The Course of American Reform
Rendezvous with Destiny: a History of Modern American Reform.
by Eric F. Goldman.
Knopf. 503 pp. $5.00.
Professor Goldman has given us a full-scale account of what has been variously known as reformism and liberalism and progressivism in America, from the gentlemanly revolt of the Liberal Republicans in 1872 to the triumph of Harry Truman in 1948 and the Korean crisis of 1950. One can find here excellent accounts of Populism, muckraking, Theodore Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, the Bohemianism of the 20’s, and the New Deal. Along the way the author makes what seems to me a completely fresh contribution by examining the complex relations between various minority groups, particularly the Jews and the Negroes, and the reform movement.
The book’s emphasis, however, falls not on movements but on ideas and on the men and women who originated them or gave them currency. When the great expansion of industrialism after the Civil War fabulously enriched a few while failing to benefit or actually impoverishing the many, a loud cry arose demanding government action to curb the rich and to make this once more the land of opportunity. But the advocates of reform immediately encountered a powerful body of thought, which had grown out of Malthus and Adam Smith and Ricardo, and then out of Darwin and Spencer, and which Goldman calls Social or Conservative Darwinism. Social reform, they were told, might be desirable, but it was impossible. “The truth is,” wrote William Graham Sumner, “that the social order is fixed by laws of nature precisely analogous to those of the physical order. The most that man can do . . . by his ignorance and conceit [is] to mar the operation of the social laws.” At the turn of the century, in an onslaught that Goldman brilliantly describes, this “steel chain of ideas” was subjected to analysis by economists such as Ely and Veblen, sociologists such as Ross, anthropologists such as Boas, theologians such as Rauschenbusch, jurists such as Holmes and Brandeis, historians such as Turner, Simons, Smith, and Beard, philosophers such as Dewey, and journalists such as Steffens and Baker, and within a decade it was dissolved.
Thus there emerged a new body of thought, which Goldman calls Reform Darwinism. The Reform Darwinians were agreed that there were no natural laws that prevented the state from modifying the social structure, and that state intervention was in fact desirable. Beyond this, Goldman points out, there was disagreement as to the role of the state. Most of the Reform Darwinians thought of the state in roughly Jeffersonian terms, as a liberating agency, negating the powers of private business and other special interests. Herbert Croly, however, in The Promise of American Life, argued that Jefferson’s theories were not adapted to the problems of modern industrial society, and set forth a Hamiltonian concept of government. Maintaining that trust-busting was futile and the restoration of free competition undesirable, he advocated powerful trusts and powerful unions regulated by a powerful state. When, in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt picked up Croly’s ideas, the New Nationalism became a political force.
Two reform parties clashed in the election of 1912, with the party of conservatism out of the running. Woodrow Wilson, campaigning for the New Freedom, attacked Roosevelt’s program as a defense of privilege and a threat of tyranny, and his demand, after election, for trust legislation, tariff reduction, and banking reform was in the Jeffersonian tradition. Yet Goldman observes that there were streaks of the New Nationalism in the Wilson administration, and the effect of American participation in the First World War was an increased concentration of power in the hands of the federal government. When the reformers came back into power in 1933, after twelve years in the wilderness, their new leader, Franklin Roosevelt, seemed, especially in such measures as the NRA, to be adopting his cousin’s New Nationalism, but Goldman feels that the form the New Deal finally took was essentially Wilsonian. And once again an experiment in the New Freedom was interrupted by war. In what has emerged since, Goldman discerns no clear pattern.
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One might wish that Professor Goldman had been able to say something about European counterparts of the American reform movement, for the battle over reform was no parochial squabble but part of the crisis of Western Civilization. He has done so much, however, that it is ungrateful to ask for more, and certainly there is basis enough in his book for a tentative evaluation. What comes out clearly, first of all, is what many of us have long believed—that the reform movement was historically necessary. An industrial-urban civilization cannot survive without a strong central government committed to the public welfare. It also seems clear that the reform movement expressed, along with other things to be sure, a greater generosity and a livelier intelligence than could be found on the conservative side.
Yet those who, like Goldman, consider themselves “part of the ‘liberal’ tradition,” cannot afford to be smug, and there is little complacency in Goldman’s book. He is aware that the strong government required by reformism is always a threat to the health of society. “We must,” he quotes V. L. Parrington as saying, “have a political state powerful enough to deal with corporate wealth, but how are we going to keep that state with its augmenting power from being captured by the force we want it to control?” That is one problem, and in the 20’s, when Parrington asked the question, it seemed to be the most important one. But we have learned since then that the state may be captured by its supposed friends as well as by its avowed enemies, and we have been forced to ask ourselves how we are to protect reform against the reformers.
This, as Goldman realizes, is a moral problem, and he is disturbed, as so many people are, by the question of relativism. It was by demonstrating the relativity of moral standards that the thinkers of the reform movement destroyed the Conservative Darwinian case for the status quo, but Goldman asks whether they did not destroy the basis of Reform Darwinism as well. He notes, on the one hand, the willingness of some reformers to act on the principle that a good end justifies any means, and, on the other, the cynical selfishness into which this one and that one have fallen. The problem is dismaying and not easy of solution, but certainly the remedy is not to adopt some convenient absolute, as a few of our panicky intellectuals have been doing. The remedy, if there is one, lies in the constant examination and reexamination of the nature of man and the nature of society.
In any case I believe that fewer reformers have been betrayed by relativism than have been misled by concealed absolutes. These absolutes have been of various kinds, but the most pervasive has been the Marxist absolute of the class struggle and the inevitable triumph of social justice through the victory of the proletariat. Goldman’s failure to deal with the relations between reformism and Marxism is the only major shortcoming of his book. Throughout much of the history of reformism, reformers and socialists regarded each other as allies. Indeed, such professed socialists as Upton Sinclair and Charles Edward Russell were indistinguishable from reformers in their short-run programs, and many of the reformers would not have quarreled much with Sinclair and Russell about ultimate aims. This confusion made it possible for Lincoln Steffens to represent himself as a liberal and skeptic while his expressed opinions came closer and closer to those of Marx and, later, of Lenin. We have had, as a matter of fact, many influential thinkers—Veblen, Beard, and Parrington among them—who have expressed Marxist ideas without acknowledging, perhaps without recognizing, their Marxist character. Is it any wonder that some of us, when we got around to reading Marx in the 30’s, felt that we had been Marxists all the time without knowing it?
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Against such a background, Goldman’s treatment of the 30’s seems inadequate and even naive. In these days, when we are asked to believe that practically all American intellectuals were Stalinists in the 30’s, it is good to be reminded that from the beginning the New Deal commanded the allegiance of a large section of the liberal intelligentsia, and that some of the top New Dealers were among the earliest fighters against Stalinism.
Yet to devote a mere three or four brief pages to the influence of Communism in the 30’s is to misrepresent the history of the reform movement. For the Communist converts had almost all been originally advocates of reform, and had moved from reformism to Communism by what seemed to them a rigorously logical path. If, as Parrington said, the problem was how to keep the state from being taken over by corporate wealth, a very obvious solution, as all socialists knew, was to take over corporate wealth lock, stock, and barrel. And if you were really serious about taking over, then, as Steffens was saying even in the 20’s, you learned how to do the job from those who had already done it—i.e., the Russian Communists.
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To call attention to the relations between reformism and Communism is not to brand reformism a heresy but simply to point out a danger. Reformism, Goldman suggests, could conceivably lead to fascism by way of the New Nationalism. It could also lead to Communism by way of fear and hatred of the status quo—“the System.” The truth is that there is a totalitarian potential in our industrial-urban culture, and it is therefore not surprising that there should be a totalitarian threat in reformism. The solution is not to abandon reformism but to struggle continuously against the dangers it involves.
If, however, I must point out that Goldman does not see some of those dangers as clearly as he might, I cannot end on that critical note. The book is a brilliant book, based on magnificent research, vigorously written, honest and independent in its thinking, generous in its sympathies. Particularly notable are the portraits-cum-analyses of maybe a hundred reformers, from Samuel Tilden and Henry George to Thomas Corcoran and David Lilienthal, each of them the product of careful reading and careful thinking. Here are materials for that critical examination of American reformism that is particularly necessary at the present moment.
The destiny with which this generation has a rendezvous is certainly not what Franklin Roosevelt had in mind when he made his speech back in 1936, but it is a destiny of great importance just the same, and we must be grateful to any book that helps us, as does Professor Goldman’s excellent work, to be prepared for it.
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