Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  The Times summarized the committee’s eight months of investigations with the headline “Senators Tell What Bolshevism in America Means.” The newspaper reproduced from the report 29 “salient features which constitute the program of Bolshevism as it exists to-day in Russia and is presented to the rest of the world as a panacea for all ills.” These included “the confiscation of all factories, mills, mines and industrial institutions and the delivery of the control and operation thereof to the employees therein”; “the absolute separation of churches and schools”; “the establishment, through marriage and divorce laws, of a method for the legalization of prostitution, when the same is engaged in by consent of the parties”; “the refusal to recognize the existence of God in its governmental and judicial proceedings”; and “the conferring of the rights of citizenship on aliens without regard to length of residence or intelligence.”22

  Civil and political discourse became poisoned by loyalty oaths, spy paranoia, and distrust of dissent. This manufactured fear used appeals to internal and external threats to persuade the country that it should devote a staggering half of all government spending to defense following World War II, and pour billions more into its intelligence service to prop up heinous dictators in Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa in the name of the battle worldwide against communism. The quaint literary serials, poems, local reports, town debates, and other forms of popular expression that had once been so prominent in the press, vanished from the pages of mass-produced newspapers. It was replaced by celebrity gossip; the new, angry rhetoric of the Cold War; and nationally syndicated columns. The papers became as commercialized and centralized as the rest of mass culture.

  The business of mass propaganda brought vast sums of advertising revenue to all organs of mass communication. But corporate and government propaganda sharply narrowed the parameters of acceptable debate. It began the consolidation of the press by huge corporations that would end with nearly everything we see, hear, and read disseminated from roughly a half dozen corporations such as Viacom, Disney, General Electric, and Murdoch’s News Corporation. And it turned news into the elite’s echo chamber.

  Liberal and radical movements at the turn of the twentieth century subscribed to the fiction that human diligence, moral probity, and reform, coupled with advances in science and technology, could combine to create a utopia on earth. It was, as the historian Sidney Pollard wrote, “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in this history of mankind . . . that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement.”23 No longer would the poor have to wait for heaven. Justice and prosperity would arrive through human institutions.

  The liberal class—buoyed by the rise of an independent press, militant labor unions, workers’ houses, antipoverty campaigns, and the rising prosperity of the country bequeathed by the industrial revolution—embraced institutions, and especially the state, as tools for progress. This faith created a new form of liberalism that departed from “classical liberalism.” While these two belief systems shared some of the same characteristics, including a respect for individual rights, the new liberal class was and remains distinctly utopian. It places its faith in practical state reforms to achieve a just society. Classical liberalism, while it embraced the goals of the Enlightenment, was colored by a healthy dose of skepticism about human perfectibility and acutely aware of the nature and potency of evil. Modern liberalism lost this awareness. Human institutions and government were seen as mechanisms that, under the right control, would inevitably better humankind.

  Faith in human institutions was at the core of the Social Gospel, a Christian movement articulated at the turn of the century in books such as Christianity and the Social Crisis, published in 1907, and Theology for the Social Gospel, published a decade later, both of them written by the leading proponent of the movement, Walter Rauschenbusch. The Social Gospel replaced a preoccupation with damnation and sin with a belief in human progress. It spawned the Chautauqua movement, which had hundreds of chapters across the country. Chautauquan communities supported labor unions, collective bargaining, social services for the poor, hygiene programs, and universal education, although the movement was not free from many of the prejudices of its age and excluded Roman Catholics and African Americans. Organizations such as the Labor Temple in New York City, the University Settlement House in Chicago, and Washington Gladden’s crusades to better the working conditions in Columbus, Ohio, were part of this intoxicating fusion of religion and reform, the Christian churches’ version of the liberal class belief in the power of reform and human progress through good government. The Reverend Josiah Strong’s declamation “that Christ came not only to save individual souls, but society” turned churches into temperance societies, labor halls, and soup kitchens. Salvation could be achieved through human agencies. The Social Gospel secularized traditional Christian eschatology and fused it with the utopian visions of material progress embraced by the wider liberal class.

  The years before World War I had offered hope to liberal reformers. It was Ida Tarbell who in 1902 exposed the ruthless business practices of John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil in McClure’s Magazine. Her series, later published as a book, fueled a public outcry against Standard Oil. It was an important factor in the U.S. government’s antitrust actions against the Standard Oil Trust, which eventually led to its breakup in 1911. Samuel Hopkins Adams, a contemporary of Tarbell, wrote a series of eleven articles for Collier’s in 1905 called “The Great American Fraud.” He exposed many of the false claims made by the manufacturers of patent medicines. Adams found that in some cases these medicines damaged people’s health. The series led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Upton Sinclair’s exposé of inhumane conditions in the Chicago stockyards in 1906 in his muckraking novel The Jungle led to the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. These exposés, which included Lincoln Steffens’ exposure of municipal corruption, dovetailed neatly into the demands of those in the Social Gospel movement, labor unions, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, or university sociology departments, which, when they were founded, focused on practical steps toward social reform.

  The muckrakers and the Social Gospel reformers had been joined by militant labor organizations, including the anarcho-syndicalism of the IWW or Wobblies, which organized strikes by unskilled workers in New England textile mills, the Minnesota iron mines, and the steel industry in Pennsylvania. Before the war, the Wobblies led hundreds of thousands of industrial workers on walkouts. They conceived of themselves not simply as a union but a revolutionary movement. The Wobblies, unlike most other unions, included women, immigrants, and African Americans. They preached an uncompromising class struggle, as the movement’s legendary leader, Bill Haywood, told delegates at the founding convention in 1905:

  Fellow workers, this is the Continental Congress of the working class. We are here to confederate the workers of this country into a working class movement that shall have for its purpose the emancipation of the working class from the slave bondage of capitalism. . . . The aims and objects of this organization should be to put the working class in possession of the economic power, the means of life, in control of production and distribution, without regard to capitalist masters.24

  Socialism had wide appeal. Debs pulled a million votes in 1912. The Socialist Party printed twenty-nine English and twenty-two foreign-language weeklies, serving immigrant communities that diligently protected their languages and cultures. The party also published three English and six foreign language dailies. The United Mine Workers was primarily socialist. And Socialists were elected to Congress and became mayors in about a dozen major cities. The Socialists came close to defeating Samuel Gompers for the presidency of the American Federation of Labor.

  And then, with war declared, it was over. Dwight Macdonald noted gloomily that “American radicalism was making great strides right up to 1914; the war was the rock on which it
shattered.”25

  The cultural and social transformation, captured in E.P. Thompson’s essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” following the war was much more than the embrace of an economic system or the triumph of undiluted nationalism. It was, as Thompson pointed out, part of a revolutionary reinterpretation of reality. It marked the ascendancy of mass propaganda and mass culture. Richard Sennet, in The Fall of the Public Man, targeted the rise of mass culture as one of the prime forces behind what he termed a new “collective personality . . . generated by a common fantasy.” And the century’s great propagandists would not only agree, but add to Sennet’s argument that those who could manipulate and disseminate those fantasies could determine the directions taken and the opinions embraced by the “collective personality.”

  The suicidal impulses and industrial slaughter of World War I mocked the utopian vision of a heaven on earth and the inevitability of human progress embraced by the Social Gospel. The Swiss theologian Karl Barth, in The Epistle to the Romans (Der Römerbrief), published in 1918, tore apart the Social Gospel’s naïve belief that human beings could link the will of God to human endeavors. Christians, Barth argued, could neither envision nor create the kingdom of heaven on earth. The liberal church never found an adequate response to Barth’s critique. It retreated into a vague embrace of humanism and self-absorbed forms of spirituality.

  After the war, as Stuart Ewen told me when we met in New York, all systems of public discourse, communication and expression were “systematically designed to avoid including any information or knowledge that might encourage people to evaluate the situation.” Mass propaganda obliterated an informed public. “Except for those who seek out information internationally or through nontraditional sources,” Ewen lamented, “the entire picture of the universe that is provided to people is one reduced to a comic strip.”

  “By the late 1920s, for example, you have the emergence of a fairly elaborate social psychological apparatus designed to take the temperature of public emotions, not for the purpose of reporting on what people feel but for the purpose for shaping what people feel,” Ewen said:

  That institution, which starts out with the Psychological Corporation in the 1920s, grows into a major polling and survey research industry, which not only permeates the commercial world but begins to permeate academia. On that level, it has become more and more pervasive. Almost every moment of human attention is being subjected to that kind of strategy. The resources that exist to give support to that are enormous. The amount of money that goes into the miseducation of the American people is far vaster and far more enthusiastically spent than that which goes into the education of the American people.

  The liberal class, believing it had to fit its ideas into the new sloganeering of mass communications, began to communicate in the child-like vocabulary and simplistic sound bites demanded by commercial media. Intellectual debate, once a characteristic of the country’s political discourse, withered. The liberal class became seduced by the need for popular appeal, forgetting, as Macdonald wrote, that “as in arts and letters, communicability to a large audience is in inverse ratio to the excellence of a political approach. This is not a good thing: as in art, it is a deforming and crippling factor. Nor is it an eternal rule: in the past, the ideas of a tiny minority, sometimes almost reduced to the vanishing point of one individual, have slowly come to take hold on more and more of their fellow men.”26

  The cultural embrace of simplification, as Macdonald warned, meant reducing a population to speaking in predigested clichés and slogans. It banished complexity and further pushed to the margins difficult, original, or unfamiliar ideas. The assault on radical and original thought, which by definition did not fit itself into the popular cultural lexicon, saw art forms such as theater suffer.

  The radical current in theater of the 1920s and 1930s brought potent new ways of thinking to audiences who had neither the time nor the inclination to read social theory. The theater became one of the last effective ways in which artists could compete with corporate consumerist culture by appealing to emotion and fact. It opposed mass propaganda by using many of the same methods of commercial propaganda. Theater responded to the political upheavals preceding World War I, during the Depression and, in a final gasp, at the height of the Vietnam War with politically charged works that, like the organs of mass propaganda, were designed to make people feel. The Province-town Playhouse in the 1920s performed the early plays of Eugene O’Neil and Susan Glaspell. The New Playwrights’ Theatre, funded by the banker Otto Kahn, included the communist author Mike Gold, who wrote Jews Without Money, and left-wing artists such as Francis Edward Faragoh, Emjo Basshe, John Howard Lawson, and John Dos Passos. Lawson, who would become one of the Hollywood Ten, jailed for a year for refusing to answer before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), wrote a jazz play, Processional, about labor strife, prejudice, and violence in a Kentucky coal mining town.

  Basshe wrote a manifesto for the New Playwrights, calling for “a theater which is as drunken, as barbaric, as clangorous as our age.” A red flag was hoisted outside the Cherry Lane Theatre, on Commerce Street in Greenwich Village, which the New Playwrights rented for their second season. Dos Passos wrote the manifesto for their second season: “Towards a Revolutionary Theatre,” in which he called for a theater that “draws its life and ideas from the conscious sections of the industrial and white collar working classes which are out to get control of the great flabby mass of capitalist society and mold it to their own purpose.” These radicals sought to change content and theatrical form. The new social theater would be “somewhere between a high mass . . . and a Barnum and Bailey’s circus.”

  During the New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) recruited Hallie Flanagan in 1935 to become the head of the Federal Theatre Project. This effort, which brought radicals and liberals together, became an effective tool for social change and perhaps was the last potent counterweight to the propaganda state. Production costs and scenic effects were limited. Money was used to pay salaries to the artists. Ticket prices were low. Theater suddenly became available to people across the country. The project split theater, as Flanagan noted, between commercial theater, whose aim was to make money, and those in the public theater who wanted to make a new social order. By the end of the first year the project had more than fifteen thousand men and women on its payroll, and by the time the project was shut down four years later, its productions had played to more than thirty million people in more than two hundred theaters and school auditoriums, on portable stages, and in public parks across the country.27 Those working in the project were professional actors, directors, designers, writers, clowns, and musicians left unemployed by the financial collapse. They produced high-quality works that spoke to ordinary lives and the misery that had engulfed the country. Orson Welles and John Houseman directed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project in Harlem and set Macbeth in the Haitian court of King Henri Christophe. Voodoo witch doctors were recruited to play the weird sisters. The incidental music was composed by Virgil Thomson. The play, which premiered at the Lafayette Theatre on April 14, 1935, was sold out for each of its nightly performances. New plays, classical drama, modern drama, radio drama, puppet plays; Yiddish-, Spanish-, Italian-, and German-language theater; children’s theater, dance drama, musicals, religious drama, vaudeville, and circuses—hundreds and hundreds of productions in every state of the union poured out of the project. It was the high point of American theater.

  The productions—which took on factory owners, bankers, coal mine owners, government bureaucrats and industrialists—led to howls of protest from the power elite. It Can’t Happen Here, a drama that illustrated how fascism could take hold in the United States, was based on the novel by Sinclair Lewis. It opened in twenty-one theaters in seventeen states on October 27, 1936. The Hollywood Citizen-News reported that “the project has been the target of criticism from sources holding the play will antagonize sympathize
rs of the Hitler and Mussolini regimes.” Welles and Houseman were preparing to mount a production called The Cradle Will Rock, a musical written by Marc Blitzstein—who would be blacklisted in the 1950s—set in “Steel-town, U.S.A.” The musical followed the efforts of a worker, Larry Foreman, to unionize steel workers. His nemesis is the heartless industrialist Mr. Mister, who controlled the press, the church, the arts, the local university, politics, the community’s social organizations, and even the local doctor. The Cradle Will Rock spared no one, from Mr. Mister’s philanthropic wife and spoiled children to Reverend Salvation, who used religion to bless war and capitalism, to the corrupt editor of the local paper, Editor Daily. Mr. Mister, a trustee of the local university, forced the college president to fire professors who did not laud the manly arts of war and capitalism to students. The artists Yasha and Dauber, considered themselves too “cultured” and dependent on the largesse of Mr. Mister’s family to engage in politics. They sang with Mrs. Mister: