The convener opened the final, roundtable panel for the conference on Herbert Croly by quoting Virginia Postrel:
Herbert Croly is not exactly a household name, but he should be. Seven decades after his death, we are still living in the political world his ideas built–and struggling to escape it…. Crolyism overturned the ideal of limited government in favor of a combination of elite power–commissions to regulate and plan–and mass democracy. It was this pragmatic progressivism, not socialist utopianism, that extinguished classical liberalism as the general philosophy of American government.
Now, my first reaction to this citation was, Virginia Postrel is crazy. If we lived in Croly’s “political world” we would not be looking at a dramatic, multidecade increase in wealth inequality and a decline in social mobility. Croly said clearly — as clearly as he could, because frankly he was a lousy writer — that fulfilling “the promise of American life” meant eliminating “undesirable inequalities in the distribution of wealth.”
Let’s grant that “undesirable” is doing a lot of work there, but the point stands: Croly opposed inequality. Not because he was a socialist — as Postrel says — but because he thought that concentration of wealth meant concentration of political power, and therefore corrupted democracy. And he did think the state should have power to limit this concentration by regulation. Moreover, as it happens and as one of the presenters pointed out, scholarly research supports Croly’s ideas on this front; Edward Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer find “at least in some instances, administrative enforcement of rules is both feasible and preferred to a liability system, and that failure of courts to deal with the problems of market failure is one indication of the possibility that regulation might do better.”
But my second reaction was, if Postrel has somehow misunderstood what advantages progressivism offered, it’s not her fault: it’s Croly’s. Postrel seems to believe that Croly “extinguished classical liberalism as the general philosophy of American government.” And although this too is madness, it’s madness Croly invited. Croly, like lots of other progressive thinkers of the early c20, believed he was attacking a citadel of classical liberalism in the name of regulatory government. Like the much pithier Walter Lippmann, he favored Mastery as against Drift. Or as we now say, big gummint as against small gummint. In Croly’s words, the olden days permitted “the utmost freedom of economic and social movement” but “the government of a complicated social organism … had very different needs.” This is the kind of thing that gives Virginia Postrel fits.
But it’s one of the big mistakes progressives made, imagining they were fighting against a party of limited government. For the late c19 U.S. was no such thing. With its protective tariff, its subsidy to railroads, its use of the fourteenth amendment to protect the rights of corporations, it was a big gummint promoting the growth of industry. Somehow, populists knew this, but progressives didn’t. The question wasn’t the size of government, it was what government was designed to do.
And populist-types went on understanding this until they got a chance to fix it in the New Deal by using gummint to rebalance the scales:
Don’t let anyone tell you that government bounties were not being given in those days…. The railroads got their sections of land in each township to encourage their efforts…. A protective tariff system was maintained by which hidden taxes were removed from the pockets of everyone who labored in industry or agriculture…. Government did not bother business in those days. It couldn’t. Why?… In those days, business ran government.
The question is, why did Croly and other progressives think they could fight against the ideal of small government, when they should have been fighting the reality of government run for the benefit of business management? The Postrelian idea that we can choose between small gummint and big gummint is fanciful. That train has sailed. If you want to blame someone for having “extinguished classical liberalism as the general philosophy of American government” you should blame the Republican Party of the Civil War era. Or maybe Thomas Jefferson. Or maybe you should acknowledge that if you think classical liberalism was ever alight as the general philosophy of the American government, you’re a bit of a fantasist. You probably also think the free market owes you a pony.
(Further, if you believe government run for the interest of business management is the same as government that’s good for business, or good for the economy, you’re a willfully ignorant fantasist.)
Yet the issues keep getting framed as big gummint/small gummint, and progressives allow it when they don’t abet it. What’s wrong with you, progressives?
52 comments
January 15, 2008 at 5:36 pm
urbino
What a terrific post. (With links aforethought! (And a mixaphor! (And ponies!)))
BTW, Eric, I browsed upon a copy of your McKinley book in a local book emporium, Sunday night. It now resides at my ancestral family manse.
January 15, 2008 at 5:41 pm
bitchphd
This is a completely fabulous post. Thanks.
January 15, 2008 at 5:46 pm
eric
I browsed upon a copy of your McKinley book in a local book emporium, Sunday night. It now resides at my ancestral family manse.
So you shoplifted it?
January 15, 2008 at 5:46 pm
eric
Also, thanks both of you, you’re very kind.
January 15, 2008 at 5:49 pm
bitchphd
The litigation vs. regulation thing is especially interesting, b/c I have kind of a thing about that. It occurs to me, thinking of a video I watched the other day of Chris Matthews (::spitting::) interviewing Elizabeth Edwards, that Edwards has a bit of the problem you’re talking about here. EE was “defending” trial lawyers to Matthews (who was being, of course, a complete ass) by talking about how they represent the little people against large corporations–but of course she didn’t point out that the Republican argument is for *both* less regulation *and* limiting lawsuits. Which it suddenly occurs to me all the more clearly, reading this post, is as terrifying as any of their other, better publicized, evils.
January 15, 2008 at 5:57 pm
eric
as terrifying as any of their other, better publicized, evil
As William James would say, it’s evils all the way down.
January 15, 2008 at 5:57 pm
ari
Yeah, let me concur. After originally looking at this post and sending Eric an e-mail complaining about how he’d formatted it — I’m so lame, the Carson Kressley (sp?) of history blogging — I actually read it. And boy is this good stuff. So, while I was poking elderly Jewish journalists with a bloggy stick, Eric was doing some intellectual heavy lifting. No wonder he’s a full professor.
But all of tihs begs the real question: why did Urbino steal Eric’s book?
And also: good point, B. You’ve (inadvertantly, I’d guess), identified one of my problems with the Edwards family: they don’t go for the kill when it’s right in front of them. Come to think of it, that’s my only problem with them.
January 15, 2008 at 6:03 pm
urbino
why did Urbino steal Eric’s book?
Czolgosz made me do it.
January 15, 2008 at 6:11 pm
ari
Anarchist.
January 15, 2008 at 6:11 pm
ari
Urbino, that is. Just to clarify. Czolgosz was merely misunderstood. He was always so quiet. Kept to himself.
January 15, 2008 at 6:16 pm
urbino
Saracen dog.
January 15, 2008 at 6:18 pm
ari
Obscurantist.
January 15, 2008 at 6:23 pm
urbino
Fleshy Hogarthian tippler.
January 15, 2008 at 6:31 pm
ari
“Fleshy Hogarthian tippler.”
Hard to top…because it’s so true. Damn.
January 15, 2008 at 6:34 pm
bitchphd
they don’t go for the kill when it’s right in front of them
It’s entirely possible that EE, not being a full professor of history and a remarkably smart one at that, didn’t go for the kill because she didn’t see the kill. I suppose it might be a problem if/that the Edwards don’t see the Big Picture, as Eric’s saying, but, well, what president does, really? It’s a completely different skill set.
Also, in the video, she was looking very tired, and he was really being an asshole to her. It’s hard to stay in control of an argument under conditions like that.
January 15, 2008 at 6:36 pm
bitchphd
As Eric’s saying progressives tend not to, I mean. Though I dunno, is Edwards a progressive? I’m bad with the labels.
January 15, 2008 at 6:41 pm
ari
Nope, he’s a self-styled populist. Though probably not a Populist. And that anyone can withstand the sheer blowhardery of Matthews, much less say anything intelligent in the face of the gale, is pretty impressive. Plus, she’s not well. Honestly, every time I see her talk, I almost start to weep thinking about their kids if she doesn’t recover and he wins.
January 15, 2008 at 7:22 pm
urbino
and he was really being an asshole to her
Matthews? The dickens you say.
As a latter day populist, I guess Edwards even bears out Eric’s point, at least on big gummint. It was Edwards, after all, who said his domestic proposals were necessary, even though they would add to the deficit. That’s about as frankly unafraid of big gummint as an American politician can be, these days.
January 15, 2008 at 8:04 pm
bitchphd
Isn’t the situation basically that she *isn’t* going to recover? I think when they found out it was back and decided to keep running, that’s what they said–that at this point it’s basically about managing it as long as they can. It’s awful.
January 15, 2008 at 8:24 pm
ari
On a more upbeat note, this is really a great post. And here’s a thought it prompted: did the myth of small government emerge from tension between the independent rhetoric of the Revolution and the relative statism embedded in the Constitution? Is that where can we find the historical taproot for what James Morone calls the “dread and the yearning” Americans have for their government? Somebody get Alan Taylor on the phone.
January 15, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Jeremy Young
Eric, I can’t agree with you here. Your argument that the Blaine/Harrison model of government and the Crolian model of government are both “big government” and are fundamentally different from liberalism reminds me of the argument of Louis Hartz, who also says they don’t fundamentally disagree but thinks they are versions of liberalism. I think you’re both wrong, and that Croly’s vision of American government is larger in both scale and scope from the liberalism-inspired government of the 1890’s.
A government that gives enormous handouts to robber barons isn’t “big government” in any meaningful sense. That’s like saying that if you have a lot of rum in your cellar and you give it all away, you still have a big rum collection. The only thing “big” about late-1800’s American government was its dogmatic resistance to attempts to enlarge its institutions. You don’t believe me, look at the Progressive alternative during World War I, and again during the New Deal. Where’s the Food Administration, the Bureau of Propaganda, the War Materiel Board in the 1890’s? Where’s the NRA, the AAA, the CCC? It’s a different model of government entirely, and entirely suited to the big government/small government rhetoric that Croly and other Progressives used.
Beyond this, though, I think Croly’s arguing against the rhetoric of the monied interests as much as against their reality. People like Carnegie and Morgan put forth a tempting ideal of government that was part Locke and part Alger, and Croly was trying to substitute another, fundamentally distinct governmental model. Sure, it’s about “what government was designed to do,” but it’s also about how big a government it takes to do it. The bureaucracy required for a Crolian government is vaster by several orders of magnitude than what came before.
January 15, 2008 at 8:44 pm
eric
Jeremy, the argument isn’t that Croly didn’t propose enlargements to government. The argument is that Croly mischaracterized the reason for proposing enlargements to government.
This is an important distinction. If you stand up and say, I’m in favor of enlargements to government because we’ve had small government and we’ve outgrown it, you hand your opponents a lovely rhetorical tool: I stand for tradition! We haven’t outgrown tradition! We are our tradition! they say.
But if you stand up and say, I’m in favor of enlargements to government because to date, the enlargements to government have all been to the advantage of industry and now I’d like to see enlargements for the rest of us, you don’t hand your opponents that advantage.
That’s all I’m saying.
Well, I’ll say a bit more. The government of the 1890s didn’t just give “handouts to robber barons.” It used the army to break strikes. It used the tariff as an industrial policy (tinplate steel, anyone?). It built a bureaucracy to keep out the Chinese and prevent those here from claiming citizenship. Frankly, it was a bit of an intrusive pain in the neck.
January 15, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Jeremy Young
Fair enough. But I don’t think the Progressives, by and large, saw things the same way. They were explicitly arguing against tradition, because they wanted to supplant it with an ideal of ordered progress. (You see this, for instance, in Lippmann’s gushing comments on the scientific worldview in Drift and Mastery.) They were happy to concede tradition to their opponents because they saw their ideal of progress as superior to tradition, and thought they could convince the American people of this superiority. In that sense, they were like modernists, but unlike modernists they believed in order instead of chaos.
To be fair, I should probably read your McKinley book before I get too deep into this, because I realize I’m arguing with some ideas you’ve given a lot of thought to. So I’ll back off.
But re: your last paragraph: what does intrusiveness have to do with bigness? The 1890’s government wasn’t raising taxes or building new bureaucracies (except with regard to immigration), it was simply using old tools in ways the Progressives disagreed with. Ron Paul would have very little trouble with the government of Grover Cleveland, I think.
January 15, 2008 at 9:11 pm
urbino
To be fair, I should probably read your McKinley book before I get too deep into this
I highly recommend pinching a copy from a bookstore near you.
Other than that, all I can say is: interesting conversation. Proceed apace, please.
January 15, 2008 at 9:21 pm
paulbeard
I learn something every time I come here: this is the history they didn’t teach in Florida in the 1970s. And it seems to bear out some long-held suspicions about How Things Work. Good stuff.
January 15, 2008 at 9:24 pm
Jeremy Young
Edge of the West.com: Where I first learned that shoplifting is a good thing.
January 15, 2008 at 9:26 pm
ari
But not from the bloggers. That lesson came courtesy of Urbino: notorious blackguard.
January 15, 2008 at 10:00 pm
urbino
It’s true. I’m quite the rake. That’s why I have so much time to muck about historically with you losers. (And by “you losers” I mean Kelman.)
January 15, 2008 at 10:18 pm
eric
what does intrusiveness have to do with bigness?
Depends how you define bigness. Your mileage may vary. By my lights, and by those of any real libertarian, interfering with the free market is “big.” So, industrial policy = big. Strikebreaking with the US Army = big. Using the courts to declare unions illegal = big.
And it leads to a doctrine of big government. For example:
I don’t think Croly could have put it better.
The 1890’s government wasn’t raising taxes
Are you sure about that? Really sure?
Ron Paul would have very little trouble with the government of Grover Cleveland, I think
Dude, this blog has established pretty clearly that Ron Paul’s opinions of c19 historical figures are not to be taken seriously.
January 15, 2008 at 10:20 pm
eric
To be fair, I should probably read your McKinley book before I get too deep into this
Would it be wrong of me to agree with you? No, I think not. May I also recommend this book, and this one? Richardson’s I already recommended in the post, but here it is again; also this book. And this one.
This is worth your attention too. So is this.
Oh, and also this.
January 15, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Jeremy Young
I’m defining bigness as the actual size of the government (its total expenditures, number of employees, number of bureaux, etc.), which is I think where the disagreement comes from. Also, I don’t see a tariff as equivalent to a tax, specifically because I was thinking of an income tax (which of course was illegal in the 1890’s) rather than a sales tax. Even libertarians believe in the sales tax.
Heh to your last link. The one before it is broken, though (but I think I know where it was supposed to lead).
January 15, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Jeremy Young
And thanks for the final two links — I’ll be shoplifting them soon from a bookstore near you (er, me).
January 15, 2008 at 10:30 pm
eric
I don’t see a tariff as equivalent to a tax
I think you’re ready to run for public office.
January 15, 2008 at 11:45 pm
Vance Maverick
This is great. Reading along, I had been interpreting “big” in the way JY did. Googling around, it seems pretty uncontroversial that our government is using a lot more of GNP today than it was in 1900 (see for example the figures in the middle of this article from the St. Louis Fed, or these unsourced lecture slides).
ER, I take your point that the government was intrusive in extraordinary ways back then. Is there a way to make a more than impressionistic argument that it was intrusive to a great degree?
January 15, 2008 at 11:46 pm
Vance Maverick
Obviously, I mean “extraordinary” with respect to what we’re used to now. (Of all the places to go committing presentism!)
January 15, 2008 at 11:55 pm
ari
I should also note (not to ignore your excellent question, Vance) that this blog WILL set the intergalactic record for links to Belle Waring’s pony post.
January 16, 2008 at 4:17 am
AWC
Terrific post, Eric.
I’ll offer three explanations for why Progressives like Croly adopted this view of their own enterprise.
1) This narrative served to distinguish them from their unsuccessful political elders, the Populists and the Mugwumps. We’ll call this the Hofstadterian explanation.
2) Progressive government really was far more expansive than Gilded-age state. Progressives push a whole range of new institutions, but they don’t actually get rid of the tariff.
3) We’re compressing Gilded-age government into a big bundle, then fitting it neatly in the late nineteenth century. In fact, neither condition holds. The big expansion comes between 1865 and 1887, during a period when the courts are quite friendly to regulation. By the late 1880s, laissez-faire dominates the judiciary and continues to do so through the 1920s. People like Croly see themselves at war with Justice Rufus Peckham, not the late Gen. Benjamin Butler.
January 16, 2008 at 5:52 am
eric
Is there a way to make a more than impressionistic argument that it was intrusive to a great degree?
One could exhibit the tariff rates, as is done in the cited articles, or one could count the number of times troops were deployed to break strikes, or the number of troops devoted to that task, as is done here.
January 16, 2008 at 5:57 am
eric
I like your no. 3, AWC, but Croly is still wrong. Remember, Promise opens with a potted history of the United States that lays out the tale of how we were a frontier people, free and wild, and now we can’t be. Not a very good history, it should be added, in light of the above.
As for the tariff — Democrats, if not progressives, did lower it, which is not nothing, and displaced part of the revenue stream with an income tax. As I’m sure you know.
Also, you know, Charles Beard (e.g.) knew very well the story I’ve told here in this post, but Beard (though he lived in and near Manhattan) always identified as a farmer. It’s not all self-identified progressives who live in Croly-land. Just the ones who choose to believe it.
Which leads me to a final rumination, maybe a twist on your no. 1 — maybe the progressives who think this way are those who see themselves as participating in the Kloppenberg/Rodgers project — in a transatlantic intellectual argument — rather than embedded in American political history.
January 16, 2008 at 8:13 am
AWC
I don’t mean to say Croly’s right. Just thinking about why the myth of statelessness developed and endures.
I really do see generational politics at work. The Gilded-age statists were largely dead by 1900, while the Gilded-age libertarians were still very powerful into the 1930s. Mugwumps like Rufus Peckham saw themselves as fighting Jay Gould, Boss Tweed, and Ben Butler. Progressives like Croly viewed themselves as battling Peckham.
Sure, tariffs declined between 1890 and 1919, but the big drop occurred during WWI, before Croly wrote TPAL. And it’s hard to deny that the power of the state grew during WWI.
I love to slag on the GOP, but your man McKinley engaged in tariff reform! For this sacrilege, he was reviled by the likes of James G. Blaine.
January 16, 2008 at 8:13 am
mw
omg i love this blog.
— happy lurker
January 16, 2008 at 8:15 am
eric
McKinley engaged in tariff reform!
I think you want to say, “tried to engage in tariff reform.”
January 16, 2008 at 8:15 am
eric
And mw, happy to have you here!
January 16, 2008 at 8:17 am
eric
And AWC, my comment about the tariff was addressed to your, “Progressives push a whole range of new institutions, but they don’t actually get rid of the tariff.”
January 16, 2008 at 8:35 am
AWC
What? You don’t think the second highest tariff in US history was a “reform tariff”? Next thing you’ll be telling me that Bush’s “Clear Skies” bill won’t improve air quality.
But the 1890 act did lower sugar duties. Mmmm… sugar.
January 16, 2008 at 9:33 am
What is government good for? « Stuff ‘n stuff ‘n more stuff
[…] 16, 2008 This post is right on and very very important. The money quote […]
January 16, 2008 at 8:43 pm
andrew
The Menand review of Jacoby’s Last Intellectuals that I mentioned a few threads back makes a similar point (middle of the second paragraph of this excerpt):
January 16, 2008 at 8:49 pm
andrew
I think I broke the comments. Or at least threw off the alignment.
January 16, 2008 at 10:16 pm
eric
Yeah, a couple things. First, it’s not clear to me Croly is falling prey to conservative propaganda, so much as misapprehending the history all on his own. Second, stipulate that lefties are suckers (“progressives drool”); that’s only half the mystery here — the other half is that this sucker interpretation of history coexists with a smarter interpretation that wants roughly the same political solutions (“populists rule”).
January 17, 2008 at 6:55 pm
andrew
I’m not so sure Menand is saying that liberals have fallen prey to conservative propaganda – “willingness to accept–or its passiveness in the face of” isn’t quite the same thing. But anyway, I noted what he said not because I think it applies directly to Croly – about whom I actually know very, very little – but because there’s a similarity between people then and now accepting, erroneously, the idea that non-interventionist government has been an American tradition.
Were I to try a more substantive comment, I’d probably end up saying something that referred to federalism, state government and the Handlins’ Commonwealth book (and related studies I was planning to read before the abandonment of my dissertation). And probably something about property, and U.S. attitudes towards it.
January 18, 2008 at 5:30 pm
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