The Political Thought of Calvin Coolidge. Thomas J. Tacoma

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СКАЧАТЬ ill health, and premature death.”^[10] Occupational differences mattered little for those at the bottom. Whether in agriculture or factory work, the fact of life was material poverty. Even farmers, though free from the artificial timetables of the factory and its whistles and machinery, were subject to competition in international markets that they did not understand and to global downturns no one could predict or control.^[11]

      In this traditional telling, class conflict and the growth of class consciousness mark the beginning of the Progressive era. Major railroad strikes in 1877, 1886, and 1894 taught even the middle and upper classes that something was wrong. Strikes across different industries—in mining, in manufacture, and in transportation—revealed to respectable Americans that the old system of individualism and the self-made man was breaking down.^[12] In addition, a major factor in the new uncertainty over the economy was the closing of the American frontier. By the 1890s, most available farmland had been bought up. The option of packing up and moving west was gone. Superadded to the plight of the farmer were the fluctuations in the prices of their goods and the economic depressions they endured. The Depression of 1893 was particularly severe, and President Grover Cleveland’s refusal to bring government action to relieve distress seemed to reveal the emptiness of the old laissez-faire ideology.^[13]

      To the immigrant families crowded into an urban slum, life consisted of work and hardship. As millions of immigrants poured into American cities from Italy, Russia, and elsewhere in southern and eastern Europe, city leaders felt overwhelmed with the prospect of providing proper utilities and maintaining healthy living conditions for them. Speakers of foreign languages and worshippers in unfamiliar faiths introduced an alien element into American society. Party bosses at the ward level took immigrant populations under wing, but this too was taken to be symptomatic of the era’s political corruption.^[14]

      Other issues also loomed large for American reformers. Beyond economic dislocations, political corruption and inefficiency, and urban distress, Americans worried about growing problems such as alcoholism and the need for temperance. Others agitated for women’s suffrage. More and more citizens were concerned about the need for greater education, especially among communities of immigrant children. Something in American society was amiss, and the Progressive movement emerged to confront the full spectrum of social ills.

      Philosophic Roots of Progressivism

      The intellectual ferment at the end of the nineteenth century that ultimately gave birth to the Progressive movement grew out of several new philosophic doctrines. Many of these philosophies were imports to the United States from Europe, as American students traveled to German universities for graduate education and then returned to the States to teach and take over leadership roles in politics and public life. Such were the Hegelian historicist ideals brought into the United States through Johns Hopkins University, for example, or the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte.^[15] Other philosophies were homegrown or developed in conversation with English political thought. Charles Darwin’s biological theory was modified by social philosophers—namely Herbert Spencer in Britain and William Graham Sumner in the United States—to produce a social Darwinist philosophy.^[16] Slightly later chronologically but ultimately more influential in the twentieth century was the pragmatic philosophy articulated by William James and John Dewey in the United States.^[17] Finally, added on and mixed throughout all of these was the social gospel theology developed and promoted by the likes of Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch.^[18] By turning man’s gaze away from eternity and individual salvation and toward a social redemption of humanity, the social gospel preachers were able to tap into the reform spirit of the era and lend their theological credentials to its political leaders.

      These new ideas require some explanation in order to make sense of the Progressive movement as a coherent critique of existing conditions and then as a political movement. In order of relative priority for the Progressives, the historical school (and its cousin, historicism), pragmatism, social Darwinism, positivism, and the social Gospel each contributed something vital and unique to the Progressive ferment. Each philosophy in its origins, chief principles, and influence contributed to the agitation for reform from 1890 to 1920.

      The Historical School and Historicism

      The historical mode of thinking did not begin in the nineteenth century. But the idea that truth could only be understood when placed in its proper historical context took root and grew to its intellectual maturity in the nineteenth century and was by the 1890s regnant among academics and public intellectuals. Perhaps of greatest influence was the Hegelian philosophy of history. While Hegel’s ideas were not imported directly and wholesale into American higher education, they were mediated through early students of Hegel and then by later generations of Americans who studied under Hegel’s disciples in Germany.^[19]

      The historical school taught that human institutions must be understood as existing in time. They were not ahistorical abstractions but should be understood on the basis of their concrete existence. Leading Progressive academic Woodrow Wilson took this idea over from the British student of English constitutionalism, Walter Bagehot. Bagehot, along with other scholars in the late nineteenth century, focused on the historical development of peoples and their political institutions. As Pestritto explains, while “Bagehot’s The English Constitution gives an historical account of the development of the British system, his subsequent Physics and Politics (1873) more broadly paints the history of political development using the terms of evolutionary biology.”^[20] Peoples grow and change; their institutions grow with them. The proper way to understand and study those changes is through examining them over time.

      For many Progressives, the approach of the historical school formed the basis of their reforms. But for the leaders of the movement, especially Wilson and his followers, the historical school stopped short of a fully developed theory of history that explained past, present, and future. This is where Wilson and company parted ways with John Dewey or the social Darwinists: for Wilsonians, History had an end-state, a goal. More than a series of endless adaptions over time, history had direction toward a destination. This was Wilson’s historicism. Wilson took this idea from his graduate school mentors at Johns Hopkins, who in turn took this conception of history over from Georg Hegel’s students in the German universities.^[21]

      Hegel had taught in his Philosophy of History that the world was guided by the spirit of reason, which over time was bringing about the progress of mankind toward the rational state and the fully recognized freedom of the individual within it. Accordingly, Hegel interpreted the dialectic of history as progressive: primitive epochs were succeeded by the more advanced. Civilizations at the cutting edge of history overtook and destroyed those who were less advanced, while incorporating whatever progressive elements were contained in those older cultures. Hegelian theodicy argued that the destruction of an historically inferior people actually facilitated the advance of history.^[22] As Pestritto again explains, Hegel provided Wilson and the Progressives with the teaching that “Providence guides historical progress, and history represents the gradual unfolding of the Divine Idea on earth and ends in the modern state, which is the culmination of God’s plan.”^[23] This interpretation of history contained profound implications for the understanding of human nature and of government. It became impossible to maintain the Lockean position on government—that governments were created on the basis of a social contract of the consenting people in order better to secure their rights and happiness—in the face of the Hegelian reading of historical progress. Moreover, since nature itself is growing and changing with the spirit of history, it becomes impossible to speak of timelessly transcendent “natural laws” or “natural rights.”^[24]

      Pragmatism

      Philosophic pragmatism contributed another key element to the intellectual ferment that gave birth the intellectual СКАЧАТЬ