Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism

by Mark R. Levin

  On July 4, 1914, when actually speaking at Independence Hall, then-president Wilson declared:

  Have you ever read the Declaration of Independence or attended with close comprehension to the real character of it when you have heard it read? If you have, you will know that it is not a Fourth of July oration. The Declaration of Independence was a document preliminary to war. It was a vital piece of practical business, not a piece of rhetoric; and if you will pass beyond those preliminary passages which we are accustomed to quote about the rights of men and read into the heart of the document you will see that it is very express and detailed, that it consists of a series of definite specifications concerning actual public business of the day. Not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past, but the business of that first revolution by which the Nation was set up, the business of 1776. Its general statements, its general declarations cannot mean anything to us unless we append to it a similar specific body of particulars as to what we consider the essential business of our own day. . . .

  Liberty does not consist, my fellow-citizens, in mere general declarations of the rights of man. It consists in the translation of those declarations into definite action. Therefore, standing here where the declaration was adopted, reading its businesslike sentences, we ought to ask ourselves what there is in it for us. There is nothing in it for us unless we can translate it into the terms of our own conditions and of our own lives. We must reduce it to what the lawyers call a bill of particulars. It contains a bill of particulars, but the bill of particulars of 1776. If we would keep it alive, we must fill it with a bill of particulars of the year 1914. . . .

  In one sense the Declaration of Independence has lost its significance. It has lost its significance as a declaration of national independence. Nobody outside of America believed when it was uttered that we could make good our independence; now nobody anywhere would dare to doubt that we are independent and can maintain our independence. As a declaration of independence, therefore, it is a mere historic document. Our independence is a fact so stupendous that it can be measured only by the size and energy and variety and wealth and power of one of the greatest nations in the world. But it is one thing to be independent and it is another thing to know what to do with your independence.30

  As if directly admonishing the late Wilson, on July 5, 1926, the thirtieth president, Calvin Coolidge, delivered his own speech in Philadelphia about the Declaration’s meaning. He stated:

  The American Revolution represented the informed and mature convictions of a great mass of independent, liberty loving, God-fearing people who knew their rights, and possessed the courage to dare to maintain them. . . .

  The Continental Congress was not only composed of great men, but it represented a great people. While its Members did not fail to exercise a remarkable leadership, they were equally observant of their representative capacity. They were industrious in encouraging their constituents to instruct them to support independence. But until such instructions were given they were inclined to withhold action. . . .

  A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man—these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

  We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

  About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers. . . .31

  The danger of rejecting America’s founding principles is illustrated best in this instance by Wilson himself. As is well documented, Wilson was an open racist who, among other things, as president resegregated the federal bureaucracy.32

  Therefore, while Lincoln embraced the Declaration of Independence before and during the Civil War to justify both prosecuting the war and abolishing slavery, Wilson denounced the same principles and language in the Declaration as nonsense or dismissed them as relevant only to the American Revolution, insisting that to treat them as the Founders intended served as an impediment to communal progress.

  In 1913, Wilson wrote The New Freedom, in which he proclaimed, “We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our life has broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life that it was twenty years ago; it is not the life that it was ten years ago. We have changed our economic conditions, absolutely, from top to bottom; and, with our economic society, the organization of our life. The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken from a forgotten age. The older cries sound as if they belonged to a past age which men have almost forgotten. . . .”33 “We used to think in the old-fashioned days when life was very simple that all that government had to do was to put on a policeman’s uniform, and say, ‘Now don’t anybody hurt anybody else.’ We used to say that the idea of government was for every man to be left alone and not interfered with, except when he interfered with somebody else; and that the best government was the government that did as little governing as possible. That was the idea that obtained in Jefferson’s time. But we are coming now to realize that life is so complicated that we are not dealing with the old conditions, and that the law has to step in and create new conditions under which we may live, the conditions which will make it tolerable for us to live.”34

  America is more complex and thus the federal government should become more complex? Life is more complicated, compelling a more complicated federal government? And the more complex and complicated life and society, the greater justification for centralized governmental decision making? This is a common theme among progressive intellectuals, past and present. However, is this approach not counterintuitive given the long and cruel history of authoritarianism? Wilson added: “I am, therefore, forced to be a progressive, if for no other reason, because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as other nations have. We have not kept our practices adjusted to the facts of the case, and until we do, and unless we do, the facts of the case will always have the better argument; because if you do not adjust your laws to the facts, so much the worse for the law, not for the facts, because law trails along after the facts. Only that law is unsafe which r
uns ahead of the facts and beckons to it and make it follow the will-o’-the-wisps of imaginative projects.”35

  Again, what are the limits of the progressive’s government? Wilson saw few. “I believe the time has come when the governments of this country, both state and national, have to set the stage, and set it very minutely and carefully, for the doing of justice to men in every relationship of life. It has been free and easy with us so far; it has been go as you please; it has been every man look out for himself; and we have continued to assume, up to this year when every man is dealing, not with another man, in most cases, but with a body of men whom he has not seen, that the relationships of property are the same that they always were. We have great tasks before us, and we must enter on them as befits men charged with the responsibility of shaping a new era.”36

  The goal is nothing less than the perfectibility of man, above all his economic condition (meaning, equitable distribution of wealth), through unbounded activist government. “Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human interests and human activities and human energies. Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, between individuals and the complex institutions amidst which they live, and between those institutions and the government, are infinitely more intricate today than ever before. No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying the same thing, yet perhaps it is worthwhile to get somewhat clearly in our mind what makes all the trouble today. Life has become complex; there are many more elements, more parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is harder to keep everything adjusted,—and harder to find out where the trouble lies when the machine gets out of order.”37

  Wilson’s distrust of republican government, and his belief in rule by a trained centralized bureaucracy, independent from the genuine consent of the governed and constitutional constraints, should come as no surprise. In 1886, while teaching at Bryn Mawr College, Wilson penned an essay titled “Study of Public Administration.” He declared that debates about “who shall make the law, and what shall that law be” was simply “the philosophy of any time is, as [Georg Wilhelm Friedrich] Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought’; and political philosophy, like philosophy of every other kind, had only held up the mirror to contemporary ­affairs. . . . There was little or no trouble about ­administration—at least little that was heeded by administrators.”38 Again, for Wilson and the progressives, the American founding was simply a historical event distinct to its own moment and condition. Progress requires that America not get stuck in its own history. “In brief, if difficulties of governmental action are to be seen gathering in other centuries, they are to be seen culminating in our own. This is the reason why administrative tasks have nowadays to be so studiously and systematically adjusted to carefully tested standards of policy, the reason why we are having now what we never had before, a science of administration. The weightier debates of constitutional principle are even yet by no means concluded; but they are no longer of more immediate practical moment than questions of administration. It is getting to be harder to run a constitution than to frame one.”39

  Where are we to find this science of administration? It is to be imported from Europe. “It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign revolutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government. . . . If we employ it, we must Americanize it, and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well. . . .”40

  And the people cannot be bothered with administration, for not only are they too busy, but they are simply unfit for and incapable of such a momentous task. It must be left to a relative handful of sensible and learned professionals. “In government, as in virtue, the hardest of hard things is to make progress. Formerly the reason for this was that the single person who was sovereign was generally selfish, ignorant, timid, or a fool—­albeit there was now and again one who was wise. Nowadays the reason is that the many, the people, who are sovereign have no single ear which one can approach, and are selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish with the selfishnesses, the ignorances, the stubbornesses, the timidities, or the follies of several thousand persons—albeit there are hundreds who are wise.”41 “The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes.”42

  Moreover, the bureaucracy will be of the noblest and most virtuous sort, with no personal, political, or ideological agenda, motivated solely and completely by its technical know-how in and public-spiritedness for the general good and welfare. “It will be necessary to organize democracy by sending up to the competitive examinations for civil service men definitely prepared for standing liberal tests as to technical knowledge. A technically schooled civil service will presently have become indispensable. I know that a corps of civil servants prepared by a special schooling and drilled, after appointment, into a perfected organization, with appropriate hierarchy and characteristic discipline, seems to a great many very thoughtful persons to contain elements which might combine to make an offensive official class. . . . But to fear the creation of a domineering illiberal officialism as a result of the studies I am here proposing is to miss altogether the principle upon which I wish most to insist. That principle is, that administration in the United States must be at all points sensitive to public ­opinion. . . .” At the same time, however, Wilson insisted that “[s]teady, hearty allegiance to the policy of government they serve will constitute good behavior. That policy will have no taint of officialdom about it. . . . Bureaucracy can exist only where the whole service of the state is removed from the common political life of the people, its chiefs as well as its rank and file. Its motives, its objects, its policy, its standards, must be bureaucratic. . . .”43

  Unsurprisingly, but significantly, Wilson insisted that the centralized administrative state must, by logic and necessity, replace or thoroughly alter the constitutional structure—­particularly the Framers’ incorporation of Charles de Montesquieu’s separation-of-powers doctrine, essential to curtailing the likelihood of concentrated tyranny, which must be abandoned in principle. Otherwise there can be no real historical progress. “The study of administration, philosophically viewed, is closely connected with the study of the proper distribution of constitutional authority. . . . If administrative study can discover the best principles upon which to base such distribution, it will have done constitutional study an invaluable service. Montesquieu did not, I am convinced, say the last word on this head.”44 Hence the administrative state is to effectively replace the constitutional state, the latter being old and immovable.

  This brings us to John Dewey (1859–1952), among the foremost progressive thinkers. Dewey, like Croly and Wilson, among others, claimed that progressivism was, in essence, a science-based pragmatism. Like most progressives, he also argued that there is no timeless, absolute truth since all things are subject to change and situation. Therefore, he also unremittingly condemned John Locke and the Declaration of Independence, and the idea of permanent truths, a transcendent moral order, and individual natural rights. In his 1935 book, Liberalism and Social Action, Dewey wrote:

  The outstanding points of Locke’s version of liberalism are that governments are instituted to protect the rights that belong to individuals prior to political organization and social relations. The rights are those summed up a century later in the American Declaration of Independence: the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. . . . The whole temper of this philosophy is individualistic in the sense in which individualism is opposed to organized social actio
n. It held to the primacy of the individual over the state not only in time but in moral authority. It defined the individual in terms of liberties of thought and action already possessed by him in some mysterious ready-made fashion, and which it was the sole business of the state to safeguard. Reason was also made an inherent endowment of the individual, expressed in men’s moral relations to one another, but not sustained and developed because of these relations. It followed that the great enemy of individual liberty was thought to be government because of its tendency to encroach upon the innate liberties of individuals. Later liberalism inherited this conception of a natural antagonism between the individual and organized society. There still lingers in the minds of some the notion that there are two different “spheres” of action and of rightful claims; that of political society and that of the individual, and that in the interest of the latter the former must be as contracted as possible. Not till the second half of the nineteenth century did the idea arise that government might and should be an instrument for securing and extending the liberties of individuals. . . .45

  Further dismissing the purpose of the founding, with its emphasis on the individual, Dewey continued: “The ideas of Locke embodied in the Declaration of Independence were congenial to our pioneer conditions that gave individuals the opportunity to carve out their own careers. Political action was lightly thought of by those who lived in frontier conditions. A political career was very largely annexed as an adjunct to the action of individuals in carving their own careers.”46

  Moreover, Dewey was a stern critic of capitalism and private property rights, which he condemned as a relic of early American principles reinforced in current times by the political party structure. On March 18, 1931, in The New Republic, Dewey wrote: “I do not mean that the whole alliance of the [political] parties with organized business is consciously sinister and corrupt, though it is easily demonstrable that this is somewhat true. I mean rather that both old parties represent that stage of American life when the American people as a whole felt that society was to advance by means of industrial inventions and their application; by the development of manufacturing, of railways and commerce. It was that stage of American life when all but a few took for granted the natural control of industry and trade by the profit motive and the necessity of accumulating money capital. This idea may once have played a part in the development of the country. It has now ceased to be anything but an obstruction. . . .”47