Did the Progressives’ institutional innovations constitute progress? Certainly not, according to the thinkers included in Lonce H. Bailey and Jerome M. Mileur’s In Defense of the Founders Republic. A collection of 10 essays, this edited volume presents critiques of Progressive reforms, all of which revolve around the claim that in attempting to establish direct democracy, Progressives overturned the Founders’ vision of an American republic. According to Bailey and Mileur, the Progressives’ success eclipsed their critics’ alternatives, and so recovering these debates holds historical value. Furthermore, the authors suggest that Progressive reforms are responsible for many ills of contemporary American politics, from demagoguery to plutocracy, so that it is in our best interest to reconsider the political order proposed by critics of the Progressives (p. 208). Framing contemporary challenges in terms of ideological struggles from the Progressive era highlights how these debates marked a key turning point in the development of American democracy.

An essay by Jeffrey Leigh Sedgwick grounds the volume’s common interpretation of the “First Founding,” which presents Madison’s institutional designs as the basis for the “Founders Republic.” Sedgwick argues that Madison proposed a set of institutions necessary for common life, given that the inherent flaws of human nature lead to conflict and instability (p. 22). Six essays follow, each focusing on a single critic of the Progressives’ “so-called direct-democracy reforms,” which threatened Madison’s vision by attempting to “sweep [it] aside in the name of ‘Progress’” (pp. 7, 32). Articulating in turn the critiques of Nicholas Murray Butler, Henry Jones Ford, William Howard Taft, Joseph G. Cannon, Elihu Root, and Eugene V. Debs shows that the critics did support a positive vision of American democracy. Elements of this vision, derived from a view of political change guided by “natural evolution” rather than rash reform (p. 75), included a judiciary independent of popular influence (Root), strong political parties (Ford), and a general goal of mediating the relationship between voters and representatives. Mileur and Bailey contribute a chapter on the historical examples of Wisconsin and Oregon, where battles over the direct primary, as well as initiative and referendum, illustrate how reformers and critics debated one another at the state level. Introductory and concluding chapters put the essays in context and allow the authors to argue that critics of the Progressives articulated a political vision worth reviving.

The editors have succeeded in providing compelling material for long-standing questions in political science, one of which concerns the tension between partisanship and ideals. Douglas B. Harris’s chapter on Cannon, for instance, provides detailed evidence of what Cannon believed, what he opposed, and what he did, thereby painting the nuanced portrait necessary for understanding this complex thinker. Harris points to “the conceptual division” within the Republican Party and articulates how Cannon gave priority to ideals over partisanship, believing that “it is the duty of Congress to deliberate and to act with caution when a great question is involved, and not to yield to any sudden hysterical demand” (pp. 121, 117). Cannon’s support for a politics where ideals guide partisanship adds a twist to Bailey and Mileur’s characterization of critics as believing that “[a]mbition, not idealism, ruled Man’s behavior, and popular government, if it were to preserve liberty and maintain order, had to protect the people from their baser instincts” (p. 216). If Cannon gave priority to ideals over partisanship, should he be excluded from the group of critics presented in the volume, or were the critics’ ideals of a different kind from those of Progressives?

Returning to debates surrounding Progressive reforms can be refreshing by forcing us to adjust our expectations for democracy, and the best sections of In Defense of the Founders Republic do this by allowing the critics to speak in their own words. In general, however, the essays lack sufficient textual citations necessary for conveying the complexity of the debates. In discussing the presidency, for instance, Mileur and Bailey quote critic Charles M. Hollingsworth’s denunciation of “pseudo-democratic reforms:” “what the ‘progressive’ reform movement really does is to provide ways and means by which a majority of the electorate may commission one man … with plenary, unrestricted powers” (p. 199). Hollingsworth is supposed to belong to the same group of thinkers as Ford, who believed that Jackson and Lincoln were model presidents. Bailey and Mileur’s essay on Ford takes steps to reconcile what appear to be quite contradictory views by articulating Ford’s belief that presidents are obligated to their party, rather than popular opinion in general (p. 77). However, given Jackson’s and Lincoln’s aggressive leadership, it remains unclear how such a view could be consistent with Madison’s fear of faction. The reader is led to believe that the critics must have advocated political positions of fine nuance, but without sufficient citations, nuance presents as muddle.

More citations could also help account for why Debs is included in this group of critics. Mileur acknowledges that Debs’s Socialist Party campaign for president in 1912 included reforms threatening the Founders Republic far beyond Progressives’ proposals, but writes that Debs “may have thought the more sweeping institutional reforms of government too radical for his audience of working men, often rural and small town residents whom he best understood from his youth in Terre Haute and whose patriotism and love of country might have made any talk about changing the Constitution sound more threatening than reformist” (pp. 167–68). This is an intriguing speculation, but taking it seriously requires, at the very least, articulating what “love of country” meant in this context, namely, its relation to the proliferation of radical institutional experiments in economic cooperation native to areas like Terre Haute (Marc Schneiberg, “What’s on the Path? Path Dependence, Organizational Diversity and the Problem of Institutional Change in the US economy, 1900–1950,” Socio-Economic Review 5 [2007]: 47–80). Adding to our understanding of the Progressive era requires a high degree of nuance because the reforms, and the ideas behind them, were diverse and complex. Bailey and Mileur, unfortunately, follow the critics’ view that there are “two sides to every public question” (p. 214). Decades of research have demonstrated that during the Progressive era at least, there were many more. (See, for instance, Gerald Berk, Alternative Tracks, 1994; Victoria Hattam, Labor Visions and State Power: The Origins of Business Unionism in the United States, 1993; Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals, 1997.)

The editors are correct that we live in a time ripe for political reform. Their suggestion that we reconsider political thinkers who opposed reform is thus an odd one, especially because that opposition does not appear particularly coherent. This could be due to the selection of thinkers represented, or it could be due to the difficulty of justifying an institutional design on the grounds that it is consistent with “universal truths” (Chapter 3) while also providing “the ‘fuel’ of combat” (p. 77). Future research could build on this volume by connecting the critics’ partisan goals to their political thought. In the meantime, it is in our interest to ask who benefits by saying “Wait.”