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[NOTE: While not directly dealing with economic thought, this review will
be of interest to those studying American institutionalism. RBE]
H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by [log in to unmask] (August, 2000)
Sidney M. Milkis and Jerome M. Mileur, eds. _Progressivism and the
New Democracy_. Amherst, Mass: University of Massachusetts Press,
1999. vi + 302 pp. Notes and index. 0.00 (cloth), ISBN
1-55849-192-9; 6.95 (paper), ISBN 1-55849-193-7.
Reviewed for H-Pol by Brett Flehinger <[log in to unmask]>,
Department of History, Harvard University
The Triumph of Progressivism
Historians of the Progressive Era have long labored in the shadow of
their New Deal colleagues. Possessing the clearer economic
motivation, the more obvious claim to long-term political influence,
the most publicly prominent social legislation, not to mention the
leading Roosevelt, the New Deal has drawn attention both as a public
issue and as a turning point in twentieth-century American
historiography for more than half a century. On the other hand,
Progressivism has remained a specialty reserved for a healthy but
less prominent band of historians interested in the period between
the cataclysms of the Civil War and the Great Depression.
But as we leave the twentieth century behind, scholars of the
Progressive Era seem to be shaking off their second-class status and
asserting a claim to the prime place in explaining the political
changes of the twentieth century. Social scientists interested in
the rise of the state, social capital theorists, political
philosophers, and historians have all contributed studies suggesting
we need to go back to the turn of the century to understand politics
and reform in late-twentieth century America. Taking this as a
jumping off point, the historians and political scientists who have
contributed essays to _Progressivism and the New Democracy_
collectively argue that the Progressive Era, rather than the New
Deal, was the fundamental shaper of the twentieth-century American
political order.
_Progressivism and the New Democracy_ consists of seven original
essays along with detailed commentaries by volume editors Sidney
Milkis and Jerome Mileur. The volume grew out of a conference
entitled "Progressivism: Then and Now," which was held at Brandeis
University in 1996. While focused specifically on Progressive-Era
politics, the topics covered in this collection reflect a wide range
of interests, including economic reform, pragmatism and democracy,
intergovernmental relations, Progressive moral thought, and others.
In addition to looking specifically at the years between 1890 and
1920, the essays in this volume consider the period's long-term
influence on American governance and society as well as speculating
on the potential relevance of "progressive" politics in the future.
Essays by historians Morton Keller and Alonzo Hamby provide context
for the volume. Drawing from his book _Regulating a New Economy_,
Keller argues that Progressive Era social and economic regulation
was not nearly as revolutionary as it was made out to be, and
concludes that regulation depended at least as much on old economic
ideas as new ones. In his article, Hamby projects Progressivism
forward and explores the "evolutionary continuity" between
Progressivism and later reforms, seeing a pattern of developing
reform across the twentieth century (p. 61).
Virtually all of the contributors to this volume see Progressivism
in its nationalist phase -- viewing the early twentieth century not
only as "a preeminent institution building era," but also as the
triumph of centralizing national consciousness over regional, state,
and local identities (p. 149). For example, even in
intergovernmental relations, in which Progressivism played a
relatively minor institutional role, political scientists Martha
Derthick and John Dinan argue that Progressive reformers provided a
crucial attitudinal change that led to the rise of federal power in
the later years of the twentieth century. Teddy Roosevelt and
Herbert Croly, not proprietary capitalist figures such as Louis
Brandeis or local-oriented politicians like Hazen Pingree, are the
heroes of _Progressivism and the New Democracy_. While some readers
may disagree as to whom the true Progressives were, such an
affirmative approach brings coherence. In contrast to the
long-running tendency to focus on the particular and avoid broad
syntheses in Progressive-Era history, seeing Progressivism as
vaguely related "tissues," many of the articles in this volume are
consciously definitional. They advance strong, focused
interpretations of Progressivism as a conscious and coherent
movement.
Eldon Eisenach, whose 1994 book _The Lost Promise of Progressivism_
reasserted the claim that Progressivism could be viewed as a single
political approach, expands his ideas to include "Progressive
Internationalism" in his vision. Eisenach argues that Progressivism
was a "church invisible" that combined social science with the
remnants of an older evangelical theology to produce a
post-Protestant, secularized, and state-oriented reform stream (p.
228). That the ministers, academics, and politicians who directed
this reform stream were linked together in the broad goals of
"democratization," "Christianization," and "Americanization" only
confirms to Eisenach the essential national identity that underlay
Progressivism (p. 233). Moreover, in Eisenach's view, the same
evangelical and self-sacrificing spirit that drove Americans to
reconstruct their society led them to believe that reforming the
rest of the world was a way of fulfilling their mission at home. As
Lyman Abbott, whom Eisenach quotes, stated, "We are likely to be a
leader among the world powers. We could not help ourselves if we
would; we would not help ourselves if we could" (p. 239).
In this view World War I is the logical culmination of Progressive
beliefs, and Eisenach reorients our understanding of the war's place
in America's reform history. World War I was not the means to extend
reform at home, or a serendipitous event bringing new
associationalism that would predominate in the 1920s, but the only
fitting end point to Progressive aspirations. In Eisenach's words,
"As preparedness turned to mobilization, and mobilization turned to
war, it was almost as if four decades of cultural and political
preparation by the Progressives had at last found and object worthy
of its impulses" (p. 240). While Eisenach claims to have the most
historical interpretation, the test of this view against the past is
debatable. Conscription, which he sees as proof positive of the
nationalist, voluntary spirit of Progressivism seems anything but
voluntary. That troops came out of compulsion, not by choice (as in
the Spanish American War) calls into question how motivated the
nationalist soldiers were. Furthermore, Eisenach stresses the fact
that "almost the entire apparatus of the draft functioned outside of
the official government," as evidence of the public spirit of
Progressivism and the war (p. 241). That a conscripting bureaucracy,
not the army, was voluntary seems only to demonstrate the
willingness of Americans to sacrifice others, not themselves, a very
different spirit than the author cites. Nonetheless, Eisenach
produces a compelling essay that runs counter to the flow of current
writing on the Progressive Era, continues his excellent work in the
field, and most clearly reflects the theme of this volume.
In "Standing at Armageddon," Wilson Carey McWilliams turns more
subtly to similar themes. Although conceding that Progressivism was
"more disposition than doctrine," McWilliams provides a remarkably
coherent picture of the Progressive mindset (p. 103). Focusing on
the social, economic, and cultural similarities among the vast
majority of Progressive-Era activists, McWilliams argues that
Progressives believed in the supremacy of moral conscience, rather
than attachment to forms or a strict belief in doctrine, as the
guide to right action. Such an argument proves a useful way to
understand and define Progressive politicians, as Teddy Roosevelt's
evolving "confession of faith" stands out remarkably well from
William Howard Taft's rooted, legalistic formalism.[1] In
McWilliams' view, the essence of Progressive ideology is not so much
political economy or democratic doctrine, but a religious and
cultural approach to public affairs that lived on well after 1920.
While the contributors to this volume agree on the central place of
Progressive-Era institutions, they do not agree on the relative
value of these institutions nor in the promise of Progressivism as a
whole. Both Philip Ethington and Eileen McDonagh see fundamental
flaws in the centralizing tendencies of nationalist Progressivism,
but differ as to the legacy of these weak points. In "The Metropolis
and Multicultural Ethics," Ethington starts by noting how ardently
Progressives worked at "suppressing the voices of diversity within
U.S. political discourse" (p. 196). He then considers the "brief and
shining moment" when an alternative, pragmatist democracy that
incorporated rather than suppressed racial, ethnic, and social
diversity was possible (p. 199). Focusing on social reformer Jane
Addams and philosopher George Herbert Mead, Ethington identifies an
intersubjective political approach based upon democratic dialogue,
as well as democratic political structures that developed in Chicago
around the turn of the century. Ethington believes that this
approach was superior to later politics because it was both
normative and multicultural. That is, it set up a political process
that not only accommodated, but also demanded a multiplicity of
voices and included those voices in a conversation that was
inherently about moral and ethical issues. Extrapolating from
Ethington's focus on the Chicago practitioners themselves, one could
see an intersubjective democracy that was both national and local.
The approach itself would likely be national and common, but
solutions would be discrete and dependent upon the social content of
the conversations.
Ethington labels the practitioners of intersubjective democracy
"heroic," while also acknowledging their failure both to apply their
ideas fully as well as to understand the potential danger in
consensus-based solutions (p. 200). However, he leaves little doubt
where American politics truly went astray when he contrasts the
missed opportunity of intersubjective democracy with the
interest-group liberalism that developed after the Progressive Era.
As opposed to multicultural democracy, which produced an inherently
moral solution, interest-group politics are fundamentally amoral.
Because interest-group systems are based entirely upon the power of
organized groups and political bargaining between these powerful
structures, they literally have no place for moral or social
dialogue. While some readers may look askance at Ethington's
monocausal explanation, no one observing contemporary American
politics (as I write we are in the midst of a series of political
conventions few people are watching and even fewer care about) can
argue against its barrenness and seeming lack of connection to
social life. Furthermore, Ethington's essay is remarkable in that it
locates the current crisis of politics not in the particular
programs and politicians of the last half-century -- but in the
broader system of democracy, the political structure, itself -- that
developed out of the Progressive Era. The legacy of Progressivism is
in the process not the product, and Ethington notes the early
twentieth century may be best remembered for the "damage done to
democracy by her closest friends" (p. 192).
Eileen McDonagh takes a schematic approach in evaluating the
Progressive legacy for American politics and reaches an equally
damning conclusion about Progressive democracy, but one that sees
later developments in a far more favorable light than does
Ethington. Using two axes to measure democratic politics (the
institutional axis, which measures the extent and efficiency of
state services, and the participatory axis, which tests how
inclusive the political process was) McDonagh concludes that
1890-1920 was marked by high institutional democracy and state
capacity but significantly diminished inclusiveness and popular
participation. In essence, as the government did more, significant
sectors of the country, women, African Americans, and new
immigrants, were able to participate less.
This conclusion is not terribly new (measurements of voter turn-
out, which McDonagh does not cite, would also support her claim) but
in an interesting turn, McDonagh looks beyond the Progressive Era,
to the 1960s, to understand Progressivism's legacy. McDonagh views
Progressive reform as a two-stage process. The first, state
formation, took place to a large extent between 1890 and 1920, while
the second, inclusionary, stage was deferred until the 1960s. By
noting that the same groups that suffered exclusion between 1890 and
1920 achieved the greatest gains in the Kennedy and Johnson years,
McDonagh provides a reform-oriented, deradicalized, progressive
appraisal of the 1960s and 1970s. In her view the rights revolutions
of the period, particularly the Civil Rights and Woman's Rights
movements are direct legacies of Progressivism and the 1960s should
not be understood as a second reconstruction or the rise of the
second wave of feminism, but as the second and final stage of
Progressive reform. As McDonagh writes, "by juxtaposing them [the
1960s and 1970s] with the earlier era of reform, these decades may
be seen as not merely a period of ferment and change, but as one
that corrects and thereby complements the Progressive Era" (p. 176).
Seen in conjunction with the other essays in this volume, this
second wave can also be viewed as the triumph of the centralizing
tendency in Progressive reform, as major segments of the population
left out by 1920 were included in the central, national polity.
The focus on centralization and nationalism that is the strength of
this volume also leads to some notable omissions. Individualist,
post-Populist, and regionalist Progressive figures such as Louis
Brandeis and Robert M. La Follette receive little mention because
ultimately they do not fit into the nationalist picture presented in
_Progressivism and the New Democracy_. On its own this criticism can
be seen as the kind of "you-didn't-include-my-Progressive-hero"
carping that has undermined and devalued the search for coherence in
the Progressive Era. These exclusions, however, open up a broader
interpretive issue.
Missing, or at best fleetingly mentioned, in this volume is the
economic backdrop precipitating Progressive reforms -- the
development and rationalization of a large-scale corporate economy
and the social, political, and legal structures that surround such
economies. While Alan Trachtenberg may be right that this corporate
change is "a historical commonplace," these economic changes played
a fundamental role in virtually all the politics of the first half
of the twentieth century and accounted for the central political
changes that are the focus of this volume.[2]
A number of the contributors note Progressive reformers' roles in
destroying the late-nineteenth century political regime of localized
political parties and courts. They particularly dislike what they
see as the tendency of anti-party reforms to break down the
connection between constituents and party leaders. However, in the
most practical terms, few people today would voluntarily return to
the old political system of nomination by caucuses, a
non-professional civil service, irregular ballots, and the drunken
brawls that characterized American politics in the nineteenth
century.
More importantly, the localized, party-centered politics of the
nineteenth century fit well the social and economic organization of
the antebellum and immediate post war society but were entirely out
of place in the emerging corporate society of the late-nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The same centralizing economic tendencies
that produced the new national mentality and culture during the
Progressive era also rendered the old localized and state-centered
party structure ineffective. Progressive reformers were not
destroying a healthy system that logically would have continued, but
replacing an anachronistic one with something more suited to the
particular economic and social conditions of their time.
Consequently, the post-Progressive rise of mass media-driven,
interest-group politics that many of the scholars in this volume
cast a critical eye toward are better understood as a political
reflection of economic and social change than as a direct product of
political reform (p. 194). It is difficult to argue with the
assessment that politics after 1920 was characterized by the break
up of the electorate into organized, identity-oriented groups. Nor
would most scholars disagree with the view that these groups clashed
for power in a struggle that lacked a broader social mission other
than gaining power. However, just as the early-twentieth century
economy now centered on a limited number of powerful, organized,
large-scale, and national enterprises to the detriment of individual
proprietors and with the result of turning customers into anonymous
consumers, the political system also reorganized around a similar
series of pre-organized economic, social, and identity pressure
groups. Like the corporate organizations that pushed economic
efficiency and profit without regard to social cost, the organized
political pressure groups engaged in a non-normative struggle for
power that fundamentally excluded questions of morality or
consideration for a broader public good. Consequently, except
inasmuch as the rise of the corporate economy involved political
decisions, the changes producing the "negative and suspicious
spirited" politics of the post-Progressive Era may well have been
outside of politics itself (p. 212).
Placing political change in economic context helps us understand
that the centralizers and nationalizers who are the focus of this
volume were not the winners or "true" Progressives (a futile
debate), but the men and women whose political vision fit most
closely with the dominant economic structure of the twentieth
century. In the end the Progressive Era saw the building of the
state institutions that would dominate American governance in the
twentieth century, but the decisive events leading to these
institutions stood outside the control of the reformers themselves.
Understanding the place of this economic legacy in the reform of
America's turn-of-the-century political economy may prove the key to
answering the question posed by Sidney Milkis at the start of the
book: "Whether there are roads that were not traveled during the
Progressive Era that might now be revisited beneficially as we
search for solutions to the most pressing challenges of late
twentieth-century America."
Notes
[1]. Theodore Roosevelt, "Address Before the National Convention of
the Progressive Party," August 6, 1912, in _The Works of Theodore
Roosevelt_, National Edition, v. XVII, Herman Hagedorn, ed. (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926), 254.
[2]. Alan Trachtenberg, "Foreword," in James Livingston, _Pragmatism
and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940_ (Chapel
Hill: UNC Press, 1997), xii.
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