Our Divided Political Heart (35 page)

It should also be stressed that that the nationalization of the economy
preceded
the Progressives’ nationalizing innovations in government. They concluded that in the new circumstances, only national action could be fully effective in enforcing new rules for a radically transformed national marketplace. Their arguments for regulating and containing the monopolies and the trusts often saw property rights as in competition with individual rights. Judge Ben Lindsey of Colorado made this explicit in a speech to the 1912 Progressive Party convention when he declared that “
property rights shall not be exalted over human rights
.” Individualism, properly understood as protecting individual autonomy and choice, was quite different from the Gilded Age’s
radical
individualism, which had defined corporations as people and property as the primary human right.

This contrast grew naturally from the Progressives’ fascination with the interaction between individuality and the individual’s need for community, an issue explored fruitfully by Wilfred McClay in
The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America
. True individuality in the Progressive view
required
a connection to community, to one’s “
fellows
,” as Croly put it. For Croly, McClay argued, “individualism had become particularly disastrous
and self-negating.” The economic system of the time “
compromised a man as much in his success as in his failure
” because “the system’s emphasis upon ‘acquisitive motives’ forced all men into a common mold, namely that of cash value.” Croly believed that self-expression included social as well as individual aims, and he insisted that “
the achievement of the national purpose
will contribute positively to the liberation of the individual.” ’ Similarly, John Dewey’s call for the creation of “
Great Community
” did not stem from a reflexive or ideological preference for the national over the local, or for larger over smaller community. It was, Dewey wrote, a logical and necessary response to a nationalized society and economy that had “
invaded and partially disintegrated the small communities
of former times without generating a Great Community.” As McClay noted, Dewey saw the “Great Community” he sought to build as requiring “
a perception of common interest, a high degree
of conscious moral and intellectual association, and flexible and comprehensive networks of communication.” (Dewey might be viewed as a prophet who foresaw the online social networks that are a hallmark of our era.) Progressives, then, were engaged in far more than building effective, “scientific,” centralized government. They also sought to strengthen the bonds of community that were fraying as the nation moved from farm to factory, from small town to big city, and from more compact forms of business to sprawling enterprises and corporations. They addressed the new in the old language of republicanism, self-rule, and civic virtue.

The Progressive-Populist fusion created a way of thinking and a passion for balance that defined American attitudes toward public life for the rest of the century. Perhaps the greatest tribute to its achievement was the extent to which conservatives over time accommodated many of its assumptions, and embraced its methods—from the initiative and the referendum to its language of class conflict, directed not against wealth and corporate privilege but at “elitist liberals.” And especially after the Great Depression, the New Deal, and American victory in World War II, most conservatives accepted, if sometimes grudgingly, the need for a stronger national government as a response to a more centralized economy and a geographically mobile people whose ties to the nation were weakening their ties to locality and state.

Two of the initiatives undertaken by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the first Republican elected president after the twenty-year New Deal–Fair Deal era, are revealing. The creation of the Interstate Highway System—it might be seen as the fulfillment of Henry Clay’s dreams, the ultimate “internal improvement”—not only bound the nation more closely together but quite literally made concrete the idea that the boundaries between states had far less meaning than they once did. In large metropolitan areas that spilled over state lines, the planning of the new transportation system assumed that the new forms of social organization created by housing and retail markets (greater New York, greater Washington, “Chicagoland”) mattered far more in the daily lives of citizens than the old political boundaries between states. Eisenhower also championed the National Defense Education Act, whose college loan program not only promoted social and economic mobility but also accelerated geographical mobility as millions of young Americans moved far and wide to pursue the new opportunities their educations afforded them. The Progressives and the Populists did not invent the idea of a far more unified American nation. They simply recognized it and accommodated it. Subsequent generations concluded they had been right to do so.

The new balance the Progressives championed did not go unchallenged. Progressivism suffered a grievous blow when Woodrow Wilson, having successfully campaigned for reelection in 1916 as the president who “kept us out of war,” decided a year later to intervene in World War I. Most damaging for the Progressive cause, he made his case for our participation not on national interest grounds alone but as a logical extension of the Progressive idea at home. By the end of Wilson’s term, the country was tired of grand adventures and sought the safety of a serene, inward-looking conservatism.

It’s hard to think of a more profound rise and fall of the impulse toward public action throughout the West than World War I and its aftermath. It is no surprise that this brutal and in many ways inconclusive war unleashed a deep cynicism about public life and grand aspirations among the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. As the economist Albert Hirschman
noted in
Shifting Involvements: Private Interest and Public Action
, the mad slaughter of the war and an outcome that was dissatisfying even to the victors produced a deep disillusionment with public engagement, with the ideas of “heroic action and sacrifice,” and with the concept of “glory” itself.

This was certainly true in the United States, even though Americans suffered nothing remotely like the losses Europeans experienced. By turning World War I into a Progressive war rooted in idealism, Wilson made it inevitable that the disappointment arising from a flawed peace would, for a time, discredit Progressive idealism itself. “
The world must be made safe for democracy
,” Woodrow Wilson had declared in bringing the United States into the war. “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion . . . We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

Victory came, but the aftermath did not—and almost certainly could not—live up to Wilson’s sweeping hopes. The ensuing public disillusionment was well described by H. L. Mencken, a reactionary with a gift for invective who proclaimed idealism’s death in 1920. After two decades of Progressivism, he wrote, Americans were weary “
of a steady diet of
. . . highfalutin and meaningless words,” and sickened by “an idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest and ferocious.” This, said Mencken, explained why Americans embraced the Republican candidacy of Warren G. Harding, hardly a man of great intellectual or moral distinction. “
Tired to death of intellectual charlatanry
,” Mencken memorably observed, the electorate “turns to honest imbecility.”

But when it came to understanding the nation’s mood, Harding was no imbecile. The country, he said in the spring of 1920 in his most famous pronouncement, wanted “
not heroics, but healing
; not nostrums, but normalcy; not revolution, but restoration; not agitation, but adjustment; not surgery, but serenity; not the dramatic, but the dispassionate; not experiment, but equipoise; not submergence in internationality, but sustainment in triumphant nationality.” As Arthur Schlesinger Jr. quipped: “
He should have added: not action but alliteration
.”

In the short run, the 1920s seemed to mark a return to the Gilded Age. Conservative ideas predominated, and the country’s prosperity seemed to
justify the enthusiastic turn back to laissez-faire. President Calvin Coolidge captured the spirit of the decade when he declared: “
After all, the chief business of the American people
is business.” Coolidge’s defenders note that in the same speech, the president also insisted: “
The chief ideal of the American people is idealism
. I cannot repeat too often that America is a nation of idealists. That is the only motive to which they ever give any strong and lasting reaction.” Coolidge’s idealism, however, seemed inspired primarily by an almost mystical (and perhaps idolatrous) devotion to the American business system. “The man who builds a factory builds a temple,” Coolidge wrote. “The man who works there worships there.”

Yet the “normalcy” of the Harding-Coolidge years did not destroy Progressivism. As the historian Arthur Link noted, “
Large and aggressive components
of a potential new progressive coalition remained after 1920.” Despite “
reversals and failures
, important components of the national progressive movement survived in considerable vigor and succeeded to a varying degree, not merely in keeping the movement alive, but even in broadening its horizons.”

The 1924 election was a triumph for Coolidge, as he overwhelmed conservative Democrat John W. Davis by a popular vote margin of 54 percent to 29 percent. But the remaining 17 percent went to the Progressive third-party insurgency led by Senator Robert M. La Follette. He managed to carry only one state outright, his home ground of Wisconsin. But La Follette ran second, ahead of the conservative Davis, in ten states, and the La Follette coalition was a partial precursor to the realignment that Franklin Roosevelt would bring about eight years later.

Moreover, a band of urban and rural progressives in Congress—among them Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Wagner from New York, George Norris from Nebraska, and Bronson Cutting from New Mexico—battled the conservative tide in the 1920s by pushing for a range of reforms that prefigured Roosevelt’s New Deal. These included proposals for public power that eventually led to the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority; for empowering labor unions that culminated in the Wagner Act; and various proposals for social insurance that prefigured Social Security. The progressives were not marginal figures in politics. As Link observed, “
Various progressive coalitions controlled Congress
for the greater part of the
1920s and were always a serious threat to the conservative administrations that controlled the executive branch.” The progressives drew electoral sustenance from millions of Americans left out of the great bonanza of the 1920s. A soaring Wall Street was accompanied by a near depression on the farms, and economic inequality reached a high point in 1929 that it would not hit again until 2007.

Herbert Hoover, who assumed the presidency in 1929, was no reactionary. He had been a Bull Moose Progressive in 1912, and his admirers included Franklin D. Roosevelt. “
He is certainly a wonder
, and I wish we could make him president of the United States,” Roosevelt said of Hoover in 1920. “There could not be a better one.” Hoover described himself at the time as an “independent progressive” and declared he was repelled by “reactionaries” and “radicals” alike. If Hoover later became a staunch conservative, his response to the Depression, though ineffectual, could not be described as laissez-faire. Roosevelt freely (and opportunistically) used this against him in the 1932 campaign. FDR condemned Hoover for having presided over “
the greatest spending Administration
in peace times in all our history.” The Roosevelt who would vastly expand the number of government agencies, from the AAA to the CCC to the TVA, had no compunction in 1932 about accusing Hoover of having “
piled bureau on bureau
, commission on commission.”

The 1920s proved to be an interruption but not a reversal of the progressive thrust in American politics. The New Deal was many things, but one thing it did
not
represent was a break from history. Roosevelt’s program was adventurous in certain respects because the circumstances he confronted were so dire. But Roosevelt, the former Wilson administration official, was acting well within the framework of the progressive tradition and the capitalist system. If his New Deal lacked philosophical tidiness (and Roosevelt had declared plainly that his central purpose in the face of an economic collapse was to “
above all, try
something
”), it could not be charged with radicalism.

In retrospect, the critique of the New Deal from the
left
—that its
purposes were fundamentally conservative, aimed at saving capitalism and the traditional American system—is more persuasive in a descriptive sense than right-wing claims that Roosevelt inaugurated a new era of American socialism. “Using the federal government to stabilize the economy and advance the interests of the groups
Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the campaign
to save large-scale corporate capitalism,” wrote the New Left historian Barton Bernstein, “Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the campaign to save large-scale corporate capitalism . . . Despite the flurry of activity, his government was more vigorous and flexible about means than goals, and the goals were more conservative than historians usually acknowledge.” In light of capitalism’s enormous success in the years after the New Deal, can anyone deny that saving the market system was one of FDR’s singular accomplishments?

Within all the experimentation and apparent incoherence of the early New Deal, Alan Brinkley identified four discernable philosophical strains. The “
anti-monopolists . . . envisioned a frontal assault
on ‘bigness’ and concentration in the corporate world and . . . often called as well for policies that would redistribute wealth and income.” The “
advocates of centralized economic planning
” sought “to curb the power of corporations by greatly increasing the managerial power of government” and envisioned a “state apparatus closely involved in the day-to-day workings of the economy.” Supporters of “
the vaguely corporatist concept of business ‘associationalism’
“ looked toward creating “
cartelistic arrangements within major industries
to curb the destabilizing impact of competition.” They foresaw government playing “a modest, largely uncoercive role.”