A Fierce Discontent: The Rise And Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920, by Michael McGerr. Free Press, 2003, 395 pages

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Curse of the Progressives

by Timothy Sandefur

We live today in the world the progressives made. The administrative state they built has received vast transfusions of funds by crusading politicians from Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, but the creature itself is a product of what Michael McGerr calls the "stunningly broad agenda" of the progressive age. "A Fierce Discontent" collects numerous examples of that agenda: from laws regulating wages and prices, to censorship, land-use planning, prohibition, and even segregation. The progressives, McGerr writes, "wanted not only to use the state to regulate the economy; strikingly, they wanted nothing less than to transform other Americans, to remake the nation's feuding, polyglot population in their own middle-class image."

Unfortunately, although McGerr brings together a wealth of sometimes shocking material showing how profoundly anti-individualist the progressives were, he somehow fails to arrive at a solid definition of the term. This undermines his larger theses. According to McGerr, progressivism, a radical and thorough attempt "to reconstruct the individual human being" and to "reshape values and behavior," was led primarily by the middle class, which sought to impose its values on the entire society. "More inclined to socialism than they liked to admit," writes McGerr, progressives "were radical in their conviction that other social classes must be transformed" so as to conform to a middle-class vision of the proper order.

There are two primary problems with this interpretation. It does not tell us what that "proper order" was, and it is inconsistent with the elitism of the progressives themselves. Unlike populism — the movement that foreshadowed the progressive age — progressivism was led primarily by intellectuals; by people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Herbert Croly, Woodrow Wilson, and many other names that would re-emerge in Franklin Roosevelt's "Brain Trust." While it is easy to describe the "values" of progressives as middle class, a more precise definition would include its overriding hostility to individualism and the dynamic society that it created. Progressivism was a technocratic movement that sought to organize progress along tracks that the intelligentsia thought were the right ones.

This would require a genuine revolution of American society. Inequalities of wealth or condition were the result, said socialists, of a society based on corrupt notions of justice inherited by capitalists. Marx wrote that:

"[I]n the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will. . . . The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. . . . It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

In other words, transactions between actors in society are so influenced by mores or other social influences that the law inevitably institutionalizes inequalities. When trans-actions are later made according to these laws, the transactions are tainted by this inequality, and these become precedents for further transactions, Êad infinitum.

Thus even a consensual transaction today cannot be said to reflect an objective, nonpolitical meeting of the minds between buyers and sellers, because it is permeated by social influences which "determine" the parties' "consciousness." The mores of individualism, of working for what one gets and then being free to keep it, were among these influences, and to eradicate them meant transforming morality as well as politics.

For instance, McGerr notes that the progressivist Walter Rauschenbusch "emphasized the fundamental importance of transforming individual human beings." He quotes Rauschenbusch: "The greatest contribution which any man can make to the social movement is the contribution of a regenerated personality. . . . Such a man will in some measure incarnate the principles of a higher social order in his attitude to all questions and in all his relations to man, and will be a wellspring of regenerating influences."

In 1900, such a far-reaching assault on individualism was much more radical than today. Its leaders, therefore, advertised their campaign in terms their target audience would accept: moral uplift; protecting the weak; helping the poor; serving your fellow man. This packaging attracted the middle-class audience, raised on Victorian moralism; Mencken said that Woodrow Wilson spoke to voters in "vague and comforting words — words cast into phrases made familiar by the whooping for their customary political and ecclesiastical rabble-rousers. . . . " The union of government and altruism — what came to be called the "Social Gospel" — was born. This explains the apparently middle-class origins of progressivism. But the product itself was — as with all socialist movements — built by elites and sold to the people, not the other way around. Despite their frequent invocation of democracy, the progressives were quite un-democratic; their state would be a democracy programmed and operated by experts. John Dewey, for instance, insisted that "the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy," but he defined democracy as "that form of social organization, extending to all the areas and ways of living, in which the powers of individuals shall . . . be fed, sustained and directed." Directed by whom? By Dewey, of course.

Progressivism transformed democracy from rule by the people into rule by a government elite in the name of the people. As McGerr writes, "In 1908, the Democratic platform demanded, 'Shall the People Rule . . . ?' It was a deceptively simple question. Who were 'the people' . . . ? It was not obvious at all." Indeed, "the people," as used by collectivists, has always meant the rulers, who claim that being controlled by the state is in "the people's" interest, whether they like it or not. Even the socialist historian Eric Foner criticizes the progressives for being overly confident "that the state could be counted upon to act as a disinterested arbiter of the nation's social and economic purposes." But when their bureaucracy failed to reach this unreachable star, the progressives' only solution was to further insulate the bureaucracy from public influence. The result of this was a state that was less democratic, not more. As their pursuit of "rational," disinterested economic planning increased, so too did the exclusion of the voices of the people, who seemed always, to the progressives, to be tainted with "partisan" interests.

Consider also the many exclusionary programs created by the progressives — programs which show that not everybody counted as "the people," notwithstanding the progressives' "pull-together" rhetoric. When Theodore Roosevelt said he had to "stop the influx of cheap labor, and the resulting competition which gives rise to so much bitterness in American industrial life," he was explicitly excluding a vast group of the world's population from achieving the prosperity and "more abundant life" that the progressives invoked as their aim. In this case, organized labor was "the people," not the Chinese immigrants.

Legal segregation was another progressive "solution." The late 19th century saw a rash of lynching throughout the nation — in some years, more than one every other day. "The solution," McGerr writes, "was a dramatic intensification and codification of segregation. . . . Through differing mixtures of law and custom, every Southern town, city, county, and state tried to achieve two goals: first, to send an unmistakable message of racial inequality that would intimidate blacks and reassure whites: second, to deprive blacks of so much economic and political opportunity that they could never threaten white power."

In short, the progressives failed to solve the problem they created, which Richard Hofstadter describes as "whether it is possible in modern society to find satisfactory ways of realizing the ideal of popular government without becoming dependent to an unhealthy degree upon those who have the means to influence the popular mind." They failed because this task is impossible — and because whose influence is "unhealthy" depends entirely on whom you ask. Like all government intervention, progressive "solutions" were subject to the public-choice effect. As government becomes more powerful, as it redistributes more resources to favored groups, the incentives for lobbying increase. Government power then falls into the hands, not of the most deserving, but of the most politically adept. Since the 1900s, political innovations intended to put "the people" in charge have sooner or later been taken over by political elites. And every year's crop of candidates speechifies that this time, they really will eliminate the "special interests," and empower "the people" to rule through a new menu of agencies and bureaus.

But progressives had also destroyed their only hope of rescue from government-by-faction when they attacked the concept of natural justice. Progressive political theory laughed at the idea that human beings were naturally free, or that political principles preceded the state. Instead, since "social being determines consciousness," justice could be chosen a priori and imposed by government: a society was "unjust" if it differed from some preconceived idea of the "good society." And without any pre-political standard of justice, those shaping society (on behalf of "the people") were free to choose any standard they wished, and once written into law, it became, ipso facto, justice. The progressives' moral relativism gave the illusion of democratic values because of its majoritarian style. But in fact, it set the standard of justice as The Rule of The Stronger, whoever that rulemaker might be. This is how progressives justified violating individual rights in the name of "democracy," even though previous generations had understood that democracy could never legitimately violate individual rights. For Justice Holmes, it was a oxymoron to say that a law was unjust — it was "like shaking one's fist at the sky," because "the U.S. is not subject to some mystic overlaw that it is bound to obey." But without a pre-political standard of right and wrong, how could progressives complain when government was taken over by "special interests"? Moral relativism undermined their appeals to democracy, therefore, even as it enshrined the absolute rule of the majority.

Imposing preconceived standards of justice on society meant a lot of cutting and stretching, and thus progressives saw World War I as "a special opportunity for reform, a chance to promote their agenda at point after point."

"In particular, the need to raise an army, stimulate the production of food and war materials, and ensure loyalty would require an activist state. 'Laissez-faire is dead,' declared a reformer. 'Long live social control. . . . ' The activist state would surely cripple the progressives' old enemy, individualism. 'War necessitates organization, system, routine, and discipline,' observed the journalist Frederick Lewis Allen. 'We shall have to give up much of our economic freedom. . . . We shall have to lay by our good-natured individualism and march in step. . . .' Full of "social possibilities,' the war, John Dewey suggested, would constrain 'the individualistic tradition' and teach 'the supremacy of public need over private possessions."

Nothing quite that serious came from the progressive era. But it made serious inroads on the political and moral independence of Americans. The notions that government should push society into a more "just" form; that disinterested "experts" could run society the "right" way, without being swayed into evil by the wiles of lobbyists; that it is "cynical" or "nihilistic" to argue that government should confine itself to more mundane tasks; that natural justice or natural rights are superstitions; that the personality is the result of environment — all of these have remained. More subtle forms of progressive control have remained also: the state monopoly on education, for example. Henry Adams said that "all state education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the direction supposed to be most effective for state purposes." Dewey and other progressives openly embraced this justification, and when educrats today criticize homeschoolers for failing to "socialize" their kids, they are simply reverting to the language of their progressive forebears. Even rituals like the Pledge of Allegiance — a progressive invention for inculcating national obedience — remain today, and are defended even by conservatives otherwise hostile to the progressive movement.

These all indicate the final failure of McGerr's otherwise very interesting book: he imagines that the progressive era is over. The election of Calvin Coolidge, on an explicitly individualistic platform, ended the progressive dream, writes McGerr. "Reformers," he says, "had to sit back and watch the Republican administrations of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover pursue a politics of individualism and laissez-faire." Yet he admits that "the nation would not abandon progressivism and its ideas completely," and that Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and other presidents pursued progressive goals and employed progressive methods. What could possibly distinguish the New Deal or the Great Society from progressivism? For McGerr, the difference is that while the latter:

"knew, better than the old progressives, how much the people were eager for Washington to help ensure their prosperity . . . [they also] realized that most Americans wanted to be left free to pursue pleasure, to indulge in the individual gratification of consumerism. The task of government was to make sure Americans could afford pleasure, and then get out of the way.

This is true, but a better explanation is that welfare statists since the 1930s represent, not the repudiation of progressivism, but just new turns in the public-choice effect that the progressives set in motion. The vast bureaucracy they created is conquered by one pressure group after another — prohibitionists, the "war on poverty" crowd, corporate powers, social conservatives, and back again. The post-progressive age has not given up on the progressives' "ambitious" work; it has simply shifted from one collective fad to the next, employing the government in a host of sometimes absurd and contradictory reform agendas, each announced in the next State of the Union address.

McGerr's book brings together hundreds of useful examples which reveal the darkness of this political vision. Unfortunately, he fails to follow the stream to its philosophical headwaters of collectivism, moral relativism, and elitism. Doing so would be a mighty task, but it would help to make the case against the chaotic power lust of the modern progressive state.

© Copyright 2010, Liberty Foundation

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