Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  In the 1890s the main source of the pressure on a national scale was the Populist party, a group of discontented farmers who took up the ideas of several radical reformists. The party, which demanded such policies as deliberate inflation, a graduated income tax, and full government control of the railroads and trusts, was only slightly ahead of its time. From 1900 to 1917, its heir and successor dominated the nation’s top leadership, intellectual and political, Democratic and Republican. The heir was the Progressive movement.

  For the most part, the leading spirits of the Progressive era were men who had been students here or abroad in the 1880s or ’90s. They were the voices of the first American generation to be reared in college on the new collectivist theories; they were men trained to the conviction that an increase in the power of the state is the solution to most of mankind’s problems. These men turned the ideas of their avant-garde professors into an enduring American orthodoxy. In this endeavor, jurists, historians, economists, and bestselling novelists fought side by side, along with Settlement House social workers who deplored mass “poverty,” muckraking journalists who denounced the profit motive, Presidents who denounced “malefactors of great wealth” (Theodore Roosevelt), and Progressive educators who denounced the mind.

  All these men and movements preached the prerogatives of the poor and the weak, whom they described as the victims of big business; they demanded a new approach to social questions, an approach eloquently characterized by Herbert Croly. Croly was an editor and co-founder of The New Republic and an adviser to Theodore Roosevelt.

  The Promise of American Life [Croly wrote in an influential work] is to be fulfilled—not merely by a maximum amount of economic freedom, but by a certain measure of discipline; not merely by the abundant satisfaction of individual desires, but by a large measure of individual subordination and self-denial.

  Herbert Croly was the son of a leading American disciple of Auguste Comte’s positivism; he was also a philosophy student at Harvard under the Hegelian Josiah Royce. Positivism, Comte had explained, places itself “at the social point of view,” and therefore “cannot tolerate the notion of rights, for such notion rests on individualism.” Individualism, Royce was teaching his students, is “the sin against the Holy Ghost.”

  “The National Government must step in and discriminate,” Croly wrote; “but it must discriminate, not on behalf of liberty and the special individual, but on behalf of equality and the average man.”7

  The average man at the time was struggling to enter this country in order to find sanctuary from governments around the globe eager to “step in and discriminate”; he was struggling to enter the fabled land of abundance, where all men, including the poorest, were enjoying a standard of living surpassing that of their counterparts anywhere in the world. But the Progressives were not a movement of average men; they had a different view of life. By himself—declared Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser and the other Naturalists of the period—man has no choice and no chance; he is a helpless social product doomed to poverty and despair; his only hope is the government.

  Organized labor was not making radical demands. In contrast to European workers, who were in the vanguard of a class struggle and of the socialist movement, American workers, like the American people, continued to reflect the influence of the Enlightenment. American labor leaders upheld labor’s independence and resisted any form of paternalism. The Progressives were undeterred. “The program of a government of freedom,” said President Woodrow Wilson, “must in these days be positive, not negative merely.” “Freedom to-day,” he said, “is something more than being let alone.”8

  Laissez-faire is not an absolute, explained Oliver Wendell Holmes, and it is not inherent in the Constitution; “social needs” must be supreme over all laws and abstract principles, however venerable. The Constitution is not sacrosanct anyway, added historian Charles Beard; it merely reflects the selfish desire of the Founding Fathers to protect their own property holdings. Reality is a social product, said the pragmatists; logic itself is in continual flux; why should politics be any different?

  Let us not hesitate, but “experiment” now, said all these voices; the essence of man is not primarily intellect, but action.

  The Progressives did not hesitate to name the model of their action. The model was the mother country of the leading Progressive state, Wisconsin. Wisconsin was described at the time as being “fundamentally a German state,” which was “doing for America what Germany is doing for the world.” “In Germany, perhaps more than anywhere else,” said the New England humanitarian Jane Addams, “the government has come to concern itself with the primitive essential needs of its working people.” “Shall a democracy,” she asked, “be slower... ?”9

  The result of the Progressives’ ideas was a wave of new measures and policies in this country, including labor laws which specified working conditions and maximum hours; a compulsory system of workmen’s compensation; the regular use of the Sherman Act to prosecute businessmen; legislation forbidding “unfair” competition (the Clayton Act); a major new regulatory agency (the Federal Trade Commission); and government entry on an unprecedented scale into such fields as finance (the Federal Reserve Act), conservation, food and drugs. To administer and pay for the foregoing, two additional factors, long familiar in Europe, appeared here for the first time: a large, entrenched civil service and, after 1913, a graduated income tax.

  In Europe, the statist intellectuals, in harmony with the continent’s basic philosophic tradition, could afford to be ideologically outspoken. In America, their counterparts could not afford it. Characteristically, following the pragmatists, they preached Progressive ideas, and then presented each new governmental measure as a product not of ideology, but of limited, “practical” factors without wider implications. At the same time they continued to offer ideological reassurances to the nation. There must be a “partial substitution of collectivism for individualism,” said Theodore Roosevelt in 1913, “not to destroy, but to save individualism.”10

  In Europe, the rise of statism had been accompanied by the rise of an aggressive nationalism. The same combination of policies was evident in the American reformist movement. (The best-known example is Theodore Roosevelt, the first major opponent of capitalism to occupy the Presidency, who united zeal for trust-busting with ardent militarism.) The two policies were complementary: each involved a major growth in the power of the central government, and each rested on appeals to the ethics of social service (at home, to the poor; abroad, to the “backward peoples”). “The spirit of imperialism,” observes American historian R.E. Osgood, “was an exaltation of duty above rights, of collective welfare above individual self-interest....”

  Imperialism in the new world had further, deeper roots. It was difficult to defend such a policy by reference to reason; it was easy by reference to “will.” American imperialism, adds Osgood—like its European model—also exalted “the heroic values as opposed to materialism, action instead of logic, the natural impulse rather than the pallid intellect.”11

  When 1914 came, the country did not wish to pursue “the heroic values as opposed to materialism.” But a group of determined intellectuals, religious leaders, and politicians did wish it. This group, which prevailed over an antiwar public, included in time almost all the leading Progressives. President Wilson, in his war message to Congress, observed that the United States had “no selfish ends to serve” in entering the war. Herbert Croly said that entering the war would provide America with “the tonic of a serious moral adventure.” He warned his countrymen of the “real danger of national disintegration,” if the average man should elevate “having his own way” above “national service.”12

  After the war the Progressive movement faded. Its political legacy, however, which included many wartime controls never repealed despite the armistice, endured. The Progressives had started America moving in a new direction: they had taken the first major steps toward the establishment of a welfare state.


  Culturally and politically, World War I was the turning point. It marked the end of the individualist era throughout the West. Although Americans yearned in 1920 to go “back to normalcy,” there was to be no normalcy again. “Normalcy” to them meant a civilized world which respected man’s rights, and its consequences: international harmony, lasting peace, a continuously rising standard of living, unobstructed freedom, cheerful self-confidence, hope for the future. Instead, the country faced the aftermath of global breakdown, the mushrooming of European dictatorships, the growing fear that the selfless crusade of 1917 had been a senseless slaughter, the growing claims of men’s duty to their neighbors, and the newer claim of America’s duty to the world. The response to all of it was a binge of giddy, gin-soaked escapism.

  The last of the nineteenth-century defenders of laissez-faire were gone. The schools and colleges were not turning out replacements. Although Progressivism had faded, its major cultural ally was flourishing: the twenties marked the emergence of Progressive education as a national force. For the first time, the ideas of the new educators gained a mass base, spreading beyond a comparatively small vanguard to engulf the children of the middle class. Increasingly, the children were hearing more about feelings and less about objective reality; they were also hearing more about social responsibility and less about the country’s past. A generation was losing the knowledge of what the American system had originally been.

  At the same time, the avant-garde, led by a group of expatriates, was introducing a similar perspective into the arts; it was presiding over the first major eruption in America of the modernist revolt against objectivity and the nineteenth century. Obediently imitating their old-world mentors, fawning over Continental decadence while cursing the “philistine Americans,” the Pound-Eliot-Stein axis and its equivalents in the other arts were turning out free verse, stream-of-consciousness novels, expressionist plays, “abstract” paintings, nonintelligible forms, nongraspable symbols, obscurity as a means of “bourgeoisie”-baiting, obscurity offered as spirituality, obscurity for its own sake. The artists said they were bored by life in the United States; they found European manifestations they could admire. The work of Paul Klee, boasted the newly founded Museum of Modem Art during the painter’s American debut in 1930, “makes the flesh creep by creating a spectre fresh from a nightmare.”13

  America was still decades away from the cultural condition of Germany. At one time, however, the distance between them would have had to be measured in light years.

  The conservative Republicans in the twenties made their own contributions to the trend. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, whom people took to be advocates of capitalism, accepted without challenge and thus effectively removed from the field of controversy all the precedent-setting controls of the Progressive era. In addition, while continuing the longtime practice of dispensing Federal favors to business, they gradually introduced new statist measures of their own. As early as 1919, Herbert Hoover, for instance, rejected laissez-faire in favor of an undefined “progressive middle way” between socialism and anarchism. As Secretary of Commerce under Harding and Coolidge, Hoover supported several regulatory innovations, including government agencies to control the air transport and radio industries. Hoover at the time also backed compulsory unionization for railway labor, and recommended that American business organize itself into industry-wide, cartel-like trade associations. “We are passing,” he said, “from a period of extremely individualistic action into a period of associational activities.”14

  When the disaster struck in 1929 the country was intellectually disarmed. There were no prominent voices to name the disaster’s cause.

  The Great Depression was not the result of a free market, but of controls; the economic dislocations which led to the collapse were a product of the government intervention of the preceding decades. A few men in the thirties, speaking for the remnant of the classical tradition, tried to point this out. They did not, however, offer any comprehensive or philosophic approach to the issues; they were concerned mostly with the details of current legislation—and their viewpoint was thoroughly ignored. The disaster created by controls was widely ascribed to the free market. On this point the Hoover Republicans and the liberal intellectuals were in agreement.

  President Hoover responded to the crisis by preaching individualism, while at the same time clinging to the earlier controls and urging more government action, including massive public works, welfare programs at the state and local levels, farm price supports, and emergency loans to business. Hoover’s policy was historic; it defined a new role for the government, which has been accurately described by Walter Lippmann. “It was Mr. Hoover,” he noted, “who abandoned the principles of laissez faire in relation to the business cycle [and] established the conviction that prosperity and depression can be publicly controlled by political action....”15

  Hoover’s policy, like Brüning’s in Germany, did not work. The soup kitchens and the desperation spread.

  The intellectuals stated their conclusions. The cause of the misery, declared Charles Beard, is “the individualist creed.... The task before us, then, is not to furbish up an old slogan, but to get rid of it....” The intellectuals had long condemned the American system and the ideas on which it was based. They had their own creed, their own, “anti-materialistic” ideals, and their own ambitions. To such men, the Great Depression was a godsend. To the writers and artists

  who had grown up in the Big Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding-out of everything they cared about, these years were not depressing but stimulating [writes Edmund Wilson]. One couldn’t help being exhilarated at the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid gigantic fraud. It gave us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power.16

  In 1933 a voice congenial to the writers and artists took over. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, invoking an old ethics, offered the country a New Deal. The nation, declared Roosevelt in his first Inaugural Address, must act “as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline.”

  As a result of the statist foundation and the economic catastrophe they inherited, the New Dealers could afford to be more explicit than their predecessors in the reformist movement. “[W]hether we like it or not,” sociologist Henry Pratt Fairchild wrote, “modern life has become so highly integrated, so inextricably socialized, so definitely organic, that the very concept of the individual is becoming obsolete.”17

  It seemed at the time to be unanimous. The Progressive educators abruptly shifted their emphasis from the earlier “child-centered” orientation to a “community-centered” version. The fiction writers wrote U.S.A. or The Grapes of Wrath or Waiting for Lefty (as the curtain comes down, furious workers, learning that the bosses’ police have murdered a union leader, howl repeatedly “Strike, strike, strike!”). The churches—according to a group representing the major Protestant denominations—“protest against the selfish desire for wealth as the principal motive of industry,” seek “a social order which shall be based upon Jesus’ principles of love and brotherhood,” and therefore offer “hearty support of a planned economic system.” Even the skeptics joined in. There is nothing “peculiarly sacred” about American “folklore,” such as capitalism or the Constitution, said Thurman Arnold, a Yale law professor who typifies the increasingly pragmatist approach of the later New Deal. We need not “rush to theories and principles as guides,” said Arnold, who soon moved to Washington to serve as head of the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department.18

  The absolutists knew what was absolute; the relativists knew what to dispense with. Some were dogmatists and some were pragmatists; but all were working toward the same kind of end.

  The New Dealers did not lavish praise on Germany. They were warmer to Mussolini’s Italy. For most of them, however, the real beacon was elsewhere. “The future,” said Rexford Tugwell, “is becoming visible in Russia; the present is bitterly in contrast.”19

  The
thirties have been described correctly as America’s Red Decade; the Communist influence on the country’s intellectuals and on the New Deal was palpable. Communism, however, was not the decisive causal factor. It was merely one fashionable expression of the ideas advocated by every major group.

  If Americans were to “reconstruct” society properly, wrote John Dewey at the start of the Depression, it “would signify that we had entered constructively and voluntarily upon the road which Soviet Russia is traveling with so much attendant destruction and coercion.” Dewey was not a Marxist; he described himself as a liberal democrat; he disagreed with the Bolsheviks on the method of travel—but not on the road or direction.

  Dewey did not fear that the end of that road would have to be the same in America as in Russia. There are no absolutes, he said; reality is inherently “unfinished.” We can know where a course will take us, he said, only “after we have acted.”20

  The political program of the New Deal centered on a goal that had been endorsed but not stressed by the Progressives. The Democrats demanded Federal action to achieve equality, “equality of opportunity.” Besides the traditional Constitutional rights, which were political in nature, they said, men also have economic rights.

  The Founding Fathers had conceived “rights” as entitlements to act and to keep the products of one’s actions, not as claims to the actions or products of others. “Equality,” in the original American view, meant the right of every man to independence—to make his way and sustain his life by his own effort; “opportunity” meant freedom. The New Dealers rejected this approach as unfeeling and cruel. “A hungry man,” they said, “is not free”; and anyway, they said, freedom is not enough. “Talk of liberty in reform circles now was likely to produce a yawn, if not a scowl,” writes one historian; “opportunity ... was the point.”