Kennedy’s contribution to the permanent welfare state was for the most part stylistic, as we’ve seen. But his “martyrdom” provided a profound psychological crisis that proved useful for the promotion of liberal goals and ideas. Johnson used it not just to hijack the national political agenda but to transform Progressivism itself into a fullblown mass political religion. For the first time, the progressive dream could be pursued without reservation during a time of prosperity and relative peace. No longer dependent on war or economic crisis, Progressivism finally got a clean shot at creating the sort of society it had long preached about. The psychological angst and anomie that progressives believed lay at the core of capitalist society could be healed by the ministrations of the state. The moment to create a politics of meaning on its own merits had finally arrived.
In his first speech as president, Johnson signaled his intention to build a new liberal church upon the rock of Kennedy’s memory. That church, that sacralized community, would be called the Great Society.
THE BIRTH OF THE LIBERAL GOD-STATE
We have already discussed at some length the personalities driving American liberalism. It is now necessary to take what may seem like a sharp detour to address the cult of the state itself in American liberalism. Without this historical detour, it is difficult to see modern liberalism for what it is: a religion of state worship whose sacrificial Christ was JFK and whose Pauline architect was LBJ.
It’s hard to fix a specific starting date for the progressive race for the Great Society, but a good guess might be 1SS8. the year Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward burst on the American scene. One of the most influential works of progressive propaganda ever conceived, the book sold hundreds of thousands of copies and was hailed as the biggest publishing sensation since Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The narrator of the book, which is set in the faraway year 2000, lives in a Utopian, militarized society. Workers belong to a unified “industrial army,” and the economy is run by all-powerful central planners partly inspired by the successes of German military planning. Citizens are drafted into their occupations, for “every able-bodied citizen [is] bound to work for the nation, whether with mind or muscle.” The story’s preacher informs us that America has finally created the kingdom of heaven on earth. Indeed, everyone looks back on the “age of individualism” with bemused contempt.
The umbrella in particular is remembered as the symbol of the nineteenth century’s disturbing obsession with individualism. In Bellamy’s Utopia, umbrellas have been replaced with retractable canopies so that everyone is protected from the rain equally. “[I]n the nineteenth century.” explains a character, “when it rained, the people of Boston put up three hundred thousand umbrellas over as many heads, and in the twentieth century they put up one umbrella over all the heads.”
Bellamy’s vision of a militarized, nationalistic, socialist Utopia captivated the imagination of young progressives everywhere. Overnight, Bellamite “Nationalist Clubs” appeared across the country dedicated to “the nationalization of industry and the promotion of the brotherhood of humanity.” Nationalism in America, as in most of Europe, meant both nationalism and socialism. Thus Bellamy predicted that individual U.S. states would have to be abolished because “state governments would have interfered with the control and discipline of the industrial army.”
Religion was the glue that held this American national socialism together. Bellamy believed that his brand of socialist nationalism was the true application of Jesus’ teachings. His cousin Francis Bellamy, the author of the Pledge of Allegiance, was similarly devoted. A founding member of the First Nationalist Club of Boston and co-founder of the Society of Christian Socialists. Francis wrote a sermon, “Jesus, the Socialist,” that electrified parishes across the country. In an expression of his “military socialism.” the Pledge of Allegiance was accompanied by a fascist or “Roman” salute to the flag in American public schools. Indeed, some contend that the Nazis got the idea for their salute from America.
Everywhere one looked, “scientific” utopianism, nationalism, socialism, and Christianity blended into one another. Consider the 1912 Progressive Party convention. The New York Times described it as a “convention of fanatics,” at which political speeches were punctuated by the singing of hymns and shouts of “Amen!” “It was not a convention at all. It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts,” the Times reported. “It was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp meeting done over into political terms.” The “expression on every face” in the audience, including that of Jane Addams. who rose to nominate Teddy Roosevelt for his quixotic last bid for the presidency, was one “of fanatical and religious enthusiasm.” The delegates, who “believed—obviously and certainly believed—that they were enlisted in a contest with the Powers of Darkness.” sang “We Will Follow Jesus,” but with the name “Roosevelt” replacing the now-outdated savior. Among them were representatives of every branch of Progressivism, including the Social Gospeller Washington Gladden, happily replacing the old Christian savior with the new “Americanist” one. Roosevelt told the rapturous audience, “Our cause is based on the eternal principles of righteousness...We stand at Armageddon, and we battle for the Lord.”
The American Social Gospel and Christian sociology movements essentially sought to bend Christianity to the progressive social agenda. Senator Albert Beveridge, the progressive Republican from Indiana who chaired the 1912 convention, summed up the progressive attitude well when he declared. “God has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.”
Walter Rauschenbusch offers the best short explanation of the Social Gospel for our purposes. A professor at the Rochester Theological Seminary and a onetime preacher on the outskirts of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the slender clergyman with a thin goatee had become the informal leader of the movement when he published Christianity and the Social Crisis in 1907. “[U]nless the ideal social order can supply men with food, warmth and comfort more efficiently than our present economic order,” he warned, “back we shall go to Capitalism...’The God that answereth by low food prices,’ ” he boomed, “ ‘let him be God.’ ” Left-wing clergy like Rauschenbusch were convinced that the state was the instrument of God and that collectivism was the new order sanctioned by Jesus.
Progressive clergy like Rauschenbusch laid the philosophical and theological foundation for statism in ways that the new crop of social scientists never could. They argued from pulpits and political gatherings and in the intellectual press for a total and complete reconception of scripture in which redemption could only be achieved collectively. Conservative theologians argued that only the individual could be born again. The progressive Christians claimed that individuals no longer mattered and that only the state could serve as divine intercessor. The Baptist Social Gospel preacher argued that the state must become “the medium through which the people shall co-operate in their search for the kingdom of God and its righteousness.”
Inspiration for such ideas came from an improbable source: Bismarck’s Prussia. Bismarck inspired American progressives in myriad ways, some of which have been touched on already. First, he was a centralizer, a uniter, a European Lincoln who brought disparate regions and factions under the yoke of the state, heedless of dissent. Second, he was the innovator of top-down socialism, which pioneered many of the welfare state programs the progressives yearned for: pensions, health insurance, worker safety measures, eight-hour workdays, and so on. Bismarck’s efficiency at delivering programs without the messiness of “excessive” democracy set the precedent for the idea that “great men,” modernizers. and “men of action” could do what the leaders of decadent and decaying democracies could not.
Moreover. Bismarck’s socialism from above gelded classical liberalism in Germany and helped to hobble it around the globe. This was precisely his purpose. Bismarck wanted to forestall greater socialist or democratic radicalism by giving the people what they wanted without having them v
ote for it. To this end he bought off the left-leaning reformers who didn’t particularly care about limited government or liberal constitutionalism. At the same time, he methodically marginalized, and in many cases crushed, the classical or limited-state liberals (a similar dynamic transpired in the United States during World War I). Hence, in Germany, both left and right became in effect statist ideologies, and the two sides fought over who would get to impose its vision on society. Liberalism, defined as an ideology of individual freedom and democratic government, slowly atrophied and died in Germany because Bismarck denied it a popular constituency. In its place was the statist liberalism of Dewey and DuBois, Wilson and FDR. a liberalism defined by economic entitlements and the alleviation of poverty.
Then there was the Kulturkampf—a subject to be discussed at greater length in a later chapter. The important point about the Kulturkampf. lost on so many contemporary commentators, is that it was a liberal phenomenon. German progressives declared war on backward Catholicism, believing that their blending of science and a form of nationalistic Social Gospel was the ideology of the future. It was a model the progressives adapted to American soil.
The godfathers of the liberal God-state were the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the scientist Charles Darwin. Hegel had argued that history was an unfolding evolutionary process, and the engine driving that process was the state. The “State is the actually existing, realized moral life...The divine idea as it exists on earth.” Hegel declared in The Philosophy of History. “[A] 11 worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.” The movement of the state through time was the “march of God on earth.” Darwin’s theory of evolution seemed to confirm that man was part of a larger organism, governed and directed by the state as the mind guides the body. For the “modern” clergy this meant that politics was a religious calling; after all. politics is nothing less than the effort to define the mission of the state, and the state was the hand of God.
Virtually all of the leading progressive intellectuals shared this “organic” and spiritual understanding of politics—perhaps none more than Richard Ely. “God works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than through any other institution.” proclaimed the founder of the American Economic Association and the so-called Wisconsin School of progressivism. The state, he insisted, “is religious in its essence,” and there is no corner of human existence beyond the scope of its authority. A mentor to Wilson and a great influence on Teddy Roosevelt, Ely was a postmillennialist Christian who defined the state as “a mighty force in furthering God’s kingdom and establishing righteous relations” Many of Ely’s famous colleagues at the University of Wisconsin saw their advocacy for economic reform, eugenics, war, socialism, Prohibition, and the rest of the progressive agenda as part of a united effort to bring about the “New Jerusalem.”
It made little sense to talk about progressives as a group distinct from the theocratic zealots trying to create a new God-state. The American Economic Association, its mission statement dedicated to uniting church, state, and science to secure America’s redemption, served as both the intellectual engine of progressive social policy and a de facto organ of the Social Gospel movement. More than sixty clergymen—roughly half the group’s roster—counted themselves as members. Later, during World War I, Ely was the most rabid of jingoists, organizing loyalty oaths, hurling accusations of treason, and arguing that opponents of the war should be shot.
With Woodrow Wilson, it is impossible to separate the priest from the professor. From early essays with such titles as “Christ’s Army” and “Christian Progress” to his later addresses as president, Wilson made it clear that he was a divine instrument, and the state the holy sword of God’s crusade, while at the same time insisting that he represented the triumph of science and reason in politics. Speaking to the Young Men’s Christian Association, he told the audience that public servants should be guided solely by the question: What would Christ do in your situation? He then proceeded to explain, “There is a mighty task before us, and it welds us together. It is to make the United States a mighty Christian Nation, and to Christianize the world.”
The war only served to intensify these impulses. “The Past and the Present are in deadly grapple,” he declared. His goal was the complete “destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere...that can disturb the peace of the world” and the “settlement of every question” facing mankind. Wilson advocated “Force! Force to the utmost! Force without stint or limit! The righteous and triumphant Force which shall make Right the law of the world, and cast every selfish dominion down in the dust.” America was “an instrument in the hands of God,” he proclaimed, while his propaganda ministry called World War I a war “to re-win the tomb of Christ.”
Wilson shared with other fascist leaders a firm conviction that his organic connection with “the people” was absolute and transcended the mere mechanics of democracy. “So sincerely do I believe these things that I am sure that I speak the mind and wish of the people of America.” Many Europeans recognized him as an avatar of the rising socialist World Spirit. In 1919 a young Italian socialist proclaimed, “Wilson’s empire has no borders because He [sic] does not govern territories. Rather He interprets the needs, the hopes, the faith of the human spirit, which has no spatial or temporal limits.” The young man’s name was Benito Mussolini.
That Wilson’s government intruded deeply into the private sector in unprecedented ways is indisputable. It launched the effort, carried forward by FDR, of turning the economy into a “cooperative” enterprise where labor, business, and government sat around a table and hashed things out on their own. Such a system—they called it syndicalism, corporatism, and fascism in Europe—sounds attractive on paper, but inevitably it serves to benefit the people inside the room and few others. When Wilson’s dollar-a-year men weren’t rewarding their respective industries, they were subjecting more of the private sector to government control. Wilson’s planners set prices on almost every commodity, fixed wages, commandeered the private railroads, created a vast machinery for the policing of thought crimes, and even tried to dictate the menu of every family meal.
Wilson’s war socialism was temporary, but its legacy was permanent. The War Industries Board and cartels closed shop after the war, but the precedent they set would prove too attractive for progressives to abandon.
While America was the victor in World War I, Wilson and the progressives lost their war at home. The government’s deep penetration into civil society seemed forgivable during a war but was unacceptable during peace. Likewise, the artificial economic boom came to an end. Moreover, the Treaty of Versailles, which was supposed to justify every imposition and sacrifice, proved a disappointing riot of hypocrisies and false promises.
But the progressive faith endured. Liberal intellectuals and activists insisted during the 1920s that Wilson’s war socialism had been a smashing success and its failures a result of insufficient zeal. “We planned in war” became their slogan. Alas, they couldn’t convince the yokels in the voting booths. As a result, they came more and more to admire the Bismarckian approach of top-down socialism. They also looked to Russia and Italy, where “men of action” were creating Utopias with the bulldozer and the slide rule. The Marxist emphasis on scientific socialism and social engineering infected American Progressivism. And since science isn’t open to democratic debate, an arrogant literal-mindedness took over Progressivism.
It was also around this time that through a dexterous sleight of hand, Progressivism came to be renamed “liberalism.” In the past, liberalism had referred to political and economic liberty as understood by Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke and Adam Smith. For them, the ultimate desideratum was maximum individual freedom under the benign protection of a minimalist state. The progressives, led by Dewey, subtly changed the meaning of this term, importing the Prussian vision of liberalism as the alleviation of material and educational poverty, and liberation fro
m old dogmas and old faiths. For progressives liberty no longer meant freedom from tyranny, but freedom from want, freedom to be a “constructive” citizen, the Rousseauian and Hegelian “freedom” of living in accord with the state and the general will. Classical liberals were now routinely called conservatives, while devotees of social control were dubbed liberals. Thus in 1935 John Dewey would write in Liberalism and Social Action that activist government in the name of the economically disadvantaged and social reconstruction had “virtually come to define the meaning of liberal faith-”
Given this worldview. it shouldn’t be surprising that so many liberals believed the Soviet Union was the freest place on earth. In a series of articles on the Soviet Union for the New Republic, Dewey hailed the grand “experiment” as the “liberation of a people to consciousness of themselves as a determining power in the shaping of their ultimate fate.” The Soviet revolution had brought “a release of human powers on such an unprecedented scale that it is of incalculable significance not only for that country, but for the world.” Jane Addams also called the Soviets “the greatest social experiment in history.” Freed from the dogmas of the past, and adhering to evolutionary imperatives, Pragmatists believed that even states must “learn by doing”—even if that meant, once again, that the new Jacobins had to unleash terror on those who would not comply with the general will.
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