Bradley C. S. Watson - Progressivism

PROGRESSIVISM

PROGRESSIVISM The
Strange History of a Radical
Idea

BRADLEY C. S. WATSON

Foreword by Charles R. Kesler

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu

Copyright 2020 by University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Watson, Bradley C. S., 1961 author. | Kesler, Charles R., author of foreward.

Title: Progressivism : the strange history of a radical idea /
Bradley C. S. Watson; foreword by Charles R. Kesler.

Other titles: Strange history of a radical idea

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : University of Notre Dame Press, [2020] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019054508 (print) | LCCN 2019054509 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780268106973 (hardback) | ISBN 9780268107000 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9780268106997 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Progressivism (United States politics) | Progressivism
(United States politics)Historiography. | United StatesPolitics and
government19011953. | United StatesPolitics and government
19011953Historiography.

Classification: LCC E743 . W38 2020 (print) | LCC E743 (ebook) |
DDC 324.2732/7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054508

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019054509

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Calvin Coolidge, 1926

The tradition of Progressive reform is the one upon which I was reared and upon which my political sentiments were formed, as it is, indeed, the tradition of most intellectuals in America. Perhaps because in its politics the United States has been so reliably conservative a country during the greater part of its history, its main intellectual traditions have been, as a reaction, liberal, as we saythat is, popular, democratic, progressive.... In our own day... liberals are beginning to find it both natural and expedient to explore the merits and employ the rhetoric of conservatism.... This is true not because they have some sweeping ideological commitment to conservatism (indeed, their sentiments and loyalties still lie mainly in another direction) but because they feel that we can better serve ourselves in the calculable future by holding to what we have gained and learned, while trying to find some way out of the dreadful impasse of our polarized world, than by dismantling the social achievements of the past twenty years, abandoning all that is best in American traditions, and indulging in the costly pretense of repudiating what we should not and in fact cannot repudiate.

Richard Hofstadter, 1955

Contents

THREE Gray in Gray: The Strange History of Progressive
History in the 1940s and 1950s

FIVE Intellectual Consolidation and Counterattack:
Conservatism and Revisionism from the 1980s to the Present

Foreword

Charles R. Kesler

In this pathbreaking volume, Bradley C. S. Watson scours the writings of American historians from the 1940s to the present, seeking to describe and to explain their strange reluctance to come to grips with the beginningand in some ways still the centralphenomenon of modern American politics: the new worldview of the progressive movement. This worldview was asseverated in the title of the journal founded to transmit its insights to mainstream America, the New Republic, as well as in the slogans of the movements greatest political leaders, Theodore Roosevelts New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilsons New Freedom. The progressives, especially the proudest and most daring of them, longed to begin American politics over again on what they considered a higher ethical and political level, higher, that is, than the eighteenth-century precepts and institutions available to the founders and blindly worshiped, as Wilson put it, for a century by their successors of every political party.

Unlike the old republic, however, the new one envisioned by the progressives would dispense with formal moments of founding or refounding in favor of a continual process of adjusting political forms to changing social needs, and so would focus not on a set of enduring institutional safeguards, such as separation of powers or federalism, but on ways of evading or overcoming those precautions in order to empower national efforts to solve national problems. Not revolution, then, but political evolution would be the way forward. Yet the discovery of such problems and the neverending search, necessarily experimental, for their cure presupposed a new and revolutionary point of departure: the intellectual-cultural breakthrough that revealed the obsolescence of the old nationalism, the old freedom, and the old republic.

Just because they were old, after all, did not mean Americas historic creeds and institutions were necessarily obsolete or ill-suited to present-day needs. James Madison had looked forward to that veneration which time bestows on everything as an essential ally to good government, without which perhaps the wisest and freest governments would not possess the requisite stability. He helped to erect a Constitution and governmental system that were designed to last or grow old. He founded a Constitution difficult to amend and a government prone (on account of the very institutional safeguards so disliked by the progressives) to check its own destructive excesses. But he hoped, also, that the new Constitution would last because it would deserve to. That is, he hoped its founders had grasped the rights and requisites of human nature well enough to design a system that would conduce over time, as far as humanly possible, to good government. A republican government that endured would tend to attract what Madison called the prejudices of the people to its side; but to the extent it actually secured justice and the common good, such a government would deserve to endure and to be supported even by, per impossibile, a nation of philosophers.

If, as Madison and his colleagues assumed, human nature was unchanging and government itself was the greatest of all reflections on human nature, then a relatively unchanging constitutional system would be a reasonable conclusion from an essentially unchanging human nature. The system didnt preclude all change, of course, providing in the Constitution itself a method for amending the agreement; but amendments had to be made in accordance with constitutional rules (see Article V), and more broadly and loosely in accordance with the Constitutions general spirit. In fact,the progressives were happy to use the amendment process to open the government to what they considered salutary modernization: the Sixteenth Amendment (ratified in 1913) authorized Congress to pass a national income tax, the Seventeenth (1913) made US senators popularly elected, the Eighteenth (1919) established Prohibition, and the Nineteenth (1920) enacted womens suffrage.