The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
in his columns for the Baltimore Sun papers that in the battle between autocracy and democracy, he wanted to see democracy go down. Mencken was enamored not only of the Kaiser’s autocratic rule but also with “the whole war machine.” He mocked Allied outrage over German killings of Belgian civilians, as well as the sinking of the Lusitania, which brought the death of 124 Americans. Mencken advised Theodore Dreiser, a fellow German American: “There can never be any compromise in future men of German blood and the common run of ‘good,’ ‘right thinking’ Americans. We must stand against them forever, and do what damage we can do to them, and to their tin-pot democracy.”
During the course of the war, he was censored by the Sun papers but wrote three revealing articles for The Atlantic. The first, “The Mailed Fist and Its Prophet,” celebrated Nietzsche as the inspiration for the new Germany, which was “contemptuous of weakness.” Germany was a “hard” nation with no patience for politics because it was governed by the superior men of its “superbly efficient ruling caste,” he wrote admiringly, adding: “Germany becomes Nietzsche; Nietzsche becomes Germany.” Mencken approvingly quoted Nietzsche to the effect that “the weak and the botched must perish. . . . I tell you that a good war hallows every cause.”
The second Atlantic article, based on Mencken’s own reporting from the Eastern Front in 1917, was a piece of hero worship that exalted General Erich Ludendorff as Germany’s “national messiah.” Mencken treasured the Kaiser, but he thought Ludendorff was worth “forty kaisers” and was the man to lead German Kultur in its total war against Anglo-Saxon civilization. According to Mencken, the general’s greatness revealed itself in the way that he had stamped out people’s individuality so that “the whole energy of the German people [could] be concentrated on the war.”
The third, and most intriguing, essay—“After Germany’s Conquest of the United States”—talked about the benefits to America of being ruled by the hard men of a superior Kultur. Known only because of the exchange of letters between Mencken and the editor of The Atlantic, the article was withdrawn and never published. Interestingly, despite Mencken’s extraordinary efforts to document his own life, the manuscript, according to Vincent Fitzpatrick, curator of the Mencken collection, cannot be found. Mencken’s reputation, it seems, was saved by wartime self-censorship—in Boston, home of The Atlantic.
1919: Betrayal and the Birth of Modern Liberalism
The years before the U.S. entered World War I were a golden age for American utopian reformers. Known as the Progressive era, they were “the years of Great Expectation when the Millennium, Woodrovian fostered, seemed just around the corner,” wrote the young reformer John Chamberlain. Speaking of his fellow young intellectuals, Lewis Mumford exclaimed: “There was scarcely one who did not assume that mankind either was permanently good or might sooner or later reach such a state of universal beatitude.”
By 1919, the sweet melody of hope had been replaced among writers and intellectuals by the anger and resentment born of a cataclysmic war, a failed peace, and a country wracked by what came to be known as the Red Scare. Hope survived for some, however, in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution. These were the conditions under which the Wilson-led Progressives of 1916, preaching social redemption for all, were reborn as the liberals of 1919, now suffused with scorn not only for President Wilson but also for American society.
Modern state-oriented liberalism, so the standard tale goes, was the inevitable extension of the pre–World War I tradition of Progressivism. But this is true only in a limited sense. The economic mobilization of WWI did provide the administrative model for the early years of the New Deal. But culturally, socially, and politically, liberalism represented a sharp break from Progressivism.
Progressivism was a middle-class Protestant movement that hoped to adapt to the strains of big corporations and big-city political machines in order to restore the traditional promise of American life. The Progressives, who were important in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, were in the business of moral reform. They were largely middle-class Victorians committed to the purification of politics, which they hoped to achieve by remolding the country’s polyglot population into a unified whole. Progressivism reached its apogee during WWI when its advocates won Prohibition and women’s suffrage while shutting down brothels and imposing “one hundred percent Americanism.”
In the standard accounts of American liberalism, both left and right argue that after the 1920s, Progressivism faced the Great Depression and as a result matured into the fully flowered liberalism of the New Deal. As I suggested in the previous chapter, this is fundamentally mistaken. While “winning the war abroad,” the Progressives “lost their war at home,” notes historian Michael McGerr. “Amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red Scare, Americans turned against the Progressive blueprint for the nation. The climax of Progressivism, World War I, was also its death knell.” Modern Republicanism—as incarnated in the 1920s by Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover—and modern liberalism were both reactions to the excesses of Progressivism.
Modern liberalism was born of discontinuity, a rejection of Progressivism—a wrenching betrayal and a shift in sensibility so profound that it still resonates today. More precisely, the cultural tone of modern liberalism was, in significant measure, set by a political love affair gone horribly wrong between Woodrow Wilson and a liberal left unable to grapple with the realities of power politics. For Progressives, reformers, and Socialists, the years from 1918 through 1920 were traumatic. During the presidential election of 1916, many leftists had embraced Woodrow Wilson as a thaumaturgical leader of near messianic promise, but in the wake of repression at home and revolution and diplomatic disappointment abroad, he came to be seen as a Judas, and his numinous rhetoric was despised as mere mummery.
For the ardent Progressive Frederick Howe, who had been Wilson’s Commissioner of Immigration, the pre-war promise of the benign state built on reasoned reform had turned to ashes. “I hated,” he wrote, “the new state that had arisen” from the war. “I hated its brutalities, its ignorance, its unpatriotic patriotism that made profit from our sacrifices and used it to suppress criticism of its acts. . . . I wanted to protest against the destruction of my government, my democracy, my America.” As part of his protest, the thoroughly alienated Howe distanced himself from Progressivism. Liberals were those Progressives who had renamed themselves so as to repudiate Wilson. “The word liberalism,” wrote Walter Lippmann in 1919, “was introduced into the jargon of American politics by that group who were Progressives in 1912 and Wilson Democrats from 1916 to 1918.” The new liberalism was a decisive cultural break with Wilson and Progressivism. While the Progressives had been inspired by a faith in democratic reforms as a salve for the wounds of both industrial civilization and power politics, liberals saw the American democratic ethos as a danger to freedom at home and abroad.
Wilson, a devout Presbyterian, was the first—and until President Obama the only—president to have systematically studied socialism. In 1887, as a young man, he responded to the growth of vast industrial monopolies that threatened individual freedom with this argument:
It is clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals.
In the midst of the 1912 presidential race, Wilson reiterated his sense of the kinship between democracy, which he saw as having roots in Christianity and socialism: “When you do socialism justice,” he said, “it is hardly different from the heart of Christianity itself.” In 1916, Wilson, a former college professor, not only brushed aside intense opposition to make the unprecedented appointments of two pro-labor-union justices to the Supreme Court, but he also