfilled his own constitutional rape fantasy” … or guffaw as we look at Beck's absurd historical flow chart of the un-American “Tree of Revolution” that places Woodrow Wilson at the base of a root structure (along with Che Guevara and Saul Alinsky) fertilizing a lineage of leftism culminating in the socialist Barack Obama.Footnote ⁴

Yet there is an intellectual method to this political mania. The grand moment when Beck most revealingly highlighted his cry of treason against the progressives came during his closing keynote at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference. His raucous, nearly hour-long address began with these formalities:

“Thank you. Please be seated. I have to tell you, I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me, God bless you.

I am so, I mean it is such an honor to be here, it really is.”

Beck then had his famed chalkboard wheeled out; this symbol of the old masterly schoolteacher itself received an immediate standing ovation. Beck proceeded to scrawl one word on the blank slate: “Progressivism.” He cautioned that Barack Obama was a mere symptom of all that was rotten in the country: “It's not just spending, it's not just taxes, it's not just corruption. It is progressivism.” Beck then became physician as well as teacher, declaring, “Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating our Constitution. And it was designed to eat the Constitution.” For Beck, progressivism amounted to a moral and political equivalent of communism: “The idea, between the two—the argument, in Woodrow Wilson's day—the argument was, well, you're a Marxist. You're a Communist. No, no. No I'm not. I'm a progressive. Well, what's the difference? Here's the difference…. Revolution or evolution, that's the difference. Revolution or evolution. Well, there's no difference except one requires a gun and the other does it slowly, piece by piece, eating away” Americans' independence from Big Government.Footnote ⁵

Glenn Beck may only play a real historian on TV. Beck is, however, hardly a marginal figure in his critique of Wilson and progressivism. He draws upon a complex historical critique elaborated over the last decade not only of particular progressive reformers, but of the entire architecture of progressive political thought and institutions. The goal of this critique is, of course, urgently presentist: at the current moment to delegitimize Barack Obama and his fellow liberals. Yet along with this presentism come some interesting—and at times compelling—historical insights.

Not so long ago, the eminent traditionalist philosopher Russell Kirk complimented Woodrow Wilson for following the best traditions of Edmund Burke. Among conservatives in the arena, such Republicans as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush (following Karl Rove), and John McCain—even Barry Goldwater—claimed the mantles of Woodrow Wilson and, especially, Theodore Roosevelt. A few still do. Jon Huntsman publicized the endorsement of Theodore Roosevelt IV, while a great-grandson of William Howard Taft decried the “new, virulent strain of empty nihilism” among Ted Cruz and his compatriots. Yet in the years leading up to the 2012 election—just preceding the rise of the Tea Party and then greatly accelerating with its ascendancy—the intellectual landscape changed dramatically. Many of those who coveted the Republican nomination now sought to sweeten the pot with the Tea Party by adopting a critical attitude toward the reformers of a century ago. Rick Perry's history lesson, for example, rambled down this path: “The truth is that ever since the dawn of the so-called Progressive movement over a century ago, liberals have used every tool at their disposal … to wage a gradual war on the Constitution, and the American way of life…. To me, the idea of living under a distant government that dictates … what I may and may not do is not comforting but intolerable. But that is the ethos of the Progressives.”Footnote ⁶

Mitt Romney did not swim in this current, but his vice-presidential nominee happily navigated this fast-running stream. Paul Ryan's style is, in many ways, that of an intellectual, and he has worked hard to burnish his reputation as the grand thinker of the new conservatism. The road to that status was at first rocky, given Glenn Beck's initial suspicions of Ryan when Beck heard that the Wisconsin lawmaker had praised parts of the early twentieth-century reform legacy. Beck urged Ryan to do an interview with him in April 2010 in what turned out to be the first time the two would speak. Beck began his inquisition: “Tell me, tell me your thoughts on progressivism.” Ryan eagerly fell in line, making it clear that his fundamental political goal had always been to “indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today.”Footnote ⁷

Lest one think that Ryan was speaking solely of current-day progressives, he made it clear that the malign influences he was attacking came from early in the previous century. Ryan was proud to have learned about the enemy first hand. “I grew up in the orbit of Madison, Wisconsin,” he recalled. “I know who these people are, I know what they think, I know what they believe.” Those experimenters gladly embraced the “cancer” created by “Hegel and Faber [Weber] and Bismarck” that was “leading us to a social welfare state, cradle-to-grave society where they create a culture of dependency on the government, not on oneself.” Ryan assured Beck, “I know you've been going after progressivism which is exactly what I've been trying to do as well.” Beck could hardly contain himself: “I love you,” he exclaimed, repeating, “Oh my gosh.” His producer joshed after the interview that “[if] you weren't already married, I think you would have proposed to him.”

Ryan was by no means simply trying here to impress a fringe, niche audience. Well before the 2012 election and again in its aftermath, Ryan argued systematically against the progressives. For instance, in January 2010 at Michigan's Hillsdale College, a homeland for conservative political thought, he explained that Roosevelt and Wilson were elitists and relativists who repudiated the “eternal” truths of the Founders and paved the philosophical way for an unlimited bureaucratic government.Footnote ⁸

Ryan's specific bête noire was Obama's new health-care law, which he saw in apocalyptic terms as a battle for the original idea of a free America against tyranny. After the passage of the president's health-care package, Ryan could barely contain his fury. He traveled to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs to offer a blistering retort to the “atrocity,” this “new Intolerable Act.” Ryan had plenty of present-day arguments against Obamacare, ranging from its budgetary implications and bureaucratic authoritarianism to its supposedly undemocratic passage. Yet once again history explained why the Democrats' health-care blueprint represented such a fundamental assault on freedom. In this speech, Ryan made an unusual intellectual maneuver, seeking to coopt portions of progressivism: “Early Progressives wanted to empower and engage the people. They fought for populist reforms like initiative and referendum, recalls, judicial elections, the breakup of monopoly corporations, and the elimination of vote buying and urban patronage.” But then progressivism “turned away from popular control toward central government planning. It lost most Americans and consumed itself in paternalism, arrogance, and snobbish condescension.” Fighting Bob La Follette would never have “hand[ed] out bailout checks to giant corporations,” TR would never have “corrupt[ed] the Congress to purchase votes for government controlled health care,” and Wilson would never have “funnel[ed] billions in Jobs Stimulus money to local politicians to pay for mark-work patronage.” Yet if Ryan perceived a glimpse of virtue in progressivism's early incarnation, progressivism's latter-day embodiment was completely rotten and must be taken down. “My party,” Ryan roared, “challenges the whole basis of the Progressivist vision of this country's future.”Footnote ⁹

The vicissitudes of campaigning diverted Ryan from systematic historical reflections, but the Wisconsinite returned to the past defiantly in May 2013, when he received the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Ryan opened his remarks with a nightmarish portrait in the aftermath of Obamacare—of huge swathes of the economy now under bureaucratic control, the Left in charge of the government, and the Supreme Court no longer willing to “enforce the Constitution's limits.” “So how did we get here?” Ryan asked, before pointing to the culprit: “a larger movement called progressivism—which began in the late nineteenth century.” Progressives put forth “a false sense of security, offering ordinary citizens social welfare in a difficult time, but “government can't keep all its promises.” “So our job,” Ryan concluded, is not just to fight Obamacare, but to wage intellectual war on behalf of “the American Idea. We have to show the American Idea is superior to the progressive state—both in our time and for all time.”Footnote ¹⁰

The Right-Wing Scholarly Assault on Progressivism

Paul Ryan has emerged as an intellectual hero to many conservative Republicans, despite his strained relationship with some segments of the Tea Party. Although Ryan does not himself cite any scholars of the Progressive Era, he navigates in a large sea of conservative historians, political scientists, and other intellectuals—inside and outside the academy—who have spent considerable energy during the last decade or so formulating a remarkably consistent critique of progressivism. The right-wing intellectuals' case against progressivism is, to be sure, deeply politicized. Yet their ideas are also more thorough, thoughtful, and nuanced than one hears in politicians' speeches—and critical to include in any scholarly discussion that purports to be robust and open-ended academic inquiry.

The initial response of most of my liberal and left-wing colleagues might well be refusal to take seriously this conservative school of thought.Footnote ¹¹ The Tea Party take on the progressives isn't my cup of tea, either. Despite its greater nuance, the conservative intellectuals' analysis shares with Beck's and Ryan's perspective a lack of significant complexity. In an age where scholars have persuasively emphasized the plurality of progressivisms, these conservatives regularly speak of all progressives as having a single voice and ideology. As Vincent Cannato has recently remarked in the Weekly Standard, a conservative periodical ambivalent about the attack on progressivism, “Most historians have long since given up trying to define ‘progressivism’ as a coherent theory. There is just too much variety of beliefs. Conservatives who have recently turned their attentions toward progressivism,” Cannato notes, “should also be cautious about creating a grand unitary theory of it.”Footnote ¹² Yet the right-wing assault on the progressives indeed cares about solely one thing, and on that count finds only a guilty uniformity. In the words of John Marini and Ken Masugi, “Whatever diversity existed in their ranks, Progressive reformers were united in their opposition to the political theory of the American founding.” Conservatives also frequently take some of the most extreme statements of certain progressives and extend them to their logical conclusion rather than examine how different progressive ideas played out in a variety of historical contexts.Footnote ¹³

That said, it is important to recognize that conservatives do effectively score points against many progressive reforms and reformers. They offer smart and at times convincing criticisms—ironically because they have (generally without saying so) adopted a good number of the smart critiques of New Left critics who saw the progressives as racist, imperialist, pseudo-reformers most interested in social control and consolidating the new regime of political/corporate capitalism. And even if these conservatives were not assimilable to the pieties of the Left, their ideas derive from an independent and distinguished intellectual lineage that includes its own compelling populist critique of the tyrannies of the reforming spirit in such works as Eugenics and Other Evils, anti-capitalist G. K. Chesterton's 1922 condemnation of progressivism in thought and deed.Footnote ¹⁴

To demonstrate that these conservative intellectuals need to be taken seriously, I will start with the book that I am confident most of my fellow lefty academic historians will have the hardest time evaluating even-handedly. Jonah Goldberg's title reveals his brawling style: Liberal Fascism. A prominent conservative pundit and founding editor of National Review Online, Goldberg contributes to a variety of media outlets. Goldberg and Glenn Beck are close, and their partnership helped propel Liberal Fascism upon its publication in 2007 to number one on the New York Times best-seller list. A revised, paperback edition took on the newly elected president in 2009.Footnote ¹⁵

First and foremost, Liberal Fascism assails left-of-center academics and pundits for lazily and irresponsibly labeling conservatives “fascists.” For conservatives, who believe in classical liberalism and limited government, are historically not those rampaging beasts. Liberals and left-wing radicals, with their multicultural obsession with race, their celebration of social engineering, and their dreams of the collective good and socialism are, in Goldberg's argument, the true fascists and always have been, from FDR to Barack Obama.

And the very first fascist—indeed, the Ur Fascist—was the progressive hero Woodrow Wilson. Despite Goldberg's briefly acknowledging the “many fault lines running through Progressivism,” he boldly declares that “the progressives were as close to authentic homegrown fascists as any movement America has ever produced.” How so? Goldberg provides a multi-count indictment: “Militaristic, fanatically nationalist, imperialist, racist, deeply involved in the promotion of Darwinian eugenics, enamored of the Bismarckian welfare state, statist beyond reckoning, the progressives represented the American flowering of a transatlantic movement, a profound reorientation toward the Hegelian and Darwinian collectivism imported from Europe at the end of the nineteenth century.” Two pages later he adds:

Not surprisingly, progressives were profoundly and self-consciously undemocratic. Goldberg quotes Wilson's “unintentionally chilling 1890 essay, Leaders of Men, [where] the future president explained that the ‘true leader’ uses the masses like ‘tools.’ … ‘It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.’”Footnote ¹⁶

Goldberg delights in tweaking conventional feel-good judgments about the progressives: “Liberals often forget” that their progressives “were the authors of Prohibition, the Palmer raids, eugenics, loyalty oaths, and in its modern incarnation, what many call ‘state capitalism.’” Moreover, “imperialism was as central to Progressivism as efforts to clean up the food supply or make factories safe.” The “most damning” of progressivism's dangerous ideas was an “infatuation with eugenics, which has simply been whitewashed out of existence.” Goldberg spends an entire chapter on the subject, arguing that there is “no clearer or more sinister proof” of how “American Progressivism shares important roots with European fascism” than the crusade against the unfit, “widely seen as the answer to the ‘social question.’”Footnote ¹⁷

The Great War is Goldberg's ace in the hole. Again, he does not mince words: “During World War I, America became a fascist country, albeit temporarily. The first appearance of modern totalitarianism in the Western world wasn't in Italy or Germany but in the United States of America.” Goldberg points to the brutal suppression of free speech and any form of dissent, the hysteria against foreigners, the loyalty oaths, the cooptation of artists and writers for purposes of propaganda, the evisceration of civil liberties, the official encouragement of vigilantism in the name of enforcing patriotism—all in all, the construction of a “police state.” Add in the nationalist socializing (for Goldberg, such a construction is quite intentional) of big business that produced rampant crony capitalism, and the best progressive reformers become susceptible to the charge of producing a fascist American state in 1917–19. Looking further on through the twentieth century, Goldberg continues the taunt: “In a society where Joe McCarthy must be the greatest devil in American history, it would not be convenient to mention that the George Washington of modern liberalism was the far greater inquisitor and that the other founding fathers of American liberalism were far crueler jingoists and warmongers than modern conservatives have ever been.”Footnote ¹⁸

Especially given that Goldberg's perspective on World War I is so compelling, how does his overall interpretation stand up as historical scholarship? There is abundant reason to be impatient with his overly broad conception of fascism, as well as with his attempt to tar every twentieth- and twenty-first-century liberal and leftist with the label of “fascist.” Also, the idea that liberal and leftist scholars uniformly give Woodrow Wilson a free pass, or have whitewashed eugenics, is rendered absurd by even a casual look at standard dyspeptic critiques of the twenty-eighth president or the raft of books on “the surgical solution” over the last three decades.Footnote ¹⁹

Goldberg's overtly politicized agenda, along with the lack of complexity in his analysis, has produced some spectacular diatribes. Consider historian Roger Griffin of Oxford Brookes University. In a forum on the History News Network, Griffin labeled Liberal Fascism, “a patent exercise in propaganda,” a “sustained pseudo-historical calumny and defamation,” and “no more ‘true’ than the Da Vinci Code.” The book is “not just oxymoronic but moronic,” and “its revisionism directly parallels that of the Institute of Historical Review, which produces euphemistic essays in Holocaust Denial misleadingly adorned with full scholarly apparatus.” As an elaborate piece of conspiracy theory and demonization of an alleged internal enemy,” Griffin insisted, Liberal Fascism even “has some affinity with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”Footnote ²⁰

Beyond the fact that Griffin engages more in over-the-top name calling than substantive rebuttal, such a dismissal clearly misunderstands the purpose and nature of this kind of book. Liberal Fascism is forthright about its nature as a polemic, using the past more for provocation than as a source for complex, calm history. One could claim that such a use of past is inherently wrong, that polemics never have a place in the writing of good history, and that we have to judge all uses of the past by scholarly standards. Yet that comes dangerously close to arguing that scholars are sole owners of the past and that any connection between past and present is instantly suspect. Such an anti-populist—indeed, monopolist—attitude is deeply troubling ... and might even require revocation of the American Historical Association presidencies of those politicized—and empirically problematic—historians named Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Goldberg does, of course, get much about the Progressive Era wrong. His polemic fails utterly to recognize that plenty of anti-progressives supported imperialism, Prohibition, immigration restriction, eugenics, and World War I—and that a good number of progressives opposed some or even all of these measures.Footnote ²¹ Goldberg also refuses to broaden the cast of progressive characters in a way reflective of the last generation of scholarship; not surprisingly, Liberal Fascism includes no middle-class black women in North Carolina, no Chicago clubwomen, no members of the Society for American Indians. That said, Goldberg does include a fairly broad range of protagonists among the traditional suspects beyond Wilson and TR. He uses both primary and secondary sources to discuss Baruch, Beard, Beveridge, Bryan, Creel, Croly, Darrow, Dewey, DuBois, Ely, Gladden, Holmes, Lippmann, Rauschenbush, Reed, Ross, and Sanger. Although he does not explore differences among progressives in any sustained fashion, Goldberg does understand that Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, and Robert La Follette refused to give their support to the war effort.

Goldberg also deploys scholarship from what we might call the penultimate generation—a relatively forgivable sin for a nonacademic. He effectively draws upon, among others, H. W. Brands, John Milton Cooper, John Patrick Diggins, Michael Kazin, David Kennedy, William Leuchtenburg, Michael McGerr, Daniel Rodgers, and—last but not least—Howard Zinn. (Given his focus on transatlantic political ideologies, a big faux pas is not looking at James Kloppenberg's Uncertain Victory and similar works.) Goldberg's evaluations of the progressives fit into the scholarly landscape in a variety of ways. His evocation of the progressive intellectuals' sympathy for early fascism, for example, matches up roughly with John Diggins's study of American perspectives on Mussolini; his take on eugenics is compatible with the work of Edwin Black's War against the Weak; his emphasis on coercive moralism congruent with Paul Boyer's Urban Masses and Social Order; his focus on bureaucracy and experts akin to the organization synthesis of historians such as Robert Wiebe in The Search for Order; his screed against state capitalism resembles Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism. Indeed, it is instructive to place Liberal Fascism up against celebrated (and also frequently criticized) syntheses. Goldberg's progressives share many of the elitist, anti-democratic impulses highlighted in books ranging from Richard Hofstadter's Age of Reform to Shelton Stromquist's Reinventing “The People.” Even more tellingly, Goldberg's book is in striking ways a companion piece to Michael McGerr's influential 2003 A Fierce Discontent. Despite a wide variety of differences in emphasis, especially in its attention to gender, McGerr's book argues that progressivism represented a unified, middle-class drive for social control whose ultimate achievements were, in many ways, Prohibition and segregation. Even closer in spirit to the book is Jackson Lears's 2009 Rebirth of a Nation, where a quasi-fascist (not his term) cult of violence and an imperial quest for regeneration among white elites served as the formative impulse of the era—although reformers do come off better than anti-reformers in Lears's book. Goldberg lacks the formal academic credentials and primary research apparatuses of all of these books, but his provocatively stated political conclusions should not render him persona non grata among scholars.Footnote ²²

The Claremont Cadre

Liberal Fascism is joined by a number of widely circulated companions to Goldberg that are not nearly as worthy of consideration, even if their influence among Tea Party activists still makes them notable. Perhaps most prominent is the 2012 book from Andrew Napolitano, former judge and current Fox News judicial analyst (and close associate of Glenn Beck). Napolitano studied with the Woodrow Wilson-worshipping Arthur Link as an undergraduate at Princeton but came to very different conclusions in Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom. According to Napolitano, mandatory public schooling has led to “reeducation camps,” and the Seventeenth Amendment “destroyed the balance of powers between the states, the people, and the federal government that the Constitution has originally set out” by unconstitutionally empowering Washington, DC, over state governments. Wilson was “evil,” and both Wilson and TR were “tyrants.” A typically melodramatic Napolitano sentence: “Purely dominated by a misguided belief in the power of the master race, the Progressives set out to control the world.” Books like this shape public discourse around progressivism, but they do not attempt to engage scholarly ideas.Footnote ²³

Anti-progressive historiography, however, generally comes in more measured and responsible vessels. The most influential of the historians and political scientists in this dissident right-wing academy is Ronald Pestritto. Glenn Beck has a number of house historians, but Pestritto is his go-to guy for the progressives. Beck asked Pestritto to provide the most sustained historical material on progressivism for his website and was instrumental in launching the little-known Hillsdale College professor into the limelight. Pestritto, in turn, has vigorously defended Beck against charges of being reckless in his history of the progressives. (Pestritto also authored a glowing review of Liberal Fascism for the Claremont Review of Books.)Footnote ²⁴

Pestritto's scholarship on progressivism is most visible in one monograph and two primary source collections. Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005) is a careful and thoughtful exploration of Wilson's political philosophy—indeed, I think it is among the most insightful works to explore Wilson's political theory, especially before his political career. The same year Pestritto published Woodrow Wilson: The Essential Political Writings (2005), followed by a coedited reader on American Progressivism. In these books, Pestritto is fair, but he does not pretend to be balanced: his argument is that Wilson consistently, proudly, and powerfully undermined the governmental vision of the Founders. Those who designed the eighteenth-century governmental framework for the United States believed in individualism and eternal natural rights, separation of powers, and, above all, limited government. Wilson, in contrast, drew from a German-based theory of the needs of the collective, a unitary sense of governmental power with the executive branch holding primacy with theoretically limitless powers, and a Constitution that needed to evolve with historical time or be abandoned. Wilson therefore represented “a dangerous departure from sound political principle.”Footnote ²⁵

Perhaps most intriguingly, Pestritto notes the congruence between Wilson's advocacy of greatly expanded governmental powers and socialism. Despite Wilson's hostility to actually existing socialism, Pestritto quotes the future president's favorable comparison in his 1887 essay “Socialism and Democracy”: “In fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members.” Pestritto notes—convincingly—that “the difference between the two, as Wilson understood it, was that his progressivism was organic and evolutionary, while socialism was abstract and revolutionary.” (Note the similarities to Glenn Beck's CPAC keynote.) Moreover, Wilson's commitment to popular rule was paper thin. His “rhetoric is intensely popular and democratic, yet the reality of [Wilson's] argument is to put political power in the hands of governing elites who possess advanced knowledge of the spirits of the age and the course of history.” As president, he empowered supposedly scientific experts as bureaucratic administrators in a manner continuous with his earlier writings as political scientist. And in this turn toward anti-democratic administration by elites, Wilson, along with TR, articulated progressivism's “single, coherent, identifiable idea or principle.”Footnote ²⁶

Pestritto, now dean of the Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale, received his PhD from the other main haven of the conservative school of progressivism, Claremont Graduate University, and is a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. As Pestritto recognizes, a host of scholars—particularly political scientists—have been building their case for two decades. The conservative intellectuals' systematic attack on the progressives arguably originates with Paul Eidelberg's 1974's A Discourse on Statesmanship, the second half of which provided a genteel but forceful critique of Wilson's political theory. For example, Eidelberg glosses a passage from Wilson's Constitutional Government, declaring, “This is nothing less than Caesarism, but of the profoundest kind. Wilson virtually deifies the people on the one hand, and their chosen leader, the President, on the one hand. The people and their leader are joined in what might almost be termed a gnostic union.”Footnote ²⁷

Political theorist Patrick Deneen describes how central progressivism has become to the political imagination of the recent conservative intellectual movement:

No other book illustrates the mainstream acceptance of this once-marginal interpretation as much as does Charles Kesler's 2012 I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism. Kesler, distinguished professor at Claremont-McKenna and editor of the Claremont Review of Books, dedicated his book to William F. Buckley Jr. The book still garnered a front-page review from that bastion of liberalism, the New York Times Book Review (admittedly, it was a negative review). I Am the Change is at once an audacious attack on Barack Obama and a toned-down restatement, for a broad public audience, of the preachings of the Claremont Choir. Obama is, without a doubt, a radical in sheep's clothing, not because he is a Kenyan-born anti-imperialist, but because he represents the apotheosis of the liberal tradition in twentieth-century American politics. Here FDR and LBJ are restored to their former places in the pantheon of conservative enemies, with Wilson finally having an opportunity to join the trinity as The Father. Wilson, in fact, performed the original criminal “cover up,” the “noble lie” that presented liberalism as just a friendly, moderate version of traditional American ideals.Footnote ²⁹

Obama's “Yes We Can” slogan, Kesler suggests, was so congenial to the progressive temperament because it in fact had no substantive goal. Yes We Can Do … anything, because progress and change are to be worshipped in and of themselves. This, Kesler claims, was the most fundamental impulse within progressivism, as well as how it was able to give birth to modern liberalism. Progressivism's theory of history justified “an endless future of continual reform.” Kesler argues that this progressive temperament was dramatically new, even revolutionary. For example, populists and progressives, despite a surface similarity, “disagreed profoundly on the cause and cure for America's problems.” The populists sought specific monetary policies or more broadly, “a larger administrative power” for their purposes, but they emphatically did not seek an “administrative state”; certainly, “the Populists never renounced the people's prudent jealousy of governmental power.” Progressives, in contrast, joyfully repudiated the Constitution and sought the solution of governmental problems not in the “crude and ignorant minds” (Wilson's words) of the rabble but “in the presumptive expertise, integrity, and political authority of the academic mandarins.” Indeed, Wilson bequeathed a cult of the leader to all later liberalism that was not “innocent of the more ominous dimensions of leadership.”Footnote ³⁰

Near the conclusion to I Am the Change, Kesler pronounces like a proud parent speaking of his offspring: “Thanks to this intellectual rebirth, the case against Progressivism and in favor of the Constitution is stronger and deeper than it has ever been. Progressivism has never been in a fair fight, an equal fight, until now, because its political opponents had largely been educated in the same ideas, had lost touch, like Antaeus, with the ground of the Constitution in natural right, and so tended to offer only Progressivism Lite as an alternative. The sheer superficiality of Progressive scholarship is now evident.” Kesler's book is itself a fairly Lite contribution to what is now a strong academic genre. Yet the book's breezy tone, along with its enthusiastic reception, provides confirmation of the strength within contemporary conservative intellectual culture of George Will's well-known 1995 aphorism that “‘back to 1900’ is a serviceable summation of the conservatives' goal, which is to reverse many results of the liberal project first formulated around the turn of the century.”Footnote ³¹

Obama Channels the New Nationalism

Woodrow Wilson serves as the primary bête noire of the Claremont Crowd, but conservative political theorists can become as exercised about Theodore Roosevelt—especially the Bull Mooser's New Nationalism phase.Footnote ³² Barack Obama may or may not have recognized that progressivism was under assault from the right when he traveled to Osawatomie, but he decided to strenuously engage there the battle over who owns progressivism.Footnote ³³ The president's primary point was that the economic principles of laissez-faire had already been tried during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The questions the nation then asked, he recalled, included the following:

• • “Would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were being controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low?

• • Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary?

• • Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because there were people who thought massive inequality and exploitation of people was just the price you pay for progress.”

Obama firmly invoked his predecessor: “Theodore Roosevelt disagreed.” This wealthy Republican recognized “what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history.” “But Roosevelt also knew,” Obama remarked, “that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. … He fought to make sure businesses couldn't profit by exploiting children or selling food or medicine that wasn't safe. And today, they still can't.”

To rehabilitate, defend, and expand the “middle class” (a term the president invoked twenty times), Obama argued that Americans needed to learn the basic lessons of progressivism. Yet there were those who are stuck in the past, who “want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess…. Their philosophy is simple: We are better off when everybody is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.” The president came to the land of his hard-working Kansas ancestors “to reaffirm my deep conviction that we're greater together than we are on our own.” Briefly invoking (while simultaneously seeking to defuse) the Occupy movement, Obama argued that the principles involved in giving “everyone … a fair shot” were not “1 percent values or 99 percent values. They're American values.” The country needed to move beyond “the breathtaking greed of a few,” along with the kind of systematic “irresponsibility” that brought on the banking crisis. Obama called for a government capable of creating an educational and technological infrastructure that would once again nurture equal opportunity.Footnote ³⁴

Obama's Osawatomie speech, along with a complementary State of the Union speech a month later, stirred those on the Left. The left-of-center punditocracy celebrated Obama's move toward “populism.” Robert Reich joined a chorus of liberals who rejoiced, “Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008. Since then we've had a president who has only reluctantly stood up to the moneyed interests Teddy Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin stood up to.” Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, opined, “I wish Obama would go to Kansas more often.” And E. J. Dionne praised the speech as “the inaugural address Obama never gave,” in which he “tied himself unapologetically to a defense of America's long progressive and liberal tradition.” The speech, Dionne cheered, would “turn the 2012 campaign from a plebiscite about the current state of the economy into a referendum about the broader progressive tradition that made us a middle-class nation.” (Closer to the election, Dionne would argue, “If Teddy Roosevelt fought against the politics of the Gilded Age, Obama is fighting a Republican Party determined to bring the Gilded Age back and undo the achievements of a century.”)Footnote ³⁵

Meanwhile, the right wing wrung its hands at Obama's incendiary embrace of “class warfare.” The Wall Street Journal reported the speech's “unsparing” language and “sharply partisan and populist tone”; an op-ed in the Journal likened Godfather Obama's rhetoric to that of the Corleone family. Charles Krauthammer bemoaned a “populism so crude that it channels not Teddy Roosevelt so much as Hugo Chávez.” Scolding the Obama administration for its lack of talent in “making adept historical analogies,” David Brooks—who had refused to support Newt Gingrich in the primaries because of the “severe damage” he would do to “the Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt strain in American life”—challenged Obama's entire attempt to appropriate progressivism. Because of the gigantic growth of government since TR's time, Brooks argued, “the progressive era is not a model; it is a foil. It provides a contrast and shows us what we really need to do.”Footnote ³⁶

Few commentators on either side recognized, however, the impoverished nature of Obama's reclamation of TR (and, by extension, progressivism) in an age of dramatically increasing social inequality and a renaissance of corporate control over politics. Obama himself threw out a smokescreen when he chose, against the advice of many of his staff, to use this speech to respond decisively, and seemingly sympathetically, to the Occupy movement. Indeed, when the president's chief speechwriter suggested modeling the address after Roosevelt's appearance in Osawatomie, Obama responded, “Great, I love the Nationalism speech…. It's pretty far out there—the most radical speech Teddy Roosevelt ever gave.”Footnote ³⁷ Yet what Obama channeled was not the same as what TR actually said in Osawatomie. Obama drew laughter close to the end of his nearly hour-long address when he noted that “Roosevelt was called a radical. He was called a socialist—even a communist.” To be sure, Roosevelt himself made no bones about how he intended his progressivism as an anti-revolutionary response to the robust socialism of his days. Still, Obama defangs the colonel.Footnote ³⁸

Observe carefully the ways that Obama quoted Roosevelt. (TR's words are in italics):

Even Louis Hartz would have been shocked upon hearing Obama's conflation of his milquetoast, patriotic, campfire invocations of fairness with TR's radicalization of the liberal tradition. Here, in contrast, is Roosevelt, uncensored, on his bully pulpit in the “New Nationalism” speech (emphasis added):

*“One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”

*“This means that our government, National and State, must be freed from the sinister influence or control of special interests. Exactly as the special interests of cotton and slavery threatened our political integrity before the Civil War, so now the great special business interests too often control and corrupt the men and methods of government for their own profit. We must drive the special interests out of politics.”

*As if anticipating, a century later, Citizens United, as well as Mitt Romney's invocation of corporate personhood:Footnote ⁴⁰ “The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have called into being. There can be no effective control of corporations while their political activity remains.”

*“Those who oppose reform will do well to remember that ruin in its worst form is inevitable if our national life brings us nothing better than swollen fortunes for the few and the triumph in both politics and business of a sordid and selfish materialism.”Footnote ⁴¹

Jackson Lears put the matter succinctly in a corrosive review of Doris Kearns Goodwin's recent best seller about Roosevelt, Taft, and the progressives. In Obama's Osawatomie speech, TR's truly progressive “rhetoric of social democracy” simply “evaporated in a technocratic haze.”Footnote ⁴²

The Progressive Reconstruction of Progressivism

By no means does TR belong in the pantheon of virtuous and unsullied democratic heroes. Political scientist Sidney Milkis, however, has recently made a compelling (and sympathetic) case for TR as a politician who came to truly believe in power to the people. Perhaps we should, therefore, take seriously the Claremont/Hillsdale school about the genuine threat the Bull Mooser represented to the status quo. To return to the “New Nationalism” speech, note a passage that Ronald Pestritto and other conservatives have quoted, and warned against—and that Obama chose to ignore: “The man who wrongly holds that every human right is secondary to his profit must now give way to the advocate of human welfare, who rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.”Footnote ⁴³

In forthrightly defending humanity over property, TR eloquently expressed how open the Question of Capitalism remained in the early twentieth century. Industrial workers who voted for Eugene Debs were not alone in questioning “capitalism.” Countless middle-class folks, from Jane Addams to masses of anonymous voters in Portland, Oregon, similarly expressed ambivalence, if not revulsion, toward the various inhumanities of the reigning economic order.

But even if one grants the Question of Capitalism was open at the start of the twentieth century, perhaps it has become closed in this moment of high-tech globalization. In the age of neoliberalism, any challenges to capitalism are, at best, signs of deluded and fruitless utopianism rooted in a past not just unusable, but unreachable. Yet when it comes to what they may or may not have permission to change, it is not clear that the masses agree with the Thomas Friedmans of the world. Polls are problematic, but a probing of public opinion put out by the Pew Research Center in the same month as the Osawatomie oration is nevertheless suggestive. Perhaps capitalism came over in the first ships, but it seems leaky, with only 50 percent of the American public holding a positive evaluation of that economic institution. A full 40 percent—enough to hold up the United States Senate—had a negative reaction to “capitalism.” Even 29 percent of conservative Republicans reacted poorly to capitalism—perhaps helping to explain support for Newt Gingrich's and Rick Perry's vigorous attacks on predatory “vulture capitalism” in the 2012 Republican primaries. In turn, that supposedly most dirty word in American politics, “socialism,” actually had a 31 percent favorable rating (to 60 percent negative).Footnote ⁴⁴

Eugene Debs, despite his historic showing in 1912, probably would not have minded garnering 31 percent of the vote. The broader point is that Theodore Roosevelt's radical progressivism—if reconfigured for the twenty-first century by insightful politicians and courageous social movements—might develop well in the rich soil of populist political opinion. More evidence: Pew surveyed not only economic terms, but also political labels. The most positive, with 67 percent, was none other than “progressive,” which beat “conservative” by 5 percentage points and “liberal” by 17 points.Footnote ⁴⁵

The task of reconstructing the history of progressivism, by progressives, is therefore more than an academic pursuit. Indeed, a good number of public intellectuals are trying to reclaim the reform traditions of a century ago. In 2008, John Podesta, former Clinton chief of staff and eventually a top Obama advisor, prepared the way by penning The Power of Progress: How America's Progressives Can (Once Again) Save Our Economy, Our Climate, and Our Country. For an overtly political manifesto written by a political operative, Podesta's book is unusually sophisticated in its sustained treatment of “the original Progressive era … as a useful and inspiring historical moment in helping to understand the challenges we face today.” Podesta's cast of characters opens not with status-conscious members of the middle class, but rather with Henry George and his class-conscious attack on power and privilege. The strikers at Haymarket and Pullman join Ignatius Donnelly and William Jennings Bryan in Podesta's narrative, where labor and populism are necessary ingredients in making progressivism powerful not only in the early twentieth century, but in the decades beyond. Podesta spends four pages on the Osawatomie speech but gives Robert La Follette (who “represented the progressive spirit in total”) nearly equal billing. The second half of the book is a wonkish manual for the current day, but the first half (relying primarily on Eric Goldman and George Mowry), thoughtfully distills historical lessons for latter-day progressives.Footnote ⁴⁶

In 2003, Podesta founded the Center for American Progress, which became one of the leading left-leaning Beltway think tanks. The CAP also kept Podesta's passion for history alive. Staffers Marta Cook, John Halpin, Ruy Teixeira, and Conor P. Williams have done considerable work that mirrors that sponsored by the Claremont Institute. They composed a series of policy briefing papers on “Progressive Traditions” that served as a pointed rejoinder to the right-wing critique of progressivism, as well as a robust and positive defense of using the history of a century ago to fight for a new Progressive Era. Their work had equivalents in the professorial realm. Literary scholar Cecelia Tichi, for example, published a scholarly book with a large public ambition, to acquaint twenty-first-century Americans with seven left-wing reformers who “helped foment an American revolution for the upcoming new century.” “Their lives and work,” Tichi urged in Civic Passions, “speak to the present as if it were only yesterday.” Walter Nugent's Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction, a scholarly work designed to appeal to general readers, likewise celebrated the populist roots of progressivism and the ultra-democratic side of Theodore Roosevelt in a manner meant to inspire in the present day.Footnote ⁴⁷

This genre's gem was Our Divided Political Heart, by the prolific liberal pundit, E. J. Dionne. Appearing in the midst of the 2012 presidential campaign, Dionne's book sought, like much of his previous work, to bridge the divide between individual and community, the public and the private, and the market and the government. Dionne introduces the idea of “the Long Consensus,” the joint contribution of both late nineteenth-century populists and early twentieth-century progressives to a democratic public culture that “wrote the social contract for shared prosperity” during the American Century. Under this regime, workers unionized, property ownership expanded, social mobility grew, and the state expanded its regulatory role even as “capitalism flourished.” With the rise of the Tea Party, however, “the Long Consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in its century-long history.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Dionne, in line with Podesta's argument, hopes that citizens will pay especially close attention to “the Populist strain of the American Progressive tradition.” He expresses impatience with liberals who write off Populism/populism by taking the bigotry at its extremist edges as the movement's essence and thereby ignoring Populism's “deeply democratic character.” “The original Progressive Era succeeded,” Dionne argues, “because it created an alliance between the largely rural Populists and urban, middle-class reformers.” Once the two movements came together, “the Progressive impulse shaped American thinking about public life for the next eight decades” (with the exception of the twenties). Moreover, Dionne's progressives were genuine, if at times ambivalent, democrats—not the elitist centralizers of both left-wing and right-wing critiques. They were communitarians who, above all, strengthened the institutions of civil society.Footnote ⁴⁹

While one might question some of Dionne's political diagnoses and prescriptions, Our Divided Political Heart offers valuable examples of how to think, as scholars, about the connection between past and present and how to talk, as citizens, about that fertile connection. Dionne's inclusion of populism as part of the Long Consensus—not just as a small moment in the origin story, but as an ongoing, constituent portion of the movement over decades—reinforces the image of progressivism as containing multitudes of (often inspirational) political ideologies. Likewise, Dionne's insistence that progressivism stood at the center of twentieth-century political history enables recognition that the fall of the New Deal order and what often seems like the bare clinging to life of the social democratic welfare state do not mean that the prospects of democratic reform—even radicalism—are over. In an age when Americans seem to have even less faith in the power of the national government to do anything right than they do in capitalism, Dionne's analysis might motivate democratic activists to rethink The State. In part via an honest engagement with conservative anti-statism, the Left might well reclaim, in the age of Guantanamo Bay and the National Security Agency, its own traditions of hostility to concentrated and arbitrary (or even just undemocratically discretionary) government power.Footnote ⁵⁰

Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore eloquently challenge their fellow leftist historians to rethink the long contours of American history when they label the New Deal as an exception in modern politics. “Modern day reformers,” they contend, “might find more potent historical analogies for contemporary dilemmas in the fluid alliances of the Progressive Era rather than in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt. Indeed, the virtues of that historical movement may actually be in what some note as its flaws: an often pragmatic approach to reform, a diffuse leadership, mixed class alliances, and the lack of a clear left and right dichotomy. At their best, the progressive reformers made the best of the power of individualism in American political culture, affirmed a vision of democratic life across class (if decidedly not always racial) lines, and sought a bridge between that individualism and a common good.”Footnote ⁵¹

Ironically, the space in the public sphere opened up by the conservative attempt to delegitimize the (unitary, monolithic) progressives provides an opportunity for those on the Left to argue for what inspires them about early twentieth-century progressivisms. Beyond specific policies, progressives bequeathed larger lessons for the revitalization of American political culture. For all their betrayals of the democratic spirit, the best of these early twentieth-century reformers sought to empower citizens to speak and to act across boundary lines, especially of gender; often of class; at times of race; and, when possible, ideology. Kevin Mattson, for example, reveals how prominent progressives such as Tom Johnson, Frederic Howe, and Mary Parker Follett sought to create institutional spaces where ordinary folks could talk to and deliberate with each other in a politically potent fashion. Such talking across ideology occurred in a multitude of places and ways. The most thoughtful portrait, and analysis, of this impulse comes in Jonathan Zimmerman's Distilling Democracy, where Zimmerman shows how ordinary citizens turned a ubiquitous, and repressive, program for alcohol education into a vigorous, multifaceted, even Whitmanesque debate about the proper role of the public schools—with an emphasis on public.Footnote ⁵²

Can historians of the Progressive Era contend that they are practicing this essential quality of democracy any better than were the ordinary Americans who argued over the merits of the city commission form of government or the role of alcohol education a century ago? Despite a good number of public intellectuals blogging and speechifying, I fear not. Most historians I know tend to live in an ideological bubble—better yet, underground silo. We proclaim our open-mindedness yet rarely do the kind of cross-talking that at least occasionally happens in American communities (if almost never in Congress). The origins of that failure to communicate is understandable. The academic left, while dominant within the humanities, believes itself to be one of the few safeguards against a well-organized, lavishly funded corporate assault on the most marginal members of society—even on democratic institutions themselves. The academic and political right, in turn, believes that the nation's freedom is hanging on by a mere thread. As Charles Kesler has opined, Obamacare is not just bad policy, but is “genuinely tyrannical,” threatening “to subvert our form of government and our way of life.”Footnote ⁵³

When the stakes are so high, why chit chat with the enemy? I would ask, though: why not? Is it too much to think that scholars might help push a more free-wheeling and robust conversation out into the public realm? That conversation might have all kinds of decidedly ungenteel moments, where people proclaim their disdain, and even hatred, for each other. Perhaps the dialogue would get so rough that even Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would recognize the public conversation as a legitimate competitor to the savage discourse of the early republic.Footnote ⁵⁴ So, it may take more than a hundred years to get Glenn Beck and Barack Obama to converse in a civil fashion, but there is no reason that the rest of us cannot still learn from one another. In their absence, let us talk about history, and politics, and their deep and contentious interrelation, in a manner that follows in the best traditions of an unruly—and not infrequently also progressive—people.