Our Divided Political Heart (34 page)

“
There is
,” Wilson insisted, “a point of bigness—as every businessman in this country knows, though some will not admit it . . . where you pass the point of efficiency and get to the point of clumsiness and unwieldiness.” And in words that would have been quite at home at an anti–Wall Street occupation, Wilson warned that the country was nearing “
the time when the combined power of high finance
would be greater than the power of government.”

Yet both Roosevelt and Wilson recognized this as a problem, even if they proposed different solutions. Both spoke to widespread anger at the captains of industry and finance, as did the Socialist candidate, Eugene V. Debs. Debs won 6 percent of the vote, the high tide of electoral Socialism in the United States in an era when Socialists ran major cities and won election to state legislatures and to Congress.

By contrast, President William Howard Taft—his background was moderately progressive, but he was moving toward a genial but firm conservatism—outlined the classic laissez-faire response that is also familiar in our day. “
A National Government cannot create good times
,” declared the only Republican nominee in history to run third in a presidential election. “It cannot make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, or the crops to grow, but it can, by pursuing a meddlesome policy, attempting to change economic conditions, and frightening the investment of capital, prevent a prosperity and a revival of business which might otherwise have taken place.” John Milton Cooper, Wilson’s biographer, observed that Taft’s declaration
“
marked an early step toward the ideological transformation
of the Republican Party during the rest of the twentieth century.”

In rejecting unregulated markets and unchecked individualism, both Wilson and Roosevelt were arguing within the framework of the old republican tradition familiar to our founders. As Michael Sandel observed, Wilson and Roosevelt—along with their intellectual guides Brandeis and Croly—“
agreed despite their differences that economic and political institutions
should be assessed for their tendency to promote or erode the moral qualities self-government requires. Like Jefferson before them, they worried about the sort of citizens the economic arrangements of their day were likely to produce. They argued, in different ways, for a political economy of citizenship.”

This is not how the conservatives of our day view the Progressives. Contemporary critics highlight the Progressives’ support for a strong central government and their fascination with applying scientific expertise to the solution of social problems. Voices on the left have sometimes joined with those on the right in arguing that many Progressives replaced faith in democracy with a confidence in rational, scientific management. This, in turn, led to a preference for government by experts and the centralization of authority. The conservative writer Chester Finn argued in the 1990s that Progressivism created a “
cult of governmentalism
” that “made us lazy and dependent while taking vast sums out of our pockets.” From a different perspective, the historian Michael McGerr saw Croly’s “
preoccupation with strong government, strong leaders and strong nationalism
” as making “explicit what was implicit in middle-class culture at the turn of the century: a subtle but significant loss of faith in traditional democratic notions.”

There is something to this criticism. Some Progressives
did
harbor an ambivalence about democracy, and some progressive reforms—aimed in theory at reducing electoral fraud—impeded access to the ballot box. Many southern progressives imbibed their region’s reactionary attitudes toward race. TR’s approach to race was ambivalent, and Wilson’s record in office was shameful and the source of bitter disappointment to W. E. B. Du Bois, the author, intellectual, and cofounder of the NAACP, who had supported Wilson in 1912. It took decades for many progressives to free themselves from a racism that engulfed the country for decades after the end of Reconstruction.

Yet in their advocacy of initiative, referendum, and recall as well as the direct election of United States senators, the Progressives could also be seen as radical democrats. Here the Populist influence was clear. Theodore Roosevelt went further still, supporting democratic ways of overturning conservative judicial rulings. But, again, there was an ambivalence: many of the Progressives were also mistrustful of urban working-class voters, particularly immigrants, who lent their ballots to political machines. The newcomers were in turn skeptical of—or even hostile to—the efforts of largely Protestant social workers who tried to “improve” them by pushing them away from strong drink and toward Protestant conceptions of morality and faith. Cultural barriers between Progressives and significant parts of the working class long predated the culture wars of the 1960s.

Nonetheless, it is misleading to cast the Progressives as pure centralizers indifferent to local government, local community, and the need to strengthen civic and social institutions outside government. Their record belies this. Progressives often achieved their reforms through local and state institutions, partly because they could not always succeed at the federal level, and also because they were mindful that hostile courts would find it easier to undo their work if they relied on federal power alone. Their campaign to outlaw or regulate child labor began in the states—non-southern states, it needs to be said—before taking hold at the national level. Twenty-five states had passed such laws by 1901,
Eisenach notes, while twenty-two states
acted between 1903 and 1908 to make it illegal for corporations to contribute to political campaigns.

If the Progressives were hyper-centralizers, why did they pay so much attention to the reform of local governments? As Eisenach observed, Progressives (and in some cases the Socialists who did quite well at the local political level in those years) wrote new municipal charters for cities they controlled. They “
formed their own municipal corporations to supply transportation
, water, gas and electricity,” and often created “nonpartisan commissions to regulate these industries.” Progressive engagement with the idea of community was not simply national and abstract. It was also local and concrete.

The Progressive spirit pushed against pure individualism in another way, creating a vast array of civil society institutions devoted to building
social capital outside (or alongside) both government and the marketplace. Community and institution building was a passion for the overlapping Populist and Progressive moments. Robert Putnam offered a catalogue of the era’s organizational achievements:

If you look at the dates at which they were created
, almost all of the major civic institutions of the United States today—the Red Cross, the YWCA, the Boy Scouts, the NAACP, the Urban League, many labor unions, the Sons of Italy, the Sons of Norway, parent-teacher associations, the Rotary Club, the Sierra Club, the Knights of Columbus and many others—almost all of them were formed between 1880 and 1910, an astonishingly concentrated period. We had a social capital deficit as a country created by great technological and economic change, and at that point we could have said, “Whoa, wait a minute, stop! Everybody back to the farm. It was much nicer there. We knew everybody.”

For most Americans in the Progressive Era, the farm was becoming less and less of an option, so the men and women of the time built organizations instead, many of them linked to the reform efforts Progressives, Socialists, and Populists were pursuing in the political sphere. In his book about New York City Progressives,
Civic Engagement
,
John Louis Recchiuti points to the work of
the NAACP, the National Urban League, the American Association for Labor Legislation, the National Consumers League, the National Child Labor Committee, and grassroots efforts social reformers undertook in the settlement houses. These organizational initiatives were as much a part of the Progressive surge as were the campaigns of TR and Wilson. For the Progressives, there was no sharp separation between the local and national, between charitable work and political work. Progressives such as Jane Addams were nudged toward political action when they concluded that one-on-one social work was insufficient to alleviate the dire conditions that existed in the neighborhoods where they worked. The individual, the social, and the political were bound together. Community building at the local level and at the national level went hand in hand; they were not opposed to each other and did not undermine each other.

This was the conclusion the sociologist Theda Skocpol reached in her research, cited in
Chapter 5
. “
Early twentieth-century local, state, and national policies
to help mothers and children were championed by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the National Congress of Mothers (later the PTA), and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs—groups that themselves expanded in part because of encouragement by government,” she wrote. “State and federal efforts to support farmers and farm families have been championed and administered by associations such as the Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation, the latter of which grew into a nationwide federation in conjunction with New Deal farm programs.”

Indeed, later on, one of the most successful programs of the FDR era was the product of exactly this sort of interaction between the federal government and an organization that was founded in the waning years of the Progressive Era and had built deep local roots. “
The GI Bill of 1944 never would have taken the inclusive shape
it did, opening up American higher education to hundreds of thousands of less privileged men,” Skocpol wrote, “had not the American Legion taken the lead in writing generous legislation and encouraging public and congressional support for it. In turn, the GI Bill aided the postwar expansion of the American Legion.”

What these efforts had in common was the reassertion of the idea of community at all levels—federal and state, county and city, small town and neighborhood. Progressives understood that in a nation with both strong local traditions and an increasingly powerful national economic market, local groups could not always thrive on their own in the face of the centralizing (and, one might add, then and now, globalizing) forces of the marketplace. It is not simply that rapid economic change can ravage local communities. Even in flourishing areas, both advocates of the unregulated market and supporters of holding the market to social standards understood the need for national allies.

The courts were inevitably enlisted in these battles. As we saw earlier, there were no courts more “activist” than those of the Gilded Age, and they freely imposed themselves against both state and national measures to regulate the marketplace in goods and labor. In the best recent account of the transformative 1912 election, the political scientist Sidney Milkis
stresses the importance of Theodore Roosevelt’s crusade against court decisions restricting the ability of state and federal governments to create rules for corporate behavior. Roosevelt accused conservative jurists of using the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause as if “
property rights, to the exclusion of human rights
, had a first mortgage on the Constitution.” To Taft’s consternation, TR sympathized with efforts to allow the democratic will to take precedence over judicial rulings. Roosevelt argued that “when a State court cast aside as unconstitutional a law passed by the legislature for the general welfare,” the issue of the law’s validity should “
be submitted for final determination
to a vote of the people, taken after due time for consideration.”

Roosevelt’s campaign to weaken judicial review failed, but the election of judges was a widespread practice, and voters did have an impact on jurisprudence below the federal level. It is a paradox of our time that as the courts sweep away the very campaign finance rules Roosevelt promoted to limit the power of big businesses and its lobbies, the election of judges has become an increasingly problematic feature of our democracy. But the larger point is that Roosevelt’s battle with intrusive conservative courts—the struggle his cousin FDR took up again in the 1930s, with mixed results—should remind us that the confrontation between community-minded reformers and a jurisprudence based on radical forms of individualism has been a staple of our politics for more than a century.

Progressivism, as Milkis insisted, was “
not a radical rejection of the American tradition
. Rather, it marked an important effort to reconcile the country’s celebration of individualism and reformers’ recognition of the need to strengthen the national government.” It was something else as well. “
The most exalted purpose of the insurgency
that crested in 1912,” Milkis wrote, “was to transform the right-based culture that had long shaped American life into a society awakened by sentiments of duty and obligation.”

Progressivism and Populism represented both innovation and restoration. The Progressives’ creativity was impressive, as was their willingness to alter long-standing constitutional arrangements. In constitutional terms, the Progressives were certainly more audacious than today’s liberals are, speaking critically (as Wilson and Beard did) of the Constitution’s
shortcomings and amending it to accommodate new circumstances. A short list of Progressive achievements would include the income tax, women’s suffrage, the direct election of senators, stepped-up anti-trust enforcement, the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, the regulation of food and drugs, the creation of the Federal Trade Commission, the establishment of the Department of Labor, the creation of the U.S. Forest Service, and the preservation of more than 170 million acres of land through a vast expansion of the national parks system.

All this entailed substantial growth in the federal government, but far from being interlopers who broke with the nation’s “small government” history, the Progressives are more appropriately seen as
restoring
a longer tradition of government interaction with the marketplace. They tempered market values with republican and civic values, protected individual rights against concentrations of private power, and sought to harmonize those rights with the interests of the community. The Gilded Age had departed from this tradition, and the Progressives brought it back, looking, as Croly did, to the models of Hamilton and Lincoln.