America Ascendant

by Stanley B Greenberg

  That America was not sustainable.

  America was able to dominate the twentieth century because a democratic revolution and an era of progressive reform mitigated some of the worst excesses and enabled more Americans to share in America’s promise. The work of the unions, the settlement house movement, the journalist social reformers, and local and state progressive leaders built the momentum for reform. In a two-decade period, America would regulate the trusts and working conditions, prohibit the sale of alcohol, enact an income tax, introduce party primaries and direct election of U.S. senators, keep public lands out of the hands of the private interests, and dramatically reduce tariffs to break the corrupt ties of business and government. Obviously, the job of reform was not completed until the New Deal, but the progressive era reforms changed the trajectory of America.

  The progressive era of bold reforms happened because of the work of President Theodore Roosevelt and his ally President William Howard Taft, both Republican reformers, the Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, who stretched his appeal to reach the urban workers, and ultimately, Woodrow Wilson as progressive governor of New Jersey and as the Democratic presidential nominee at the time of the progressive electoral wave.

  Today America is being transformed by revolutions in energy, digital technology, advanced manufacturing, and big data, by immigration, and by seismic changes in racial diversity, in the family, and in gender roles. Those changes are crystallized in the growing metropolitan areas and the rising Millennial generation. With America open to immigration and multiculturalism, it is poised to lead and to be exceptional again. But first it must address the dark side of that progress. Long-term wage stagnation leaves people in jobs that don’t pay enough to live on, while CEOs and the top 1 percent take all the gains in income and wealth. And the top 1 percent has been given license to buy elections and the government to rig the rules even further. Marriage and working-class families are in trouble, with a growing number of children raised by single parents. Working-class men feel marginalized, while working women face huge hurdles managing work and family and earning equal pay and must get by without help from employers or the government.

  Well, America’s new majority is demanding a politics and an agenda that addresses these huge challenges. The public argument is now centered on these issues, and a new data-driven social critique is making itself felt. The momentum for reform is building in America’s cities and states, in the churches, and in some sectors of business. And the public is ready to support a Democratic political project centered on these challenges, including going after the big money and special interests and asking the top 1 percent to do their part.

  And that means the current and future Democratic presidents will get to play a historic role shaping a reform era. President Barack Obama rescued the economy from the financial crisis and the Great Recession. He signed the Affordable Care Act, which is dramatically reducing the number of uninsured, reducing health care costs, and giving women and the self-employed new security. President Obama and state attorneys general made the fight for marriage equality, and now gay marriage is constitutionally protected in all fifty states. His legalization of the “DREAMers” could not be overturned by Congress, and he has delegitimized the anti-immigration forces.

  Those are critically important gains and a starting point for addressing the problems of America’s new economy. And these successes reflect his identification with the ascendant demographic trends and values in America, rather than the real-life contradictions people are struggling with every day.

  It will fall to future Democratic presidents to take up the mantle of reform. The next president will come to power when the conservative forces are still very strong and desperately battling to slow the ascendant trends. The country does not yet know whether the next Democratic president will be a Theodore Roosevelt or a Woodrow Wilson—both of whom played honorable and necessary but very different roles in the triumph of reform. Ultimately, Democratic leaders will take the stage and play both roles if America is to see the scale of change that is possible and required if all are to benefit from America’s ascent.

  The next president might take note of the choices Theodore Roosevelt made in 1905.

  Let us imagine that a newly elected Democratic president is preparing to drive to the U.S. Capitol to deliver his or her first State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress. The president will likely have read and taken some lessons from President Roosevelt’s first and second State of the Union messages, delivered to Congress after his 1904 election to a second term. His pragmatic side tempered his “progressive spirit” since he was well aware that the Congress itself, the Supreme Court, and conservative Republicans in the states constrained what he could accomplish. The House and Senate leaders then were deeply opposed to those progressive changes, as Roosevelt acknowledged in his message: “I am well aware of the difficulties of the legislation that I am suggesting, and of the need of temperate and cautious action in securing it. I should emphatically protest against improperly radical or hasty action.”1

  While not expecting Congress to enact bold reforms, Roosevelt said that it should at least take some critical first steps to reform, such as requiring that the rail owners charge everyone the same rates and not discriminate against farmers or smaller manufacturers. At least get that done, Roosevelt urged Congress. The legislation lurched through Congress, and ultimately they produced a bill that many progressives hated, the Hepburn Act of 1906. Roosevelt would applaud the compromise because it at least outlawed free railroad passes and strengthened rules against rebates—practices used by railroads to empower favored industries and bribe legislators—and established the principle that the federal government could regulate and oversee railroad rates.

  In 2017, there will be very great pressure on the new president to advance reforms. So many cities and states have passed reforms, the business coalitions and the churches have spoken out, and he or she will have just won a campaign centered on what they are going to do about the middle class and inequality.

  Perhaps the Democrats will have won back the Senate and made gains in the House, and Republicans will feel some pressure to give way on some issue or show a more bipartisan spirit. Perhaps the business community will pressure the GOP establishment to bite the bullet and allow immigration reform. Yet it is more than likely that Republicans will have dug their heels in even deeper in resistance to the ascendant trends and necessary reforms. And Republicans will still hold considerable power in the states and in the Congress.

  The new Democratic president then might learn from what Teddy Roosevelt did as he faced such conservative roadblocks.

  First, he used these messages to Congress to assert a clear and expanded role for government to check the power of industrial concentration and excess.

  The fortunes amassed through corporate organization are now so large, and vest such power in those that wield them, as to make it a matter of necessity to give to the sovereign—that is, to the Government, which represents the people as a whole—some effective power of supervision over their corporate use.

  He was forthright about the need for government to be the counterbalance.

  In order to insure a healthy social and industrial life, every big corporation should be held responsible by, and be accountable to, some sovereign strong enough to control its conduct.2

  Second, Roosevelt used his message to repeatedly call for Washington, D.C., to become a “model city.” While he was uncomfortable with the rush to enact reforms by La Follette in Wisconsin, he urged the Congress to do just that in Washington, where the federal government had uncontested authority to affect working and living conditions:

  The National Government has control of the District of Columbia and it should see to it that the City of Washington is made a model city in all respects, both as regards parks, public playgrounds, proper regulation of the system of housing, so as to do away with the evils of alley tenements, a proper system of educat
ion, a proper system of dealing with truancy and juvenile offenders, [and] a proper handling of the charitable work of the District.

  Roosevelt went further, saying that Washington should send a message on what is a proper agenda for the times:

  There should be proper factory laws to prevent all abuses in the employment of women and children in the District. These will be useful chiefly as object lessons, but even this limited amount of usefulness would be of real National value.

  Our next Democratic president’s State of the Union address will no doubt draw inspiration from the successful reformers in Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles who enacted a living wage; in Chicago and New York City, who are pressing toward universal pre-K; and in Connecticut and California, where paid sick days are now law and a remarkable number of citizens now have health insurance for the first time. He or she might well point to Mayor Bill de Blasio and Mayor Rahm Emanuel sitting in the gallery, leaders of cities that should be an “object lesson to the nation.”

  Returning to Roosevelt’s considered use of his messages to Congress, the third goal he set to Congress in 1904 and 1905 was to enact laws to expand the president’s ability to take executive action to protect public lands, create national parks, and limit commercial use of national forests—and to do so urgently or regret the consequences. In both messages, he made clear his intention to protect the Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone. He praised the state of California for gifting Yosemite Valley and Mariposa Big Tree Grove, encouraged the government to immediately appropriate funds for their inclusion in the National Park Service, and called on other states to do the same so that the national government could see to their proper supervision as national public resources.

  In his or her speech, the next Democratic president will no doubt thank President Obama for using his executive powers in the face of Washington dysfunction to reduce emissions from coal-fired plants by requiring major cuts in emissions by 2030 and to ensure that America is on a path to reducing greenhouse gases, which will remain his or her commitment as well. He or she will thank him for his executive order on pay equity that empowered women to challenge for equal pay in businesses contracting with the federal government and establishing reliable data to enforce all equal pay laws. And he or she will thank President Obama for laying the groundwork for similar action with regard to paid sick days and paid family leave and overtime.3

  With the next Democratic president’s likely mandate to address the challenges facing working women and families, he or she should pay a lot of attention to how Roosevelt approached such issues in his 1905 message.

  Roosevelt concentrated repeatedly on what was happening to women, families, and children in the new industrial economy of his time. He educated the country on the new economic realities:

  The introduction of women into industry is working change and disturbance in the domestic and social life of the Nation. The decrease in marriage, and especially in the birth rate, has been coincident with it. We must face accomplished facts, and the adjustment of factory conditions must be made, but surely it can be made with less friction and less harmful effects on family life than is now the case. This whole matter in reality forms one of the greatest sociological phenomena of our time.

  Even without any prospect of enacting a national law to correct the emerging abuses, Roosevelt simply asserted that there must be an “an effective system of factory laws to prevent the abuse of women and children.” And to that end, he instructed the Department of Commerce and Labor to help create the “full knowledge on which to base action looking toward State and municipal legislation for the protection of working women.”

  America’s next Democratic president will face a Supreme Court fully committed to the free-speech rights of corporations, and that makes it almost impossible to make fundamental reforms and disrupt the close bond of special interests and government, though here, too, he or she will do well to note the fifth task Roosevelt took on in his message to Congress.

  Roosevelt had been elected to a second term in 1904 with massive financial support from the industrialists and New York elites, though without the remotest prospect of a legislative hearing, he asserted almost gratuitously a challenge to the corruption at the heart of the Gilded Age:

  All contributions by corporations to any political committee or for any political purpose should be forbidden by law; directors should not be permitted to use stockholders’ money for such purposes; and, moreover, a prohibition of this kind would be, as far as it went, an effective method of stopping the evils aimed at in corrupt practices acts.

  The next Democratic president will have to say categorically that he or she will campaign for a constitutional amendment to enable this modern democracy to regulate this unacceptable flood of private and secret money into politics and challenge Congress to move urgently to enact a law that requires all donations to all organizations influencing elections be disclosed in full and immediately on the Internet. Like Roosevelt he or she will say, “This is the defining threat to our democracy and acting now will empower our citizens, workers, and consumers to have their say.”

  * * *

  President Woodrow Wilson began his inaugural address on the East Portico on March 4, 1913, the way contemporary progressives should when they finally achieve the political breakthrough necessary to enact the full reform agenda. Then they will have the wind at their backs and the freedom to realize all that we have learned.

  “There has been a change of government,” President Wilson’s speech began. He continued:

  It began two years ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean?

  And he declared his intention “to interpret the occasion.”4

  For Wilson and the country in 1913, this was a triumph of party that he was about to use for the country as an instrument “for a large and definite purpose.” It is difficult to imagine such a moment when today’s Democrats will govern politically and self-consciously with a partisan agenda to bring the radical reforms that began with first steps in the cities and states, communities and parishes, then coalitions and corporate America until their ideas and values became hegemonic.

  That tipping point was deeply political and partisan, as it will have to be for Democratic presidents who make a breakthrough on enacting reforms.

  At that moment, President Wilson had the security to give voice to the contradictions and dark side of our progress and speak of these reforms as releasing America’s inherent potential, as he did in his first inaugural address.

  “We see that in many things that life is very great,” President Wilson said at the outset:

  [America] is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of groups of men.

  America has also “built up … a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident.”

  Then, he redirected his focus to speak directly and eloquently of the contradictions that motivate the urgency to bring change. “With riches has come inexcusable waste,” he declared:

  We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient.

  We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the m
en and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.

  The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat.

  When a Democratic president assumes office at a comparable tipping-point moment, he or she will speak of the contradictions that have left so many people struggling, so much potential wasted by the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few and not used toward any public purpose, and declare the necessity to act. Let’s hope that president brings the same eloquence to the core wrongs that demand bold changes.

  Wilson, too, lamented how America’s great experiment in democracy and government also brings a dark side we are hard pressed to address:

  [M]any deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

  The country is “stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil.”

  When such a Democrat assumes the nation’s highest office in our new progressive era, what diminishes government will hardly be a secret as the top 1 percent exercises its “freedom of speech” to make sure government advances its interests, without regard to the middle class whose voices and values get crowded out along with policies that would allow them to rise again.