American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  People argued the case in terms also of their basic values, but values were not clear guides to action. Almost everyone believed in Individualism, Democracy, and of course Liberty or Freedom, but how did these terms translate into economic or governmental policy? Individualism was a case in point. It was in the name of Individualism or individual liberty that the businessmen of the late nineteenth century had fought off governmental interference and apotheosized the Horatio Alger man who rose to the top through the untrammeled exercise of ambition, competition, and talent. Then Wilson, La Follette, et al. had turned Algerism upside down by proclaiming that monopolies had blighted individual liberty, opportunity, competition.

  Or consider democracy. Economic? Political? Social? In both the private and public sphere? Exercised through the majority will? Stockholders’ meetings? Party politics? Coalitions of minorities? Or through a scramble for power and pelf, open to all on an equal basis, favoring none? For most Americans, for most of their leaders, these questions were still open.

  Then, the thorniest question of all: If economic concentration did indeed threaten American democracy, what should be done about it? Those who favored some kind of governmental action had divided most clearly in 1912 between Wilson’s promise to break up economic bigness and Roosevelt’s proposal to regulate it. It turned out, though, that these differences were not as polar—or as profound—as the two sides believed. In practice, policy crept out of these narrow categories and found its own crisscrossing paths. Then too, Wilson showed considerable flexibility in carrying out his programs. Thus, after having flayed Roosevelt’s proposal to regulate big business through a strong Federal Trade Commission, Wilson himself moved around to this position.

  However much he might have altered course, President Wilson’s forceful leadership stimulated and catalyzed thought throughout the ranks of progressive thinkers. Out of the clash of ideas during the Roosevelt and Taft years arose an intellectual leadership that was centrally concerned over the sharpening conflict between the ideological defense of big business and the claims of democratic progressives. Four men took the lead in rethinking the role of democracy in the booming American workshop, the whole question of “industrial democracy.”

  By far the most influential of these—measured both by access to power and by influence on policy—was Louis Brandeis. Unperturbed by Wilson’s failure to offer the “people’s lawyer” a major post in the face of conservative opposition, the Boston attorney continued to advise the President on major economic policy. “Brandeis and Wilson initially used Wilson’s presidency, and the potential power it gave him, to teach the nation about the ideals of Brandeis and the progressives and to enact some of them into law,” according to Philippa Strum. Brandeis successfully backed James McReynolds for Attorney General; met often with Cabinet and other Administration officials; worked with Secretary of State Bryan to influence Wilson against allowing the “money trust” too much control over the new Federal Reserve system; and, changing his own mind, helped change Wilson’s mind as to the desirability of a regulatory, rather than merely investigative, Federal Trade Commission. Though disappointed by Wilson’s conservative appointments to both the commission and the Federal Reserve Board, Brandeis remained on cordial terms with the President.

  Still, Brandeis from the start took a stronger line against big business, the trusts, and especially the money trust than Wilson did. The theme that “never varied in Louis Brandeis’s thought,” according to Melvin Urofsky, was that “too great a concentration of economic power constituted a social, economic and political menace to a free society; a business could be efficient only up to a certain size beyond which bigness caused inefficiency; trusts could never stand up to smaller units in a freely and truly competitive market place; proper rules regulating competition could insure such conditions; competition is the atmosphere which a free society breathes.”

  For Brandeis the paramount issue was not efficiency but democracy—industrial, political, governmental democracy. In “striving for democracy,” he told the Commission on Industrial Relations in 1915, “we are striving for the development of men.” Industrial democracy would not come by gift; it “has got to be by those who desire it.” Brandeis’s great hope was that industrial workers would want it, for they had the most to gain from it. Individual employees had no effective voice or vote, but collectively workers should exercise more control through their unions, just as stockholders should be held responsible for decisions made by their companies. Brandeis pointed to the garment industry, where an agreement had created a system of government for both employers and unions, including even “administrative officers, courts, and a legislature always ready to take up questions arising in the trade.” The smaller the business, Brandeis suggested, the more likely such industrial democracy could grow.

  Second only to Brandeis in influence over presidential leadership was Herbert Croly, friend of Theodore Roosevelt. Raised by activist parents—his father the editor of the crusading New York Daily Graphic, his mother a journalist and pioneering feminist—Croly left for Harvard in 1886 imbued with his family’s Comtean positivism and dedicated to the welfare of mankind, and after intermittent years of study under James and Santayana, and as editor of the Architectural Record, he became even more dedicated to the welfare of mankind. He produced in 1909 his masterwork, The Promise of American Life, a 468-page tome as relevant and powerful as it was long and prolix. It was Roosevelt’s reading of this book, shortly after his return from Africa, that mightily strengthened the radical thrust of the former President’s progressivism and brought the two men together.

  Two progressives could hardly have been more philosophically divided than Croly and Brandeis. Brandeis looked back nostalgically to Jeffersonian ideas of local democracy, individual liberty, rural culture, and small-scale economic competition. Croly called for a strong national government, under vigorous executive leadership, prepared to carry out progressive and humane policies at home and pursue nationalistic policies abroad. To him, individual liberty was important, but no less was liberty of the whole people to shape their own destiny. Only the centralized power of the people could deal with the centralized power of big business. Croly, it was said, would use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends, though he complained that Hamilton perverted the “national idea” with his upper-class bias almost as much as Jefferson perverted the democratic idea with his extreme individualism and egalitarianism.

  Croly was in fact calling for rare national leadership. He was man enough to chide his friend the Colonel for trying to make the American citizen into a “sixty-horse-power moral motor-car,” for doing little to encourage “candid and consistent thinking,” for his “sheer exuberance of moral energy,” and TR was man enough to accept the soft impeachment. The two worked together, each hardening the other’s convictions, through the 1912 campaign, and then collaborated while Roosevelt debated whether to stick with the Progressives or return to Republicanism. But as the Colonel’s 1916 election prospects dwindled, Croly turned increasingly to the Democrat in the White House who was practicing leadership, no longer merely preaching it.

  When Croly began to plan a new weekly of progressive opinion in 1913, it was only natural that he would turn to his recent acquaintance Walter Weyl. A product of the Wharton School in his native Philadelphia and of the University of Halle in Germany, Weyl in 1912 published The New Democracy. “America today is in a somber, soul-questioning mood,” were Weyl’s opening words. “We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions. We are hastily testing all our political ideals.” He was happy to help with both conceptions and ideals. In the next 356 pages, he listed the nation’s gains but also its failures—“sensational inequalities of wealth, insane extravagances, strident ostentations,” along with boss-ridden cities, wretched slums, pauperism, vice, crime, insanity, dangerous factories, unemployment, premature deaths of babies, the scrapping of aged workmen,
rising class conflict, hunger, “social vice,” the breakdown of government.

  What would Weyl do about all these evils? First, measure them; he was an avid statistician. Second, work with consumer and labor groups, as he did in several years of involvement with the labor leader John Mitchell and his coal miners. Third, find a solution midway between Manchester liberalism and Marxist socialism. Finally, in all this be practical, “pragmatist.” Marx was wrong, Weyl contended, in teaching that progress would come through the poverty and proletarianization of the working class. Weyl proposed the doctrine of “progress through prosperity.” Reformers should use democracy—the right to vote, the initiative and referendum, the party primary—as both means and end. A sweet and easygoing man, considered almost saintly by his friends, Weyl believed in progress without pain.

  Weyl was forty when tapped for the new weekly; Croly also recruited another thinker fifteen years younger than Weyl, and the most remarkable of the future editors. Like Weyl, Walter Lippmann was born of German-Jewish parents. Growing up on Manhattan’s upper East Side, he was indulged as a child and later granted independence and the money to sustain it. During his first three years at Harvard, he took one course each in history and government, three in economics, five in language, and seven in philosophy. He studied under Harvard greats—Hugo Münsterberg in psychology, George Lyman Kittredge in English, Irving Babbitt in French literature, and in philosophy, George Santayana and, above all, William James, who profoundly influenced the eager young scholar. Lippmann also learned something about political psychology and human motivation from a visiting British professor, Graham Wallas, one of the original Fabian socialists. By the time Lippmann left Harvard, he had headed the student socialist club.

  By twenty-five, Lippmann had lived the average man’s lifetime: assistant to Santayana, reporter for the Boston Common, research aide to Lincoln Steffens, secretary to the socialist mayor of Schenectady, and author of two important books, A Preface to Politics and Drift and Mastery. Through luck and design, he had come to know scores of persons of political or literary note on both sides of the Atlantic—Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett, G. K. Chesterton in England, and at home such unlikely persons as W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he put up unsuccessfully for Manhattan’s Liberal Club. When, in October 1913, Croly invited him to lunch at the fashionable Players Club and offered him sixty dollars a week to work for the new weekly, Lippmann accepted on the spot.

  “Lippmann, as you say, is an interesting mixture of maturity and innocence,” Croly happily wrote his close friend Judge Learned Hand. No matter how Lippmann turned out as a political philosopher, “he certainly has great possibilities as a political journalist.” He did not know as much as he thought he did, “but he does know a lot, and his general sense of values is excellent.” He was a bit impertinent, but it would be an impertinent journal. Croly added roguishly, “We’ll throw a few firecrackers under the skirts of the old women on the bench and in other high places.”

  The weekly—it would be called the New Republic—did toss a few firecrackers, some of which exploded, but it became primarily a journal that reflected the eclectic and limber attitudes of its several editors. Lippmann’s political philosophy was changing even as he joined the weekly. Already he had given up his socialist beliefs, especially after his experience with the socialist mayor, who moderated his program to pander to the sluggish masses. His Preface to Politics was an “intellectual potpourri,” in Ronald Steel’s words, filled with Lippmann’s student collocation—James’s tribute to practical results, Henri Bergson’s creative intuition, Nietzsche’s will to power, H. G. Wells’s scientific utopianism, a chunk of Freud, and John Dewey’s master plan for social change. He attacked majority rule, the two-party system, trust-busting, electoral reform, and other products of “uptown” reformers or the mass mind. He called for national leadership, scientific management, and, in Freudian style, a new morality based on directing instead of “tabooing our impulses.” Drift and Mastery was a more intellectually focused and limited book that seemed to abandon Lippmann’s earlier emphasis on irrationality in politics, fretted over the “chaos of a new freedom,” but still contained a dash of youthful iconoclasm.

  Still, it was the old story of progressives and reformers having a far better grasp of what they opposed than what they wished to substitute. The New Republic crowd, and their friends and friendly critics like Brandeis and Dewey, brilliantly dissected problems of economics, religion, politics, morals, psychology; they made many a sensible proposal for specific reforms in government, industry, education, law, crime prevention, social welfare, civic life. But they did not come to grips with the central issue that for many intellectuals lay behind all the specific issues—the threat of corporate power to American pluralistic democracy. This failure stemmed from a number of sources—the lack of adequate economic and social data, the limited tools of economic analysis, the power of reform shibboleths like “direct democracy,” the pleasures of iconoclasm as compared to the drudgery of policy analysis. But, above all, the failure lay in habits of thinking, especially in the pragmatism that dominated social thought in the progressive era. Rebelling against the windy, absolutist doctrines of left and right, such as Marxism and Social Darwinism, the progressive thinkers made a fetish of practicality, immediate results, manageable reforms. They did so at the expense of hard and creative thought about the economic and political changes that would be necessary to curb the economic behemoths and, through transforming leadership and creative popular action, bring about the reconstruction of society.

  The reconstruction of American society—this was the cardinal goal of American socialists of almost all hues and tints, but they wrangled year after year as to how to define this goal and how to realize it.

  Of the socialist parties still existing in 1913, however feebly, the Socialist Labor Party had taken the most consistently radical position for revolutionary action leading to the abolition of the wage system, the destruction of capitalism, and the collective ownership by the people of the means of production and distribution. Drawing its strength from Marxists—both European and homegrown—and from militants in the workingmen’s parties of the 1870s, the SLP had preached a vaguely defined revolutionary strategy, and had denounced bread-and-butter unionism even while making concessions to short-run trade union tactics. By the mid-nineties, the party had established itself especially in German-American unions and virtually controlled the Central Labor Federation of New York.

  A type of leader hardly known in the United States but familiar to radicals abroad supplied powerful leadership to the SLP. He was Daniel De Leon, brilliant theoretician, doctrinaire socialist, ideological purist. His early years would hardly have seemed likely to produce such a sectarian: son of a Curaçao surgeon, De Leon studied in Germany, then in 1874 settled in New York City, where he taught Greek and Latin, edited a paper supporting independence for Cuba, won a law degree from Columbia, and became a lecturer on international law at that university, meanwhile carrying political lances for Henry George and Edward Bellamy. Winning the editorship of the SLP party organ, De Leon dominated the organization for almost a quarter-century. He fought to convert trade unionists to socialism without being converted by them, launched ferocious personal attacks on his rivals from left to right, sought to create through the SLP a revolutionary industrial union, and tried to drive the AFL out of business—all with the goal of demanding the “unconditional surrender of the capitalist system.” By 1912, after years of secessions, expulsions, and schismatic infighting, capitalism reigned triumphant and the SLP was reduced to a tiny band of militants, but De Leon had posed the question that no leader now could duck: Should industrial workers try to reform and shore up capitalism from within, or replace it with some kind of socialism?

  The Socialist Party, launched in 1901, never seemed to make up its collective mind on this central question, in part because its origins were even more diverse than those of the SLP. Its early me
mbers, according to Milton Cantor, included veterans from the Populist movement, from Eugene Debs’s American Railway Union, from Christian socialism, leavened by settlement workers, millionaire socialists, scions of German Forty-eighters, “and the cultural radicals—bohemian writers and artists—who fought for birth control, women’s suffrage, and uninhibited social-sexual behavior.” The party included New York intellectuals, hard-boiled union bosses, practical-minded candidates for mayor and governor, hundreds of socialists who actually won local office.

  The Socialists evolved an ingenious device for preaching both the reform of capitalism and its abolition. In the preambles, their party platforms proclaimed lofty and even revolutionary goals, such as the abolition of wage slavery or the building of a cooperative commonwealth, and then the platforms settled down to the nuts and bolts of reforming the capitalistic system: welfare measures, state and municipal reforms, protection of labor, conservation, public works for the unemployed, and the like. This device seemed to satisfy both “immediatists” and “impossibilists.” As the years passed, the party became increasingly meliorist, but the rhetoric of revolution hung evocatively over convention orators and county stump speakers.

  The Socialists could boast of seasoned leadership at every party level. During the decade leading up to his 900,000-vote triumph in 1912, Eugene Debs won worldwide fame. He ran for the presidency, he told Lincoln Steffens, to raise “social consciousness.” When socialism came to the verge of success, he continued, the party would choose “an able executive and a clear-minded administrator; not—not Debs.” Debs was party candidate and spokesman, not manager. The task of running the organization fell on men like Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger, who also heavily influenced the adoption of party policies for “gas and water” socialism. In particular Berger, leader of the Milwaukee party, fought for constructive, “safe and sane” socialism—a position that helped him win congressional office.