Our Divided Political Heart (33 page)

It’s true, as even Obama’s critics acknowledged, that the administration’s fears of a collapse in the markets during the first months of Obama’s term were understandable. These limited his capacity to push the marketplace and challenge the financial industry as much as seemed appropriate in light of its behavior. Nonetheless, the rise of Occupy Wall Street and, more important, the broad support many of its demands and criticisms won in the polls were a lesson to Obama and to liberals generally. American liberalism is far more than a technocratic creed. Its historical roots are firmly planted in a Populism that was not anti-market but did demand more accountability from those who ran the marketplace and a better deal for those who lived and worked outside the country’s most privileged circles. Elizabeth Warren, the architect of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and later a candidate for the U.S. Senate from Massachusetts, became
a hero within more populist and progressive circles because she spoke with both passion and precision for this sensibility. Ironically, in light of Frank’s observations, she was also a Harvard professor, though not one who bought into economic orthodoxy.

The anti–Wall Street movement did something else: it reminded Americans of the deeper commitments of the American Populist tradition and, in so doing, challenged the Tea Party’s populist claims. At the very least, progressives no less than the Tea Party had found a populist voice—and it was one that Obama himself began to heed.

At this point in our history, there would seem to be little point in arguing too much about who is a true populist and who is operating under a false flag. The word is too much with us, and no one has the authority to impose a set of tests to determine who deserves membership in some populist club. Yet it’s still worth the effort to rescue an important and constructive American tradition from promiscuous misappropriation and the distortions this entails.

Alan Brinkley suggests a set of goals for American politics that, while not explicitly populist, define quite well what this tradition hoped to achieve. “
We need a vigorous government and a healthy market
,” Brinkley argued. “We need strong national institutions and strong local ones. We need a healthy public sector and a healthy private one. Above all, perhaps, we need—to paraphrase Webster—liberty and community, for neither is sustainable without the other.”

True populism in the American tradition is not the philosophy of the angry, prejudiced mob inspired by envy and parochialism. It is a well-tempered democratic wish for the sense of balance among shared objectives that has always allowed Americans to move forward—together. And it was toward these ends that the United States moved, with some interruptions and detours, over the century that began with the rise of the Progressive movement.

If it is judged in the narrowest terms, the Populist rebellion against the Gilded Age failed. Populism’s hero, William Jennings Bryan, went down to defeat in 1896 and again in 1900. He lost to William McKinley, whose cause was championed by a business class politically unified to a degree unprecedented in American history. The politics of the Gilded Age, with its emphasis on the centrality of private enterprise and untrammeled individualism, seemed destined to endure indefinitely. The Supreme Court of the time was determined to lock this vision into the nation’s law. Continuing to rule in favor of strict separation between public and private endeavor, it blocked or hampered government efforts to protect a growing industrial working class and to write new rules for an economy undergoing a sweeping process of consolidation.

Yet to hold that Populism died without effect or that conservatism triumphed unreservedly misreads the period entirely. For in 1900, the country was on the verge of one of the great reform moments in its history. Decisions made over the next twenty years would come to define much of the next century and inaugurate the rise of American global power. And the Long Consensus that the Progressive Era would establish allowed many of Populism’s dreams to come true.

On its own, Populism could never hope to triumph in an increasingly urban and industrial country. Bryan’s 1896 campaign was a glorious cry of protest against the power of the urban rich—the financiers who were transforming the economic landscape and the industrialists who seemed
intent on monopolizing American industry. But McKinley’s triumph was made possible in part by his success in winning support from urban workers. He was not simply the candidate of the well-to-do. McKinley’s economic approach was successfully cast as being more connected to the America of the future, while Bryan, forward-looking in so many respects, gave his opponents the ammunition they needed to paint him as a figure of a soon-to-be-lost rural past. This was true even if Charles Postel was right to argue that Populists were at heart modernizers more interested in a just distribution of modernity’s benefits than in overturning its achievements. Bryan won the hearts of millions, but McKinley appealed to the pocket-books of millions of others. McKinley was helped by the shamelessness of employers who secured Republican votes by threatening to lay off workers the day after a Bryan victory. Yet many urban workers did not need this inducement. After prosperity returned, McKinley cruised to reelection in 1900 by campaigning on behalf of “
the full dinner pail
.”

Bryan worried many in the cities by embracing his role as the champion of the countryside so passionately. “
Burn down your cities and leave our farms
, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic,” Bryan had declared in his “Cross of Gold” speech. “But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” The line brought cheers in the vast open spaces of Kansas and Nebraska. It fell flat among many on the teeming sidewalks of New York or Pittsburgh. And the voters were moving, in droves, to the cities. Many of the urban newcomers were immigrants from southern and eastern Europe who brought with them their own traditions and, in the case of Catholics and Jews, religious faiths quite distant from the evangelical Protestantism that inspired Bryan and many among the Populist rank and file.

Yet the spirit of protest at the heart of Populism spoke to the hopes and discontents of Americans in the cities no less than to those on the farms and prairies. It was a protest against the individualism of the Gilded Age, against courts aggressively foiling democratic efforts to right the injustices of a new capitalism, against the power of the monopolies and the trusts, against the loss of control over their lives that so many people were experiencing. Populism did not give way to nothing. The cause of social reform at the heart of the Bryan movement did not disappear. After the
turn of the century, Americans who had embraced the Great Commoner joined with a new and larger Progressive movement that brought middle-class voices and middle-class votes to a much broader coalition for the common good. “
After 1900
,” wrote Richard Hofstadter, “Populism and Progressivism merge.”

That the new Progressivism enjoyed successes that the old Populism did not reflected a lesson repeated throughout American history: reform movements based on the dispossessed alone have often ended in failure. Campaigns on behalf of fairness and justice have often succeeded when they joined the aspirations of the left-out with those of the aspiring middle class. To the adage “
March without the people, and you march into the night
” might be added another: march without the middle class, and you march toward defeat. It’s a double-edged lesson: middle-class reform movements that lack populism’s edge and its broadly democratic commitments founder; but so do populist movements untempered by the middle class’s inclinations toward stability and moderation.

The merger of Populism and Progressivism into a successful movement was possible because McKinley’s victories were not unalloyed triumphs of reaction. McKinley was certainly the candidate of big business, but his electoral coalition included many voters of at least a mildly Progressive disposition. And his vice presidential candidate in 1900, Theodore Roosevelt, understood these forces viscerally. After Roosevelt succeeded to the presidency following McKinley’s assassination in 1901, TR slowly transformed himself from a reformist conservative into a full-fledged progressive and then, during his 1912 third-party presidential campaign, into something of a radical.

It might be said that TR made the aspirations of Populism safe for the middle class by discussing them in a middle-class idiom. Roosevelt, Hofstadter observed, “
persistently blunted Bryan’s appeal
by appropriating Bryan’s issues in modified form.” Progressivism thus “became nationwide and bipartisan, encompassing Democrats and Republicans, country and city, East, West, and South.” It produced “
a working coalition between the old Bryan country
and the new reform movement in the cities, without which the broad diffusion and strength of Progressivism would have been impossible.” At the time, the philosopher John Dewey used an arresting metaphor
to describe their differences: “
Roosevelt borrowed much from Bryan, but Bryan came from Nazareth in Galilee
, and spoke the cruder language of the exhorter and itinerant revivalist. When Roosevelt uttered like sentiments, his utterances had the color and prestige of a respectable cult and an established Church.”

This merger of interests and sentiments did not come out of nowhere. Already a confluence of Populist and nascent Progressive forces had come together to pass the Interstate Commerce Act in 1888, regulating rates and prohibiting discriminatory pricing, and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, outlawing monopolies. As the historian Eldon Eisenach has noted, the laws may have been “contradictory in their aims,” the first aimed at controlling concentrated economic power, the second at breaking it up. The courts often rendered both laws “
ineffectual
.” Yet both, as Eisenach argued, “
symbolized a new national commitment
to responsible oversight of the flourishing industrial economy.”

This was a central goal for both Populists and Progressives. It was the beginning of the end of the Gilded Age exception to the American rule of a government creatively engaged in the nation’s economic life. The goals of this new coalition were in keeping with the objectives of Hamilton, Clay, and Lincoln: to foster a flourishing private sector while also achieving public purposes and common ends. It was a return to the classic American balance between individual freedom and the community interest.

With a brief interruption during the 1920s, the Progressive impulse shaped American thinking about public life for the next eight decades. It both brought about and defined what came to be known as the American Century. Eisenach was not exaggerating when he wrote of Progressivism that

the movement’s leading minds founded the modern American university
and created the modern academic disciplines and journals; they created the ligaments of the national administrative and regulatory state and founded and supplied a mass national journalism independent of political parties and churches; and they witnessed and helped legitimate the creation of a national financial and industrial corporate economy that soon became the engine driving
the international economy. In short, they helped transform America into the dominant world power it is today.

Note that Eisenach calls attention to how the Progressives helped “legitimate” the corporate economy. By criticizing, reforming, and rationalizing the workings of capitalism, the Progressives helped the system survive. In this sense, left-of-center revisionist historians such as Gabriel Kolko were on to something important when they pointed to Progressivism’s “conservative” achievements. It would not be the last time that capitalism was saved not by its most unapologetic enthusiasts but by critics who understood the system’s imperfections and inadequacies and saved it from itself.

Inspired by the Populists, spurred by the rising Socialist and trade union movements, and encouraged by Social Gospel Christians, the Progressives took a step beyond their forebears in linking government’s engagement with the economy to the cause of social justice. In doing so, the Progressives brokered an informal settlement in the battles between the Jeffersonians and the Hamiltonians, the Jacksonians and the Whigs. They embraced the Jefferson-Jackson tradition of deepening American democracy and promoting greater social equality (even if many of them retained a Whiggish mistrust of both). But they found their path to these ends through the methods of Hamilton and Clay. They would use federal and state governments on behalf of a new set of “internal improvements” that would lift up the economically downtrodden and ensure fair economic competition.
Herbert Croly, the progressive thinker
who gave shape to what became modern liberalism, as the historian Edward Stettner rightly argued, put the new movement into precisely this context. Its goal, Croly wrote, was “
to use Hamiltonian administrative nationalism
in the interest of a democratic social policy”—as we saw earlier, to deploy Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends.

Progressivism was a vast and varied movement, and in the 1912 election it presented itself in two different forms. Theodore Roosevelt’s “New Nationalism” battled Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom.” The differences between the two reverberate to this day. Roosevelt, influenced by Croly, argued that economic concentration was inevitable and that efficiency and justice were best served through government regulation of the large new
enterprises. Wilson, adopting the views of Louis Brandeis, argued for breaking up the large agglomerations of economic power in the interest of creating a fair and competitive marketplace energized by smaller businesses. Charging Wilson with believing in the “outworn academic doctrine” of laissez-faire economics, Roosevelt pledged to “
use the whole power of government
” to combat “an unregulated and purely individualistic industrialism.” Wilson replied that Roosevelt’s policies would leave sprawling, inefficient, and domineering corporations intact. “
Have we come to a time
,” Wilson asked, “when the President of the United States or any man who wishes to be President must doff his cap in the presence of high finance and say, ‘You are our inevitable master, but we will see how we can make the best of it?’”