K's Comment stirred up long-neglected historical memories of those "progressive" years Woodrow Wilson was president. No, I'm not an expert on the Wilson presidency, but he did have some firsts in the civil liberties department. First, some background:
During the post-Lincoln years, it was unusual to have a Democrat for president. (The Democratic Party was for "crackers", racists, and southerners. Think of it: the Northeastern U.S. was Lincoln country!) Wilson was the first consecutive two-termer Democrat after Lincoln's assassination. The first Democrat was the beleaguered, impeached Andrew Johnson, the poster boy for failed Democratic states' rights politics; the second was "Uncle Jumbo", Grover Cleveland, the only president to have two of the 44 presidential slots, as in, two non-consecutive slots. Ideologically, "Big Steve" was closer to Calvin Coolidge than he was to Lyndon Baines Johnson. He was not "progressive" by anyone's standard, I don't think.
We are All Liberals; We are All Progressives. Woodrow Wilson was America's first "progressive" president. The social climate of those years gave birth to the bumper stickers of our time: unprecedented prosperity juxtaposed with shocking inner city poverty, industrial slaughter of human beings, pollution you and I can't even conceive of, and so on. Woodrow Wilson was elected president at the beginning of our era. When you think of Woodrow Wilson, you think of Democrats like Barack Obama, not Democrats like Harry Truman or "Uncle Jumbo." This is what Jonah Goldberg said about President Wilson:
Wilson, like the bulk of progressive intellectuals in fin-de-siècle America, was deeply influenced by three strands of thought: philosophical Pragmatism, Hegelianism, and Darwinism. This heady intellectual cocktail produced a drunken arrogance and the conviction that the old rules no longer applied.
The classical liberalism of the Founders – free markets, individualism, property rights, etc. – had been eclipsed by a new "experimental" age. Horace Kallen, a protégé of Pragmatism exponent William James, denounced fixed philosophical dogmas as mere rationalizations of the status quo. Sounding much like today's critical theorists, Mr. Kallen lamented that "Men have invented philosophy precisely because they find change, chance, and process too much for them, and desire infallible security and certainty."
The old conception of absolute truths and immutable laws had been replaced by a "Darwinian" vision of organic change. Hence Wilson argued that the old "Newtonian" vision – fixed rules enshrined in the Constitution and laws – had to give way to the "Darwinian" view of "living constitutions" and the like.
Wilson once told a black delegation, that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." But his racism wasn't just a product of his Southern roots; it was often of a piece with the reigning progressive obsession with eugenics, the pseudoscience that strove to perfect society through better breeding.
Under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, Wilson's administration shut down newspapers and magazines at an astounding pace. Indeed, any criticism of the government, even in your own home, could earn you a prison sentence. One man was brought to trial for explaining in his own home why he didn't want to buy Liberty Bonds.
The Wilson administration sanctioned what could be
called an American fascisti, the American Protective League. The APL – a quarter million strong at its height, with offices in 600 cities – carried government-issued badges while beating up dissidents and protesters and conducting warrantless searches and interrogations. Even after the war, Wilson refused to release the last of America's political prisoners, leaving it to subsequent Republican administrations to free the anti-war Socialist Eugene V. Debs and others.
Now, obviously, none of the current crop of self-described progressives are eager to replay this dark chapter. But we make a mistake when we assume that we can cherry pick only the good parts of our past to re-create. You Want a More 'Progressive' America? Be Careful of What You Wish For
A Talkative Softy. How many times have the 'Warm Fuzzy Liberals' in your life lauded that 'progressive' era as the standard by which all Republicans should be shot. Here is a taste of that era:
The Progressive movement swept America from roughly the early 1890s through the early 1920s, producing a broad popular consensus that government should be the primary agent of social change. To that end, legions of idealistic young crusaders, operating at the local, state, and federal levels, seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a mountain of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hour laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage, and electoral reform, among much else.
Today many on the liberal left would like to revive that movement and its aura of social justice. Journalist Bill Moyers, speaking at a conference sponsored by the left-wing Campaign for America’s Future, described Progressivism as “one of the country’s great traditions.” Progressives, he told the crowd, “exalted and extended the original American Revolution. They spelled out new terms of partnership between the people and their rulers. And they kindled a flame that lit some of the most prosperous decades in modern history.”
Yet the Progressive Era was also a time of vicious, state-sponsored racism. In fact, from the standpoint of African-American history, the Progressive Era qualifies as arguably the single worst period since Emancipation. The wholesale disfranchisement of Southern black voters occurred during these years, as did the rise and triumph of Jim Crow. Furthermore, as the Westminster College historian David W. Southern notes in his recent book, The Progressive Era and Race: Reform and Reaction, 1900–1917, the very worst of it—disfranchisement, segregation, race baiting, lynching—“went hand-in-hand with the most advanced forms of southern progressivism.” Racism was the norm, not the exception, among the very crusaders romanticized by today’s activist left. Damon Root, When Bigots Became Reformers
That's the problem with Democrats and 'progressives.' They can't own up to their intolerance. After all, it's Republicans who are bad.
Jeff Jacoby: Obama's Swelling Ego
Comments