II. The Origins of Progressivism in America

The Progressives' conception of “positive” freedom—and the derivative notions of history and the positive state—was principally inspired by early nineteenth century German idealism. These principles gained influence in America via two main paths. The first path was blazed by German-born and educated scholars like Francis Lieber. Lieber, who eventually ended up teaching at Columbia, emigrated to the United States in 1827 after attending the University of Berlin where he was influenced by Johann Fichte and Frederick Schleirmacher, among others. Lieber's efforts were bolstered by the energetic exertions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of aspiring American social scientists who matriculated in German universities between 1820–1920, most of whom did so between 1870–1900.Footnote ⁸ “Many of the new academic professionals of the 1870s and 1880s, and the young men who were responsible for defining and shaping political science as an integral discipline in this country's new universities,” Sylvia Fries observes, “found intellectual nurture, not to mention relatively easy and inexpensive access to a doctoral degree, in the universities of Germany.”Footnote ⁹ Those who received at least some measure of German training, and who returned home to become leading figures in the emerging disciplines of history, economics, political science, sociology, etc., include, among many others, Theodore D. Woolsey, John W. Burgess, William A. Dunning, Andrew D. White, Herbert B. Adams, Edmund J. James, Simon N. Patten, Richard T. Ely, Henry C. Adams, Charles R. Henderson, Albion Small, Edward A. Ross, E. R. A. Seligman, Charles E. Merriam, Frank J. Goodnow, Charles A. Beard, W. E. B. Dubois, and Walter Weyl.Footnote ¹⁰

Following their return to the United States, most of these scholars eventually obtained positions in American colleges, which is where the import of their new thinking was initially most pronounced. “As early as the 1860s,” Eldon Eisenach writes, “Americans who studied in German universities returned to launch powerful critiques of American colleges and universities and strongly urged adoption or adaptations of German models.”Footnote ¹¹ While several American universities soon became Progressive strongholds—e.g. Columbia, the University of Chicago, and the University of Wisconsin—arguably no American university produced as many influential Progressives as did The Johns Hopkins University. Founded in 1876, Hopkins was expressly modeled on the German university with its emphasis on research, scholarship, and graduate training. In its inaugural year, Austin Scott, a Ph.D. from the University of Leipzig, established a seminar on American historical and political studies. In 1883, Herbert Baxter Adams, a younger colleague who had earned a Ph.D. at the University of Heidelberg (where he had studied with Johann K. Bluntschli), took over Scott's course.Footnote ¹² Adams, with the assistance of other German-trained faculty like Richard T. Ely, succeeded in producing a plethora of highly influential scholars.Footnote ¹³ “An impressive group was trained at Hopkins,” John Gunnell notes, “and many did seminal research and institutional work in the emerging, yet often not clearly defined, social scientific disciplines at major graduate institutions.”Footnote ¹⁴ John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson, Albert Shaw, John R. Commons, Westel W. Willoughby, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Frederic C. Howe were all among Hopkins' graduates.

In addition to founding new universities on the German model and reordering existing ones accordingly, these scholars also helped define the emerging disciplines of social science by founding a host of professional academic associations—e.g., the American Historical Association (1884), the American Economic Association (1885), the American Political Science Association (1903), and the American Sociological Society (1905). These institutions were patterned on German models, and, in some cases, at least, their founding was urged by the German professoriate.Footnote ¹⁵ The American Economic Association (AEA), for example, was consciously designed as an American version of the Verein für Sozialpolitik, the leading association of Historical School economists in Germany, which served as “an institutional nexus of professors and state officials, academic learning and practical policymaking.”Footnote ¹⁶ Five of the AEA's six original officers, moreover, had studied in Germany, as had twenty of its first twenty-six presidents.Footnote ¹⁷ Like their German predecessors, these institutions were explicitly reform-minded. The aim of combining scholarship and reform, as Jurgen Herbst notes, “marked the development of social science in late-nineteenth century America [e.g., in the formation of the American Historical Association (AHA)]. It was in evidence again when the political scientists and the sociologists separated themselves from the Social Science Association.”Footnote ¹⁸ Through all these endeavors Progressive academics established an important beachhead for German idealism in America. “By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century,” as Eisenach thus concludes, the Progressives'

III. Redefining Individualism: The Progressive Embrace of the Idealistic Conception of Freedom and History

It is frequently suggested that the Progressives depreciated the importance of the individual and his rights in favor of the “social good” or “general welfare.” In a 1903 survey of recent American political thinking, Charles Merriam seemingly confirms this view by describing the progressive redefinition of the end or aim of government as a movement away from “the individualistic … philosophy” of the Revolution:

Whereas the Founders defined the end of government in terms of the individual and the natural rights to which he is entitled, the Progressives define it in terms of “the general welfare.” In the Progressives' view, Merriam thus seems to suggest, the social good, that is, the “interests of the community as a whole,” simply takes primacy over the individual and his rights.

While this formulation is, in the end, apt, it is nonetheless the source of much confusion, for it makes the Progressives sound as though they have no concern for the welfare of the individual, which is not the case. It is true, of course, that they were not concerned about individual rights in the Founders' sense. Despite occasional rhetorical obfuscations to the contrary, there is abundant evidence confirming that the Progressives rejected the Founders' understanding of individualism. “Across the range of Progressive writings, and throughout this entire period,” as Eisenach concludes, “one finds a persistent attack on rights and individualism as worthy foundations for American national democracy … The rejection of natural rights as a foundation for moral or political reasoning was not even considered to require a defense.”Footnote ²¹ By the turn of the twentieth century, in other words, intellectuals, if not the broader public, pervasively denied the Founders' understanding of equality and the natural rights doctrine which flows from it.

If we infer from this rejection that the Progressives were altogether unconcerned about the welfare of the individual in any sense, however, we shall be seriously misled, for the “social good” or “general welfare” itself cannot be understood apart from the welfare of the individuals comprising that society. Indeed, as Merriam's own subsequent discussion confirms, the Progressives' conception of the “general welfare” derives from a new conception of individualism—from, that is, a new conception of the welfare of the individual which not only differs in marked respects from the Founders' conception, but also grounds a new conception of moral right and obligation. Drawing on Theodore Woolsey's discussion of this question in his influential two volume treatise Political Science, among others, Merriam writes: “Woolsey took the position that the state cannot be limited to restraining individuals from injuring each other, but may justly act positively for the general welfare. ‘The sphere of the state,’ he said, ‘may reach as far as the nature and needs of man and of men reach,’ ” including, the “redress of wrongs,” “prevention of wrongs,” “care for the outward welfare of the community, as in respect to industry, roads, health,” and “the cultivation of the spiritual nature.”Footnote ²² For Woolsey, as with the Progressives generally, the scope of the state is defined by the “general welfare,” which is defined in turn by “the nature and the needs of man”—by the nature of the human being, as the Progressives, not the Founders, understand it. This nature, Woolsey clarifies, is comprehensive in the sense that it includes the whole of man's concerns—i.e., his “outward” (external, material, or physical) concerns, no less than his higher, “spiritual” concerns. The “general welfare” is promoted, accordingly, whenever policies seeking to promote the fullest possible development of this nature among Americans generally are adopted, howsoever such policies may violate what the Founders regarded as the natural rights of the individual: “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” Merriam pointedly concludes, “but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle.”Footnote ²³ In stressing the primacy of the “social good” or the “general welfare” over individualism or individual rights, in short, the Progressives were, first and foremost, stressing the primacy of a new individualism over the old. The theory that society is “organic,” and hence constitutes a whole which is ethically prior to the individual and his rights in the old sense, as John Dewey instructively notes, “can say not less, but more than any one else, that society exists for and by individuals,” as it “is as much an account of the individual as it is of the whole.”Footnote ²⁴

The Progressives thus discarded the Founders' conception of individual freedom as natural rights in favor of a new conception of freedom synonymous with the fullest possible development or “perfection” of human nature. For the Progressives, as Eisenach observes,

The distinction between “negative” and “positive” liberty, and the rejection of the former for the latter, Eisenach continues, “was a litany in Progressive writings, voiced in the languages of economics, ethics, sociology, and religion.”Footnote ²⁵ “Negative” freedom, as Dewey and Tufts explain,

“Negative” freedom is “freedom from subjection to the will and control of others.” The Founders' conception of freedom is essentially “negative” because government secures freedom to the individual primarily by restraining (or holding back) others, as well as itself, from interfering arbitrarily with his right to make decisions in his own life—to decide, that is, how to pursue the lowest to the highest ends in life.

For the Progressives, however, “true” freedom is “positive” in character because it consists in the actual development of one's full—and hence highest—nature, not the mere legal right or opening to pursue such development. “‘When we speak of freedom as something to be highly prized,’ ” Richard T. Ely, quoting the British neo-Hegelian T. H. Green, explains, we “‘do not mean merely freedom from restraint or compulsion.’ ” On the contrary, “true liberty means the expression of positive powers of the individual” to “make the most and best of themselves.”Footnote ²⁷ It means, as he clarifies elsewhere, the “most perfect development of all human faculties in each individual, which can be attained,” including that of “all the higher faculties—faculties of love, of knowledge, of aesthetic perception, and the like[.]”Footnote ²⁸ Importantly, then, the Progressives neither abandoned individualism per se, nor the idea that nature grounds freedom and morality. On the contrary, as progressive political scientist Westel W. Willoughby explains, “Hegel, Green, and their idealistic followers” (including Willoughby himself), contend that

According to the idealists, “metaphysical inquiry” into the “spiritual and intellectual nature” of man teaches us that human beings have a natural capacity or potential to achieve moral or “personal perfection.” Both the “possibility” of achieving this end, as well as the “desire” to do so, are “innate in man.” While the state is thus not the “creator of the sense of ethical obligation,” it alone “furnishes the means” through which this human potential can be actualized or brought into “concrete application.”Footnote ²⁹

For the Progressives, like Hegel, then, freedom does not consist in the individual's mere ability to govern himself absent the overt interference of others, but, rather, in his ability to actualize the potential inherent in his being becoming thereby “perfect” or complete. In other words, the Progressives redefined individual freedom in terms of an explicitly teleological conception of human nature, and, hence, in terms of the realization of a particular conception of virtue or human excellence. “True” freedom is thus “positive,” not “negative,” in character, and goes hand in hand with a particular understanding of history: When freedom is defined in “positive” terms, as Ely, quoting the British neo-Hegelian T. H. Green, emphasizes, it is the “result of a long and arduous constructive process.”Footnote ³⁰ This “long and arduous constructive process” is history or “social evolution” rightly understood. Importantly, then, while the Progressive conception of “social evolution” entails change, this change is no mere arbitrary or directionless flux. For “‘amid all the … ebb and flow of social change,’ ” the Progressives nonetheless believed it was possible to discern certain “general” or “predominate” “tendencies” indicative of the Progressive “unfolding” (and hence actualization or fulfillment) of the human potential to be free.Footnote ³¹ For the Progressives, in short, freedom is inextricably tied to an evolutionary, or, more precisely, Progressive, conception of history, development, or growth in which each successive stage, like an infant maturing into adulthood, represents a fuller or more complete flowering of man's inherent nature than the previous one.

The Progressive conception of “social evolution” or “progress,” accordingly, cannot be understood apart from the ideal of freedom which provides its basic engine, aim, and hence general trajectory. “History,” as Richard Gamble, following progressive theologian Shailer Mathews, notes, “possessed a distinct and discernable tendency, a teleology. It moved from the physical to the spiritual, from perdition to redemption.”Footnote ³² The Progressives were thus “evolutionists,” but neither solely nor even primarily of the Darwinian variety, as is commonly suggested.Footnote ³³ “The peculiar service of Darwin,” Ely explains, “was the explanation of the method of biological development by means of the theory of natural selection … [S]o convincing was the evidence he submitted” in his 1859 essay, “The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,” “that the general acceptance of the idea of evolution dates from the publication of this book.” But, while Darwin may have been the great popularizer of evolution, he was hardly the first to advance some concept of it: “[T]he idea of the evolution of industrial society,” Ely continues,

As suggested previously, these scholars, the founders of the German Historical School of economics, were the teachers, and the teachers of the teachers, of many of the German-trained Progressive social scientists. The idea of evolution that they developed, in turn, reflected the influence of an even earlier exponent of evolution, for the German Historical School, as Daniel M. Fox notes, was “deeply influenced by Hegelian concepts of historical process[.]”Footnote ³⁵ The Progressives' thought thus reflects the influence of a pre-Darwinian conception of evolution, a conception which, though not entirely at odds with a Darwinian-based explanation, was ultimately in considerable tension with it. “Attempts have been made,” Ely observes, “to carry over the principle of natural selection from biology into the study of the social life of man.” While natural selection might explain the mechanism of evolution in a merely “organic” sense, it cannot adequately explain human or “social evolution”: “It has been well said that as organic evolution gives us man, so social evolution gives the ideal man.” “This thought,” Ely notes, “finds beautiful expression in the following language of the late Professor Joseph Le Conte”:

From the Progressives' standpoint, the suggestion that society always evolves through the blind and unbridled pursuit or struggle for survival—i.e. unfettered selfishness or “competition”—flew in the face of the general or predominate “tendencies” (or trends) they widely regarded as the hallmarks of human development. Although the Progressives defined progress essentially in terms of the increasing actualization of various latent “capacities”—e.g., the “the religious nature, the moral sense, the taste, the intellect”—they put special stress on the actualization of man's social and intellectual capacities.Footnote ³⁷ “The history of morals,” as Dewey and Tufts explain,

The first process, the “rationalizing or idealizing process,” is the process through which man's reason develops initially as a blind or unconscious tool in the service of his most primitive or spontaneous (and hence physical) instincts—e.g., to eat, seek shelter, generate offspring, etc. The development of reason in this respect is manifest in the development of “skilled occupations, in industry and trade, in the utilizing of all resources to further man's power and happiness.” Gradually, however, man's reason develops to the point where it begins to “introduce new ends.” Man, Dewey and Tufts continue,

Like Hegel, the Progressives argue that the human mind advances from unconscious through increasingly conscious phases of development.Footnote ⁴⁰ Over the course of this development reason begins to function not only as an increasingly powerful tool in the service of man's material desires, but also, though more gradually, as an increasingly self-aware faculty capable of distinguishing man's lower, material or physical existence from his higher “ideal” or spiritual nature, thereby elevating the latter, and its desires, over the former. In this respect, at least, Progressive historian John W. Burgess was hardly alone in believing, as John Gunnell notes, that history represents “the objective record of ‘the progressive revelations of the human reason’ and ‘spirit’ and ‘its advance toward its own perfection.’ ”Footnote ⁴¹

For the Progressives, accordingly, the development of the sciences generally, and the social sciences particularly, was both a manifestation of this developmental process, as well as its agent. Because reason develops historically in terms of its ability to grasp man's end, as well as its ability to devise means of attaining that end, as a race advances it grows increasingly able to understand, acquire control over, and thus reengineer the various “forces” shaping its existence. “We now have such scientific knowledge of social laws and forces, of economics, of history,” as social gospel theologian Walter Rauschenbusch emphasizes,

Man, or, rather, advanced man, having acquired “scientific knowledge” of the various processes shaping his existence, and having become more fully aware of his previously “hidden destiny,” could now consciously harness those processes to facilitate a wider and more efficient arrival at his proper end or “destiny.” For the Progressives, then, the very development of the social sciences in America not only confirmed that a high degree of rational development had already occurred, but also augured in the sciences' anticipated development, as well as their integration into the actual substance of public policy, a wider and more rapid realization of this developmental process for everyone.

The other main line of moral or historical progress, the “socializing process,” is the process through which human beings develop “an increased capacity to enter into relations with other human beings.” “Like the growth of reason,” this building up of a “‘social self,’ ” as Dewey and Tufts call it, is “both a means and an end.”Footnote ⁴³ Just as the development of reason is initially valuable merely as a means of attaining some other end, but ultimately becomes an end in itself, so too are man's relations with others. The social development of humanity, in other words, would culminate in social relations of a particular kind. The “socializing process,” as Dewey and Tufts explain, “consists in the extension of the area or range of persons whose common good is concerned, and in the deepening or intensification in the individual of his social interest: ‘the settled disposition on each man's part to make the most and best of humanity in his own person and the person of others.’ ”Footnote ⁴⁴ As man advances, in other words, the locus of his concern widens: his preoccupation with his own narrow and largely material concerns increasingly gives way to concern for others, which others, are understood in increasingly wider terms—e.g., family, nation, and ultimately all humanity. At the same time, the kind or nature of concern man takes in this growing circle of “others” also changes. Instead of viewing others as mere tools in the service of his own gain, man would increasingly view these others as beings to whom he owed an obligation, an obligation which would ultimately be understood in terms of their fullest possible growth or development. The Progressives thus not only believed that history was moving individuals into increasingly wider and more complex social groups—e.g., economic and political units—but that this very process was accompanied, albeit more slowly, by a “deepening” sense of moral obligation. “Day by day,” Ely enthuses, “the phrase, ‘All men are brothers,’ comes to mean more and more, and the time is surely coming when it will ethically mean as much in the world at large as once it did in the village community.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The “socializing process” of history, in short, would culminate in the formation of men dedicated to the fullest possible development of all humanity.

For the Progressives, then, the “rationalizing” and “socializing” processes of history were gradually effecting a reconstitution of the objects of human desire: “as man advances,” says Ely, “material wants give way to higher social, mental, and spiritual wants.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Individuals were not only increasingly taking greater interest in their “mental” development, but were also growing increasingly self-forgetting or “service“-oriented in the sense of being willing to subordinate their own concerns to promote the moral growth of others. Men are, Ely insists, increasingly bringing “ethical tests to bear upon all relations of life … rejecting as unsound all practices and customs inconsistent with genuine brotherhood.”Footnote ⁴⁷ In America, as elsewhere, these historical forces were forming a new and improved citizen, a “new patriot,” or, more precisely, a super patriot, whose relative willingness to sacrifice his personal affairs for the sake of others would be like that of a soldier in wartime: “In the days of '61 to '65,” as Charles Van Hise, a leading Progressive conservationist, economist and, president of the University of Wisconsin, writes,

The extraordinary degree of self-sacrifice once characteristic of Americans only in exceptional, short-lived periods of wartime, the reformers believed, not only should but actually was increasingly becoming the norm in all areas of life. From their standpoint, moreover, such self-sacrifice cannot even properly be described as self-sacrificial: for the individual, in the very act of subordinating his own “personal desires” for the sake of promoting others' welfare, was actually achieving his highest level of growth. “This view,” Ely assures, “does not imply a conflict between the development of the individual and the development of society. Self development for the sake of others is the aim of social ethics. Self and others, the individual and society, are thus united in one purpose.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The Progressives were thus confident that humanity generally—and the most advanced or progressive races particularly—was developing an increasingly broader conception of duty to an ever-enlarging circle of men, including, ultimately, all humanity. As mentioned previously, however, their understanding in this regard was in tension with those Darwinian-minded scholars who sought to explain “social evolution” solely in terms of natural selection. In a review essay of Benjamin Kidd's 1894 book, Social Evolution, for example, Theodore Roosevelt criticizes Kidd on precisely this point. Roosevelt, David Burton explains,

Roosevelt insisted that “[s]ide by side with the selfish development in life, there has been almost from the beginning a certain amount of unselfish development too; and in the evolution of humanity the unselfish side has, on the whole, tended steadily to increase at the expense of the selfish, notably in the progressive communities.”Footnote ⁵⁰ “Competition,” Ely likewise agrees, “begun far below man with the very beginnings of life, persists as one of the most fundamental laws of animate existence, but evolution carries it to higher and ever higher planes.”Footnote ⁵¹ From the Progressives' standpoint, as Wilson Carey McWilliams rightly notes, “evolution—pace Darwinian individualism—rewarded the capacity for cooperative action.”Footnote ⁵² The idea that natural selection, understood as the unbridled pursuit of survival, was the sole—or even ultimately the chief mechanism of progress—was simply not supported by the facts.

For the Progressives, in sum, “true” freedom is “positive” in nature because it consists in the individual's actual ability to develop and exercise properly the different capacities of his entire nature. To link the progressive conception of freedom, and hence morality, to the fulfillment of human nature, is, of course, to depart in an important respect from the conventional view, for the Progressives are widely regarded as thoroughgoing moral relativists. As Axel Schafer contends, for example, the professors constituting the German Historical School of economics “exhorted their students to study and understand economic life in the context of social customs, values, and institutions. They urged them to look at culture, rather than nature; at the environment, not genetics; at historical differences, not universal laws; and at ethical change, not moral absolutes.” Gustav Schmoller, arguably the most influential member of this school, Schafer continues, “maintained that ethics were embedded in historically developed institutions, and were neither based on fixed ideas intuited a priori, nor determined by nature.”Footnote ⁵³ The problem with characterizing the Progressives as moral relativists is that this is only partially correct, and proceeds from an emphasis upon one aspect of the progressive conception of history to the virtual exclusion of—or, at least, a confusion about—its ultimate implication. Specifically, the Progressives, like the German Historical School, did deny the existence of “moral absolutes” both in the sense of moral principles which are accessible or capable of being understood at all times and in all places, as well as in the sense of motives (or principles of action) which govern human behavior at all times and in all places, e.g., the “iron law” of self-interest or natural selection. This denial follows from the development of human reason from unconscious through increasingly conscious stages of awareness, on the one hand, and the development of an increasingly social will, on the other.Footnote ⁵⁴ As has been previously suggested, however, this developmental process does not represent the abandonment of nature in any sense as the source of human morality. Indeed, as Schafer himself somewhat concedes, for all their relativism, Schmoller (and the German Historical School more generally) also embraced a teleological conception of history and ethics:

To put the point more baldly, the Historical School, like its members' American progeny, believed that history is teleological precisely because they believed in a teleological conception of human nature. History is teleological because it is a developmental process ordered toward the realization of a definite end—i.e., man's highest nature which is innate in the form of unrealized or latent potential, capacities, or faculties. This process is progressive, moreover, because the specific capacities constituting this human potential are increasingly actualized, a process the Historical School believed was proceeding at different rates among the different races of the human family. For the Historical School the various races (and their civilizations) were not simply different, as a consistent relativist would maintain, but could be ranked hierarchically in terms of their relative development of reason, as well as their relative development of a social will. The reformers' confidence in the basic aim, content and hence direction of history, in short, provided a standard by which they evaluated and ranked the different branches of the human family—which is why, as Rodgers observes, “it was the mark of those who shaped the Atlantic progressive connection to see the world as a long line of runners pumping down a common track of progress, some in advance, others straggling in the rear.”Footnote ⁵⁶

IV. The Progressive Conception of Freedom, History and the Transformation of Public Policy

The Progressives' redefinition of freedom in idealistic or “positive” terms literally transformed the Founders' theory of government, and, thereby, the principles informing the formulation of public policy in America. As the Progressives themselves were very well aware, this change implied two significant changes in the substance of public policy.

First, despite superficial appearances to the contrary, the reformers' embrace of the idealistic conception of freedom transformed the object or purpose of government and hence its legitimate scope. “More than anything else,” as Michael McGerr rightly notes, “progressivism, ‘the great work of reconstruction,’ was the attempt to reconstruct the individual human being.”Footnote ⁵⁷ As we have seen, the reformers' disposition in this regard follows from their embrace of the idealistic conception of freedom and history. It follows, more precisely, from the Progressives' belief that as a race advances its members become increasingly conscious of the full scope of the duty they owe to others, including, ultimately, the duty to promote the moral growth of all humanity. The more “progressive” a race becomes, in other words, the more its members would recognize that all men have an “innate” or “natural” right to actualize their full potential, which government, no less than every other social institution, is obliged to promote.Footnote ⁵⁸ Although the Progressives continued to define the end of government in terms of individual freedom, then, their redefinition of its content—from negative to positive—prompted them to deny the natural rights doctrine of the Founding, and thus the idea that the power of government is limited, in principle, to securing such rights. In their view all of the decisions previously reserved to the individual by virtue of the Founders' natural rights doctrine were now subject to public disposal in whatever degree those in government believed was necessary: “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as Charles Merriam concludes in his 1903 survey of progressive thinking,

“[I]n general,” as Ely likewise writes, “there is no limit to the right of the State, the sovereign power, save its ability to do good.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In redefining freedom, accordingly, the Progressives not only denied that securing the natural rights of the individual, as the Founders' understood these rights, was a proper object of public policy, but also affirmed that the power of government could rightfully expand in whatever degree promotion of a wider and deeper realization of the “ethical ideal” was believed to require. As the agent of progress, in other words, government could now rightfully determine to what extent, if any, individuals should be allowed to make decisions in their own lives. This momentous change not only paved the way for an unprecedented level of public control, but in so doing, as Merriam suggests, rendered the time-honored American practice of questioning whether government could rightfully intrude upon any specific aspect of individual decision-making virtually obsolete.

Second, the Progressives' redefinition of freedom not only stripped government of its obligation to secure the natural right of individuals to govern themselves, but also put an end to the idea that men, as men, are entitled to the same or equal legal rights. For although the Progressives believed men had an equal right to develop, and were actually treading a common path of development, they were no less convinced that the different races (and classes therein) were advancing at markedly different rates. “The last few years have witnessed a great change of mind,” as Progressive political scientist Paul Reinsch observes in a 1905 article entitled “The Negro Race and European Civilization”:

The process of “social evolution” has produced “certain great types of humanity” so “essentially different in their characteristics,” Reinsch contends, that government cannot treat them “as if they were alike”—as if, that is, they possess the same or equal rights. In the “Declaration of Independence,” Ely likewise pointedly observes, “liberty is associated with equality. Natural equality is held to be a fundamental fact, and not by any means a goal to be reached slowly and painfully.” “[W]e,” in contrast,

For reasons not only of heredity, but also environment, the different races of the human family were developing at different or unequal rates. Thus, whereas the Founders “were inclined to regard men as substantially equal, and to suppose that all could live under the same economic and political institutions,” Ely concludes, “[i]t now becomes plain that this is a theory which works disaster, and is, indeed, cruel to those who are in the lower stages, resulting in their exploitation and degradation.”Footnote ⁶² To treat the different races equally by securing to their individual members the same legal rights, in short, was simply to foster the “degradation and exploitation” of those still in the “lower stages” of development.

Whereas the Founders emphasized the equal natural and legal rights of man, the Progressives, though recognizing a common, equal natural right to develop, nonetheless emphasized that the rights granted at law must vary in relation to the relative development of the group in question.Footnote ⁶³ The particular legal rights granted to any group—e.g., to what extent they should be allowed to make decisions in their own private matters, participate in public decision-making, or receive positive resources—should be determined, in part, in relation to how relatively developed the group was perceived to be—and why. “Race improvement,” Ely contends, “is a result of selection on the one hand, and of environment on the other.”Footnote ⁶⁴ By “selection,” of course, Ely meant the transmission of qualities—e.g. physical size, susceptibility to disease, extent of psychological abilities, etc.—from one generation to the next via sexual reproduction or “the blood.” “Race differences,” Progressive economist John R. Commons explains,

Although the Progressives widely believed humanity was endowed with the same basic capacities, and was, as a consequence, treading a common path of development, they did not typically believe nature had been equally generous to each race. In terms of the magnitude of their native “endowments,” in other words, the Progressives believed there were “superior” and “inferior” races, just as there were also superior and inferior individuals.Footnote ⁶⁶ “Society,” as Progressive sociologist (and feminist) Charlotte Perkins Gilman explains, “is an organic relation, it is not composed of constituents all alike and equally developed, but most diverse and unequal. It is quite possible to have in a society members far inferior to other members, but yet essential to the life of the whole.”Footnote ⁶⁷ For the Progressives, then, neither racial equality in the sense of an equal potential to develop, nor even racial equality at law, was an essential feature of a just or well-ordered society. Michael McGerr, thus, overstates only slightly in observing that “progressives, North as well as South, did not believe in any sort of equality between the races at the turn of the century.”Footnote ⁶⁸

While the Progressives believed that a race's “original endowment” functioned like a developmental ceiling, they also stressed the influence of various environmental factors. Those who seek to understand the “processes of racial disintegration,” Progressive economist Simon N. Patten writes, have begun to recognize “the force of Social Heredity, which has wrought from past conditions a psychological environment that exercises power side by side with its twin force, the material environment of to-day's soil, food and climate.”Footnote ⁶⁹ On the one side, then, the Progressives emphasized how a race's prospect for development depended, in part, upon its “material environment,” upon, that is, the relative lack of food, harshness of its climate, etc. To the extent to which its material environment frustrated mere subsistence, the potential for growth was significantly retarded: “The sharp and unjustifiable antithesis of spiritual and material in the current conception of moral action,” Dewey and Tufts write, “leads many-well-intentioned people to be callous and indifferent to the moral issues involved in physical and economic progress. Long hours of excessive physical labor, joined with unwholesome conditions of residence and work, restrict the growth of mental activity[.]”Footnote ⁷⁰ In order to release the poor from the “material” constraints upon their growth, accordingly, the Progressives advocated a host of economic reforms including factory legislation, minimum wage laws, maximum hours laws, public housing, and a comprehensive package of social insurance. Once such reforms were implemented, the reformers had high hopes concerning how the poor would respond: “When sanitation, good housing, and shorter hours of work have generated enough energy to release starving faculties,” Patten predicts, “poverty men will adjust themselves as capably as normal men and will also appreciate culture and morality.”Footnote ⁷¹

But the character of its material environment was not the only environmental factor that determined a race's prospect for development. No less important was a race's “social heredity.” By “social heredity,” the Progressives meant the transmission, from one generation to the next, of the acquired “customs, manners, and habits of thoughts” characterizing a particular civilization.Footnote ⁷² When discussing the low quality of a race, Commons cautions, we must be precise about the particular cause or character of its lowliness:

While Commons plainly believes there are inferior stocks, he nonetheless stresses that a race's lowliness may be mere “backwardness.” A race's apparent inferiority, in other words, might be due merely to the poor quality of its inherited culture or civilization rather than a scant “original endowment.” The “Chinaman,” he clarifies,

To the extent to which a race's low grade of development was believed to be attributable to the inheritance of a less developed civilization, of course, it was particularly open to social melioration or reform. Such reforms, importantly, could not seek merely to release the race from the material or poverty-related constraints upon its development. “The reasons why the Southern negro has not established an agricultural civilization,” Patten thus notes, “are psychological and in no sense economic.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In order to reform a backward “Social Heredity,” accordingly, policies designed to educate or inculcate the views and practices of a higher grade of civilization into more primitive peoples—policies seeking to effect a veritable “transfusion of civilization,” as Charlotte Perkins Gilman characterizes it—would be essential.Footnote ⁷⁵

V. “Transfusing Civilization”: Colonialism, Disfranchisement and Segregation

Just how dramatically the Progressives' embrace of the idealistic conception of freedom reconstituted the character of the relationship between the individual and his government can most clearly be seen in the specific policies the Progressives advocated—in many cases successfully—for those races and individuals they deemed least developed. Why is this? It is true, on the one hand, that the principles informing the Progressives' approach to the governance of these groups are the same as those informing their approach to the governance of all Americans. For the Progressives, as we have seen, government, as the agent of progress, is obliged to promote the fullest possible development of all. On the other hand, however, the Progressives also clearly believed that some groups were more advanced than others. Whereas those deemed more advanced could be allowed to exercise a higher measure of control over their own most immediate concerns, as well as public decision-making, those groups lagging furthest behind could not. Such groups faced a particularly steep developmental ascent, and were thus especially in need of the government's control and “tutelage.” While the Progressives' approach to the governance of the least developed groups thus differs only in degree, and not in kind, from their approach to the governance of all Americans, their treatment of the former casts the paternal character of their conception of government in an especially stark or clear light.

In foreign policy, the Progressives' embrace of the idealistic conception of freedom, and the conception of right and duty following from it, necessitated a frankly “colonial” or “imperialistic” policy. America, Merriam stresses, “must have a colonial policy.”

As a predominately Anglo-Saxon nation, the United States was part of the most advanced branch of humanity, the Germanic or “Teutonic” race. As such, it not only had a “right and privilege” to promote “the political civilization of mankind,” this was its special “mission and duty, the very highest obligation incumbent on the Teutonic races[.]” In carrying this duty out, moreover, the United States was wholly justified in interfering in the affairs of other nations, regardless of whether they posed a threat to America. “[I]nterference with the affairs of states not wholly barbaric, but nevertheless incapable of effecting political organization for themselves,” Merriam continues,” is fully justified. Jurisdiction may be assumed over such a state, and political civilization worked out for those who are unable to accomplish this unaided.”Footnote ⁷⁶

These principles, as Merriam himself observes, found no mere academic expression but were shared and expressed by leading Progressive politicians, including Theodore Roosevelt, Albert Beveridge, and Henry Cabot Lodge, in the aftermath of the Spanish-American war.Footnote ⁷⁷ In a speech delivered in the Senate in 1900, for example, Senator Beveridge—the future keynote speaker at the Progressive Party Convention of 1912—argued that American withdrawal from the Philippines, a Spanish colony ceded to American control by the Treaty of Paris, would be to “renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world.” Americans, he urged, should not be squeamish about ruling the Filipinos without their consent, about forcing them, that is, to live as the United States directs:

“Self-government,” the right, that is, to consent to one's government, is not the right of men as men, but, rather, the fruit of long development—“the degree which crowns the graduate of liberty[.]” As such, the U.S. cannot bestow it upon “liberty's infant class,” upon races like the Filipinos who, by virtue of “blood” and culture (e.g., “Spanish example”), have yet to master even the mere “alphabet of freedom.”

President Roosevelt shared Beveridge's position in this regard. In Roosevelt's view, as David Burton explains, “[h]uman progress required the more politically sophisticated race to rule people unable to govern themselves until they had sufficiently matured.” In the case of the Philippines, then, “[t]he best interests of the Filipinos required a period of preparation for self-government under American tutelage.” “In the Philippine Islands,” as Roosevelt explained in a letter to Andrew Carnegie, “we are training a people in the difficult art of self-government … We are doing this because we have acted in a spirit of genuine disinterestedness, of genuine and single-minded purpose to the benefit of the islanders.”Footnote ⁷⁹ Just as parents must rule their children for their own good until they mature, so the United States must rule the Filipinos, though the period of its minority would be far less definite: “We ourselves,” Roosevelt wrote in a letter to Joseph G. Cannon, “must be the judges as to when they become ‘fit’ and when it would be ‘prudent’ to approve of independence.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In subjecting the Filipinos, the United States was simply implementing the moral obligation, and explicitly paternal means, it had already begun implementing at home, particularly in the South. In assuming “the White Man's Burden” in the Philippines, as C. Vann Woodward thus observes, American foreign policy came to embody “many Southern attitudes on the subject of race.”

As the Boston Evening Transcript implies, the Republican Party's embrace of “the White Man's Burden,” and hence “Southern race policy,” marked an important reversal in the party's principles. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the party of Lincoln had taken important steps toward implementing “the most perfect civil and political equality,” as Frederick Douglass put it, by adding the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, thereby respectively outlawing “slavery or involuntary servitude,” promising the “equal protection of the laws” to all “person[s],” and barring the states from denying or abridging the “right of citizens … to vote … on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”Footnote ⁸² These substantial legal gains to blacks proved, of course, to be short-lived, but not as short-lived as is commonly thought. “The impression often left by cursory histories of the subject,” Woodward complains, “is that Negro disfranchisement followed quickly if not immediately upon the overthrow of Reconstruction,” upon, that is, the withdrawal of the federal government from southern governance in 1877. Although “Negroes were often coerced, defrauded, or intimidated” in this period, he allows, they nonetheless “continued to vote in large numbers in most parts of the South for more than two decades after Reconstruction.” “Not only did Negroes continue to vote after Reconstruction,” he adds, “they continued to hold office as well.”Footnote ⁸³

Between 1890 and the beginning of World War I, however, state law became sharply more racial in character, actually rolling back previous gains and elaborating a host of new restrictions. “The political nadir of American Negroes,” as I.A. Newby likewise observes,

The imposition of property qualifications, literacy tests, and/or poll taxes ultimately prevented most blacks and, no less deliberately, more than a few poor whites from voting.Footnote ⁸⁵ “The effectiveness of disfranchisement,” Woodward writes, “is suggested by a comparison of the number of registered Negro voters in Louisiana in 1896, when there were 130,334 and in 1904, when there were 1,342.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The disfranchisement of blacks was accompanied, he adds, by “the mushroom growth of discriminatory and segregation laws,” intrusively dictating a thoroughgoing separation of the races in transportation, the workplace, hospitals, mental and penal institutions, recreational facilities, voluntary associations, etc. Two states even went so far as to forbid the members of fraternal societies from addressing fellow members of another race as brother.Footnote ⁸⁷

The disfranchisement of blacks and growth of segregation was no mere resurgence of indigenous prejudice. Although it is the case, as was suggested earlier, that the “anti-Negro attitudes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” had their root in “the refurbished ideas of antebellum slavocrats,” Newby notes, “after 1875 were added the ideas and myths of European science and race theory, and the natural and social sciences which blossomed between 1875 and 1925 provided the framework within which a new ‘science of race’ matured.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The rise of Jim Crow, in other words, was not only catalyzed, in important part, by Progressive academics, but was also explicitly championed by Southern Progressives. “The omission of the South from the annals of the progressive movement,” Woodward observes,

Southern Progressives racked up “spectacular gains” against bosses and their machines, corporations and railroads, as well as in “humanitarian legislation for miners, factory workers, child labor, and the consumer.” These successes, Woodward continues, “coincided paradoxically with the crest of the wave of racism.” But this was no real coincidence, as Woodward subsequently concedes, for the leaders of both movements “were often identical.” “In fact,” he declares, “the typical progressive reformer rode to power in the South on a disfranchising or white-supremacy movement.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Progressive politicians, like Progressive academics (many of whom played a leading role in the drive for labor legislation and social insurance on the national level), widely believed the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment had been a serious mistake. One implication of the fact that America, though a predominately Anglo-Saxon nation, was nonetheless a nation of mixed races, Merriam explains in his 1903 survey of progressive thinking, was that “the Teutonic race can never regard the exercise of political power as a right of man, but it must always be their policy to condition the exercise of political rights on the possession of political capacity.”Footnote ⁹⁰ And yet this was precisely what the Fifteenth Amendment failed to do. “[B]y the cataclysm of a war in which [the “Negro” race] took no part,” Commons complains,

The problem with the Fifteenth Amendment was that it was based on “a theory of abstract equality and [the] inalienable rights of man.” To confer rights upon men as men, rather than conditioning them upon the proven capacity to engage in self-government, the fruit of long development, was mere “dogmatism.” The Fifteenth Amendment failed

The legal right to vote, Commons concludes, should not be extended to blacks until such time as they, as individuals, develop sufficient “intelligence, self-control, and capacity for cooperation,” which fitness could best be determined through “an honest educational test,” that is, a literacy test.Footnote ⁹¹

From the Progressives' standpoint, though blacks and other “backward” races might not yet merit the right to consent, they must nonetheless be ruled with a view to preparing them for such participation. “The great lesson already learned,” Commons continues, “is that we must ‘begin over again’ the preparation of the negro for citizenship. This time the work will begin at the bottom by educating the negro for the ballot, instead of beginning at the top by giving him the ballot before he knows what it should do for him.”Footnote ⁹² The Progressives thus advocated various reforms designed, in important part, to educate blacks, including segregation. “Perhaps the best known [southern] reformer,” McGerr writes, was “Edgar Gardner Murphy.”Footnote ⁹³ In his 1904 book, Problems of the Present South, Murphy—whom Newby characterizes as “one of the most conscientious and sincere friends of the Negro in the South”—argues that in the years following the Civil War “the South was right” to conclude

The “policy of the South in reference to the negro,” he emphasizes, represents no abdication of moral responsibility, but, rather, a “deeper acceptance of obligation,” the outgrowth of that “spirit of … tender and generous paternalism” which had developed under slavery. “There is a distinct assumption of the negro's inferiority,” Murphy concedes, “but there is also a distinct assumption of the negro's improvability. It is upon the basis of this double assumption that the South finds its obligation.”Footnote ⁹⁴ From this point of view, segregation would not only better protect blacks—that “child-race”—from white violence, but would also throw blacks back upon their own resources to provide for themselves, thereby forcing them to develop economically. “The very process which may have seemed to some like a policy of oppression,” Murphy concludes, “has in fact resulted in a process of development.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Segregation, as implemented, was relatively mild compared to what some Progressives advocated. In a 1908 article entitled “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” for example, Progressive sociologist (and feminist) Charlotte Perkins Gilman proposes forcing certain blacks to live and work in quasi-military labor camps. “The problem,” she explains, “is this:”

Gilman's solution to the problem of “transfusi[ng] … civilization,” was to compel all blacks beneath “a certain grade of citizenship,” i.e., all those who were not “decent, self-supporting, [and] progressive,” to live and work in labor camps until such time that they proved themselves worthy of acting under their own direction. In these camps, blacks, whose very presence “in many ways retards the progress of Race A,” would be separated from whites but also forced to labor productively for themselves. In so doing they would be taught how best to provide for themselves, thereby developing economically, and their children would be educated in a progressive manner. “This proposed organization,” Gilman feels obliged to clarify, “is not enslavement, but enlistment.”