The Twisted Tree of Progressivism

Sorting out the Progressive movement and its constituent ideologies can be difficult in that the very term “progressive” is burdened with contested meanings. Rather than work along lines agreeable to presently out-of-office politicians hoping to regain power by denouncing long-dead Progressives, we begin with some deep background.

One portent of Progressivism is found in the Liberal Republican movement of the 1870s. Prone to Paris Commune panics, distressed by strikes and labor trouble, such reformers as Charles Francis Adams (descended from John Adams), Francis Amasa Walker (Boston laissez-faire economist and Indian manager), and E. L. Godkin (Anglo-Irish editor of The Nation) concluded that efficient, inexpensive bureaucracy was just the ticket. It could manage questions too important to be left to democratic processes, especially those touching on the lately acquired government-bestowed advantages of big business. (“Efficiency” had a great future before it.) This movement was urban, basically eastern, and closely connected with economic elites (Nancy Cohen, Reconstruction of American Liberalism).

Another tributary into Progressivism—populism—began in opposition to all the above. Populists stated the case for tariff- and debt-ridden farmers in the South and the West. Their key innovation, or deviation from the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian tradition, was the belief that “the powers of government…should be expanded,” as their 1892 platform put it. How far this idea actually reached depended on the particular populist, but this new approach brought some of them closer, in method anyway, to the later Progressive movement.

A third source of Progressivism was a university-based intellectual movement whose leading figures included Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, philosopher John Dewey, economist Thorstein Veblen, and historians James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard. What united them was historicism and cultural organicism (Morton White, Social Thought in America). The ferment amounted to “a pragmatic revolt against formalism, abstraction and deductive methodology in the social sciences” (Wallace Mendelson, Capitalism, Democracy, and the Supreme Court). Darwinism, variously read, and scientism were among their weaponry.

A vaguer force was post-millennial Protestant reform, originally based in Greater New England, but now of national scope. Kicked off center-stage by science, many Protestant clergymen engaged social causes in a distinctly Progressive spirit. All these tendencies, plus an ingrained American penchant toward panic, pointed toward a busy future.

These forces (and perhaps others) converged on certain economic, social, and political problems stemming from America’s rapid industrial growth: the Gilded Age’s blatant corruption and subsidies (embodied in the railroads, their origins, and practices), labor strife, urban poverty, economic concentration, and financial manipulation. (Subtext: no stone unturned, no child left alone, no person unregistered, and no physical entity unregulated.) (See my October Freeman article, “The Gilded Age: A Modest Revision.”)

Progressives were fierce critics of federal courts, which they saw as the bulwark of big business. (This was never exactly untrue.) Their foremost concern was how to sustain the new industrial order while conserving American values and institutions. As they saw it, the main alternatives were: 1) restore competition by various means, including antitrust laws, or 2) accept and closely regulate an economy of large corporations. These conflicting visions constituted a serious fault line within Progressivism.

East versus West Approximates Hamilton versus Jefferson

New Republic editor Herbert Croly tried to bridge the Progressives’ divide by setting Hamiltonian means alongside Jeffersonian ends—a “synthesis” that could not survive the slightest clash with real life. Taking “Jeffersonian” as answering roughly to Plan I (restore competition) and “Hamiltonian” as answering to Plan II (accept and regulate big corporations), we can spot the rough geographical outlines of what were (as much of the literature suggests) two quite different forms of Progressivism.

Self-identified Progressives were concentrated in the GOP. Eastern Progressives proposed to regulate big corporate businesses, whose rise they viewed as inevitable. Thus for the eastern wing of the Republican Party “the problem was not how to remedy the evils of the new finance capitalism. [It was] how to manage the discontent it aroused, particularly in the once-docile middle class.” The eastern Progressive icon, Theodore Roosevelt, “wished to see the American people governed by a liberal oligarchy; he did not want them governing themselves.” By contrast, western Progressives tended to see “big business as an artificial menace to self-government, not merely aided but made possible by a whole system of special privilege” (Walter Karp, Politics of War). This means, in effect, that westerners thought some of the damage could be undone. Western Progressivism owed more to populism; it was “more rural and sectional than nationwide” and “represents, in a sense, the roots of modern American isolationism. [It was] less pacifistic and isolationist than it was nationalist,” but “opposed to imperialism or colonialism or militarism.” Such Progressives rejected American imperial initiatives precisely because of their apparent connections to Wall Street and the British Empire (Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform).

Given this political geography, there was considerable overlap between farm spokesmen and these “populist” Progressives. Historian Elizabeth Sanders writes that the farm bloc pursued specific reforms through statutory regulations enacted by Congress and enforceable in the courts, and not through expert commissions and administrative bureaucracies. To that extent, then, they were antibureaucratic. The more developed parts of the Midwest and Pacific coast fell midway between populism and eastern Progressivism, while peripheral western zones and much of the South remained essentially populist.

Further: “[I]t was the periphery that furnished most of the opposition, in both parties, to Wilson’s preparedness efforts, for in this momentous sense . . . the agrarians were not statists: far more than other sections, the periphery opposed war, standing armies, and imperialism” (Sanders, Roots of Reform, italics added). Certainly, these positions ought to count on the antistatist side of the ledger, unless war, militarism, and empire are not causes and instruments of aggravated statism. (President Wilson’s ruthless purge after 1917 of antiwar Democrats has long obscured the antiwar aspects of populism in the South. See Anthony Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Militant Interventionism in the South,” Journal of Southern History, November 1999.)

It was not just farmers with whom quasi-Jeffersonian western Progressives identified. Senator William Borah (R., Id.) saw himself as a defender of small business and carried on a two-front war against large corporations and state bureaucracies. A noninterventionist foreign policy completed the package. And somewhat jarringly perhaps, Georgism was the default economic position of many Progressives. This makes sense, however, because Henry George’s reform program, like that of the farm bloc, rejected administrative solutions. (Ransom E. Noble, “Henry George and the Progressive Movement,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, April 1949.)

Creeping American Statism

There are attempts from time to time to father American statism on Progressivism. This will hardly do. First, union-nationalist theorists like John W. Burgess and Orestes Brownson reveled in the vastness of national sovereignty after 1865. In cases like In re Neagle (1890), the U.S. Supreme Court theorized abstrusely on national sovereignty per square foot. At the level of ideas there was quite a lot of statism about. Second, as legal historian William Novak writes, a steadily rising curve of interfering (“statist”) state and federal legislation runs from the 1870s into the 1920s. This upward trend was across-the-board and predated Progressivism. (“The Legal Origins of the Modern American State,” in Austin Sarat et al., Looking Back at Law’s Century.)

Here is one example. After the biggest western land-grabbers crowded small farmers onto marginal lands, especially in California (see my “The American Land Question,” Freeman, July/August 2009), the cry went up for federal engineers to build colossal dams in the arid West to help small farmers become competitive. These projects reinvented ancient hydraulic despotism, coupling it rhetorically with a Jeffersonian end. (Donald Worcester, Rivers of Empire). Here Veblen’s favorite social class, the engineers, did wondrous works and overcame nature itself over many decades. It was impressive—but hardly chargeable to Progressivism.

Progressivism, Law, and State

Eastern, urban Progressives were committed to efficiency, expertise, regulatory bureaucracy, and scientism. Their program was effectively a political phase of corporate liberalism, of which Teddy Roosevelt, an artificial westerner, and Woodrow Wilson, an ex-southerner, offered somewhat different brands. (Wilson’s corporate liberalism did not wear the Progressive label.)

An important point of historical controversy concerns the relation of big business to Progressive legislation. Gabriel Kolko has argued that many key statutes were prepared by big-business lawyers and contained provisions intended to cartelize industries by restricting competition and discouraging new entrants. Sanders counters that the resistance of the farm bloc and organized labor sometimes kept business from getting exactly what it wanted (Kolko, Triumph of Conservatism

The related “capture“ thesis holds that, whatever the intention of legislators, the businesses to be regulated will eventually dominate the relevant bureaucracy. American socialist William J. Ghent commented that regulatory bodies were “Irresponsible to both the people and the people’s officials” and “peculiarly liable to the influence of the Big Men” (Our Benevolent Feudalism). In private, businessmen themselves agreed with Ghent.