Progressive History 101 (Minus All that Uncomfortable Racism, Sexism, and Support for Eugenics)
Damon W. Root | April 19, 2010
Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, I wrote an article criticizing many of his left-leaning supporters for labeling themselves as progressives, arguing that “what the current vogue for the term progressive fails to acknowledge is that the original progressives embraced the worst abuses of state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.”
In response, I received a number of angry emails stating that today’s progressives had nothing to do with the sins of the first progressives, and that to conflate the two was intellectually dishonest and just plain mean. Perhaps some of my correspondents will now direct their outrage to the left-wing Center for American Progress, which just released a new monograph entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America.” This paper argues that today’s progressives are the direct inheritors of an unbroken progressive tradition, one that brought glorious benefits to all Americans by doing away with the evils of limited government. Here’s a sample paragraph:
Progressives sought above all to give real meaning to the promise of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution—“We the people” working together to build a more perfect union, promote the general welfare, and expand prosperity to all citizens. Drawing on the American nationalist tradition of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln, progressives posited that stronger government action was necessary to advance the common good, regulate business interests, promote national economic growth, protect workers and families displaced by modern capitalism, and promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.
As far as history lessons go, this is laughably biased and incomplete. For starters, the original progressives most certainly did not “promote true economic and social opportunity for all people.” In the Jim Crow South, as historian David Southern has documented, disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, and lynching all "went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism." Economist John R. Commons, a leading progressive academic and close adviser to high-profile progressive politicians—including “Fighting” Bob Lafollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson—authored a 1907 book entitled Races and Immigrants in America, where he called African Americans “indolent and fickle” and endorsed protectionist labor laws since "competition has no respect for the superior races."
There’s also the matter of sexism. Exhibit A is future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous “Brandeis Brief,” submitted to the Supreme Court in the case of Muller v. Oregon (1908). At issue was a state law limiting the working hours of female laundry employees. In his brief, Brandeis collected a parade of statistics, arguments, and journalistic accounts, all “proving” that women required special protection from the state. In fact, Brandeis argued, since women were responsible for bearing future generations, their bodies were in some sense collective property. "The overwork of future mothers," he wrote, "directly attacks the welfare of the nation." The Supreme Court agreed, declaring that, "As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race." Feminist legal scholars have long criticized Brandeis for introducing that bit of sexist paternalism into the law, though you wouldn’t learn anything about it by reading this monograph.
Finally, “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America” is totally silent about the progressives’ widespread support for the theory and practice of eugenics. As Princeton University economist Tim Leonard has chronicled, "eugenic thought deeply influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's relationship to the American economy." Despite the fact that this monograph favorably cites progressive hero Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes for his famous dissent in the economic liberty case Lochner v. New York (1905), the authors make no mention of Holmes’ notorious majority decision in Buck v. Bell, where Holmes and his colleagues (including Louis Brandeis) upheld the forced sterilization of those who “sap the strength of the State.”
In sum, the Center for American Progress has produced a fairy tale version of history, one that highlights what the authors see as the accomplishments of progressivism while totally ignoring anything that might detract from their lopsided narrative. Anyone interested in actually learning about the origins and history of the progressive movement should look elsewhere.
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Whitewashing Progressivism
Posted by Justin Logan
Damon Root points out that the Center for American Progress has a particularly one-sided view of “The Progressive Tradition in American Politics.” [.pdf] To add to what Root is saying, my view is that American politics is essentially tribal warfare and an important factor in tribal warfare is the cohesion of the tribes. One way to accomplish this is by romanticizing history to create a powerful identity with which the tribesmen want to associate themselves. A political movement needs heroes, villains, narrative. But CAP’s account of the Progressive movement’s history is remarkably one-sided.
When I ticked over to CAP’s “Progressive Tradition” document [.pdf], I looked to see whether they included Wilson’s 1916 reasoning that it was “in order to keep the white race or part of it strong to meet the yellow race — Japan, for instance, in alliance with Russia, dominating China — [that made it] wise to do nothing” with respect to the war in Europe. They did not. In fact, the authors select the passive voice for describing Wilson’s slapdash diplomacy that sucked America into the war: “In his second term, he became preoccupied with international affairs due to the U.S. entry into World War I.” This phrasing makes it sound like “the U.S. entry” was an act of God, not an act of Wilson. Moreover, if someone without any prior knowledge read the document they would be painfully unaware that the reason Wilson “became preoccupied with international affairs” was because he got us into a war.
What about the Committee on Public Information, a government propaganda machine that made George Bush look like Glenn Greenwald? The CPI worked in concert with (no kidding) the “Boy Spies of America” to root out insufficiently pro-war thinking. CPI’s perhaps most metaphysical pronouncement was that U.S. entrance to the Great War was, in fact, “a Crusade not merely to re-win the tomb of Christ, but to bring back to earth the rule of right, the peace, goodwill to men and gentleness he taught.” What about Roosevelt’s puffed-up belligerence, again foreshadowing Bush, in stating that “He who is not with us, absolutely and without reserve of any kind, is against us, and should be treated as an alien enemy”? What about the Palmer Raids, named for ur-Progressive and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, wherein the U.S. Government ransacked union halls and homes, snatched up prisoners and held them without access to counsel or courts, and engaged in mass, summary, and unilateral deportations? Not a word.
As to the Red Scare more generally, the best the authors can do is to shrug that as Wilson’s “general intolerance of dissent during World I became exacerbated by fear of the 1917 Russian Revolution, he played a central role in promoting the Red Scare of 1917-20. The Red Scare made domestic activism a target of both police suppression and nativist sentiment, producing an atmosphere hardly conducive to the cause of progressive reform.” Is that supposed to be a denunciation?
In contrast to all this obfuscation and equivocation, poor Warren Harding comes in for a soaking for having produced “a sharp increase in racial violence and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, new restrictions on immigration, rises in protective tariffs, increases in economic concentration, and tax cuts for the rich.”
Imagine if a conservative group came out with a history of American conservative thought that expressly linked modern American conservatism to the political thought of, say, John C. Calhoun, with only mealy-mouthed “to be sure” language like that used by CAP with respect to Progressivism. Lefties would be outraged, and rightly so. Will CAP clear the air on the Progressive movement’s history of racism, imperialism, executive supremacism and contempt for civil liberties? I bet I know the answer.
Justin Logan • April 20, 2010 @ 12:15 pm
cato-at-liberty.org |
