Liars (3 page)

Bryan had arrived in Chicago uncertain of his chances of becoming his party's presidential nominee. But as his speech progressed he became convinced that victory was his. A new monetary policy based on the coinage of silver—“free silver”—had proven to be an even more enticing message than he'd expected. The new supply of money would relieve crippling debts for the farmers and other impoverished voters Bryan sought to mobilize.

As he neared the climax of his remarks he mustered every last ounce of energy he could and unleashed some of the most famous lines in American political rhetoric. “If they dare to come out in the open field,” he thundered, “and defend the gold standard as a good thing, we shall fight them to the uttermost, having behind us the producing masses of the nation and the world. Having behind us the commercial interests and the laboring interests and all the toiling masses.”

Bryan paused, raised his hands above his head, and continued, “We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them: you shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.”

He brought his hands down around his head, as if he were placing an imaginary crown on top. Then he stretched his arms out to his sides, palms toward the delegates, took a deep breath, and bellowed, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!”

Moses had now morphed into Jesus, and the multitude assembled thought they were witnessing the Second Coming. Their shouts thundered through the coliseum, shaking its steel girders and echoing down city blocks in every direction. “Bedlam broke loose,” exclaimed a stunned
Washington Post
correspondent. “Delirium reigned supreme. In the spoken word of the orator thousands of great men had heard the unexpressed sentiments and
hopes of their own inmost souls.”

♣

With that speech, William Jennings Bryan
—“The Great Commoner”—ignited the first progressive moment in American history. His speech transformed Thomas Jefferson's and Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party—a party famously skeptical of the federal government—into a vehicle for massively expanding the state and making it responsible
for redistributing wealth, breaking up businesses, assailing private property, and providing all manner of aid to the poor.

Bryan was America's first prophet of progressivism, an ideology that would go on to redefine the Democratic Party for generations and ultimately destroy the experiment in limited government that had begun with the founding of the Republic.

But Bryan's progressivism, while new to Americans and antithetical to the American system, was not a new movement at all. In fact, it originated from the very place the Founders had fled: the authoritarian-ruled nations of Europe.

Ninety years before William Jennings Bryan's rapturous reception in Chicago, a German university professor cast his eyes on an emperor. Maybe it was because the commanding figure on horseback contrasted so starkly with his own bent and bookish posture, but the image impressed Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel more than anything he had ever seen.

It was October 1806, and Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-declared emperor of France, was on his way to battle outside Jena, where Professor Hegel taught. Napoleon's forces slaughtered tens of thousands of Hegel's Prussian countrymen, defeating their kingdom's army once and for all. But his nation's humiliation hardly lessened Hegel's admiration for the French tyrant. If anything, it increased it.

Napoleon sought to build an empire, a vast, ambitious government of planners and administrators. He was, in Hegel's view, an energetic man bringing progress—bloodstained progress, perhaps, but progress nonetheless—to a land that desperately needed it. He believed this was the kind of strong, forward-thinking
leader Europe had been waiting for.

The French Revolution that culminated in Napoleon's reign differed wildly from the American Revolution that preceded it by a mere thirteen years. The colonists who challenged an empire were rebelling against the way things had been done for centuries. They were tossing out monarchs who claimed to have a “divine right,” a mandate from God to rule their citizens. Their movement championed
the inalienable rights of the individual over the government. It defended the governed against their governors. Americans had created a government of elections and the rule of law: classical liberalism. The French preached democracy and liberty, but they birthed something else entirely: a reign of terror, culminating with an emperor who wielded near-total power.

How did these two revolutions meet such vastly different ends? Perhaps because, in the Americans' case, the Framers of the Constitution were keen observers of human nature. As a result, they enacted checks against one man and one party amassing too much power, a careful balance of forces that trusted individuals more than it trusted the state and protected the people from too much centralized control. The architects of this new government possessed no illusions that they were creating a utopia ruled by perfect people—just the opposite, in fact. They believed man had fallen because he was naturally too self-interested and sinful.

Across the Atlantic, a growing movement of philosophers and academics had different ideas about the nature of man and what the future held, most notably the young university professor so entranced by the sight of Napoleon's majesty: Hegel, the father of the progressive movement.

Hegel, whose own father was a senior government official working for one of Germany's dukes, understood the importance of administrators from a very early age. As he worked on his PhD, Hegel found a new way of looking at history and mankind's role in it by drawing on the writings of Jakob Böhme, a German Christian mystic, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French writer.

Böhme believed that the fall of Adam and Eve was a first necessary stage so that mankind could achieve self-awareness. Man was separated from God, but through evolution over centuries, he could eventually achieve perfect knowledge with science and education. Rousseau, on the other hand, coined a concept
he dubbed the “general
will” of the people as a whole. The will of the individual, he proclaimed, was far less important than that of the collective. It was the government's responsibility to identify and carry out that collective will.

Hegel believed that the history of humankind was the story of man becoming more and more rational and “achieving consciousness.” To “perfect” humanity, all that was needed was a government that tamed the impulses of human nature for the greater good. This was Hegel's revolutionary idea of progress.

Like many progressives who followed in his wake, Hegel also dabbled in race theory to explain why some societies seemed to “progress” better or faster than others. According to Hegel, it was “the German nations” who “
were the first to attain the consciousness that man, as man, is free.” Inferior genes, he believed, were the only way to explain why other parts of the world remained economically backward.

Hegel concluded that the world now stood at one of the most advanced stages of human history and that experts and knowledgeable persons should rule with the most perfect government and unlimited authority over the individual. Through the state and its rulers, in Hegel's “philosophy of history,” man essentially became God on earth. This was the foundational principle of what eventually became known as progressivism.

With his belief in scientific training, Hegel helped create the modern research university system. Modeling this on the Prussian style of education, he envisioned universities that churned out administrators trained in the science of governing men and women—an idea they called “social science.” Prussian education reforms extended down to young children as well, with the establishment of free, compulsory education by the state, starting with a mandatory “kindergarten” and national tests to track childhood learning. Hegel believed that this
“scientific” approach to governance and progressive reforms would ultimately lead to a well-managed administrative state of experts.

If there was a good example of what an “unreformed” society looked like in Hegel's estimation, it was the United States. He saw America in the 1820s and 1830s as a wild and open nation, a vast unsettled frontier land with a primitive government. There was nothing progressive about it. It was a land with too much individual liberty, too much protection for private property, and too many greedy, ambitious people
trying to build their individual fortunes. America, Hegel thought, was in dire need of progressive reform.

Hegel became Germany's most renowned academic, eventually attracting followers around the world, even in America. But one follower in particular was far more consequential than the others. This disciple was a fellow Prussian philosopher, a university student who was a generation younger but just as ambitious and intent on making his mark on the world by proving that mankind could establish a progressive utopia here on earth.

His name was Karl Marx.

Europe was on fire.

The previous year had brought turmoil and upheaval to the continent, punctuated by uprisings against its faltering ancient monarchies, particularly in Germany. That was why, in April 1848, Karl Marx and his comrade Friedrich Engels took the great risk of returning to their native land to publish the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung
—the “New Rheinish Newspaper”—in the city of Cologne.

The paper was going to be their contribution to this great struggle, their way of fanning the flames of change, not just in Germany
but in France, Hungary, Poland, and Italy and across the continent. And in large measure, they were already succeeding. Across central Europe, the masses demanded reform and social justice. Finally, thought Marx, revolution was in the air—and in the streets.

Of course, the revolution was not as “pure” as Marx and Engels would have liked. The proletariat working class had not yet emerged as the driving force, but there was time yet. First, thrones and crowns had to go. Then, even if the selfish bourgeoisie took over from the kings, the working classes could, soon enough, be roused in turn to dislodge the new bourgeois oppressors—and Marx's ideal society could be born.

Although riots and protests had broken out in most capital cities, the Cologne offices of the paper were eerily quiet. There were no shouts of celebration. The presses weren't running. There was no frantic pounding of feet as copy boys with rolled-up sleeves darted to and fro carrying last-second edits. The proudly inflammatory
NRZ
proclaimed itself on its masthead to be “The Organ of Democracy,” but in May 1849, that organ had seemingly gone silent.

Standing over his desk, one fist turning slowly, grinding into the battered wood of its surface, Marx, the paper's editor in chief, was seething. This was it. The reactionaries had him cornered—again. With anger boiling inside him, the newspaperman-revolutionary reread the note from the Royal Police: