The Revolt Against the Masses. Fred Siegel
in The Promise of American Life and its successor, Progressive Democracy (1915), two books so tightly connected that Croly said he wished he had written them as one, is best described as a plan for achieving (Auguste) Comtian ends—that is, the worship of society—by Rousseauian means, i.e., a plebiscitary democracy led by enlightened experts. As Croly himself explained it, he was “applying ideas, long familiar to foreign political thinkers, to the subject matter of American life.”
If liberals have a hard time understanding their own history, it’s at least in part because they’ve so successfully avoided dealing with Herbert Croly—who he was and what he hoped to achieve. Croly’s moralistic streak led his detractors to describe him as “Crolier than thou,” but his was an unconventional kind of morality. He was born in 1869 to David Croly and Jane Cunningham Croly, both successful New York journalists. David Croly, a sexual reformer who believed that copulatory repression bred social disorder, was a founding member of the Church of Humanity, an institution dedicated to propagating the ideas of the French sociologist Auguste Comte. David Croly’s wife, known professionally as “Jennie June,” was a caustic critic of marriage and a leading feminist writer. Their son was among the first in America to be baptized into the Comtian faith. Comte, a utopian socialist of sorts, attributed the troubles of the modern world to the “spiritual disorganization of society.” He wanted to deploy positivist science to restore the unity lost in the Protestant Reformation, and thus create a modern version of the “moral communism of medieval Christendom.”
The young Herbert Croly was raised to be a prodigy, but he developed slowly. He left Harvard before graduating and went to work for the Architectural Record, during which time he wrote Stately Homes in America from Colonial Times to the Present Day. At the age of forty, he took the underlying themes of his architectural writing, the tension between the artist and the marketplace, and translated them into politics, in The Promise of American Life. The book sold poorly but propelled him onto the national stage, where he drew the interest of former president Theodore Roosevelt. Croly would influence TR, just as TR, whom Croly saw as an American Bismarck, had already influenced him.
Bismarck was much on Croly’s mind. In The Promise, Croly, like John Stuart Mill, showed nothing but contempt for English liberalism. He saw it leading to “economic individualism . . . faith in compromise . . . [and a] dread of ideas.” These had, he wrote, made “the English system a hopelessly confused bundle of semi-efficiency and semi-inefficiency.” Croly much preferred the greater efficiency and, as he saw it, the greater equality of Germany, where “little by little the fertile seed of Bismarck’s Prussian patriotism grew into a semi-democratic nationalism.” Its great virtue was organization: “In every direction, German activity was organized and placed under skilled professional leadership, while…each of these special lines of work was subordinated to its particular place in a comprehensive scheme of national economy. … The German national organization means increased security, happiness and opportunity of development for the whole German people.”
Liberals came to accept as a given Croly’s insistence that, in America, the German path could be achieved only by using higher education to create the “skilled professional leadership” necessary to run society. Entrusting public affairs to this educated class would, Croly believed, have “a leavening effect on human nature.” “Democracy must stand or fall on a platform of possible human perfectibility,” he said. These were the words of a radical, not a reformer—a man who, like Marx and Comte, saw himself as leading humanity to a higher and more refined stage of civilization.
For Croly, businessmen and their allies—the jack-of-all-trades latter-day Jeffersonians—were blocking the path to the bright future he envisioned for the specialists of the rising professional classes. America’s business culture, he warned, threatened individuality, because businessmen “have a way of becoming fundamentally very much alike,” despite their differences. “Their individualities are forced into a common mold because the ultimate measure of the value of their work is the same, and is nothing but its results in cash. … In so far as the economic motive prevails, individuality is not developed; it is stifled.”
The flip side of Croly’s hostility to self-interested businessmen was his adoration of the new class of American intellectuals and artists. This class had the virtue, he said, of having a “disinterested” take on public affairs, which allowed it to rise above the petty peculiarities of the marketplace and serve all of humanity, in the manner of Plato’s guardians. Unfortunately, “the popular interest in Higher Education has not served to make Americans attach much importance to the advice of the highly educated man,” Croly lamented. “He is less of a practical power in the U.S. than he is in any European country.” Like H.G. Wells in England, Mussolini in Italy, and Lenin in Russia, Croly wanted the collective power of society put “at the service of its ablest members,” who would take the lead roles in the drama of social re-creation.
Croly’s Progressive-era audience was stirred by his insistence that the “ablest” deserved a more interesting world. “The opportunities, which during the past few years the reformers have enjoyed to make their personal lives more interesting, would be nothing compared to the opportunities for all sorts of stirring and responsible work, which would be demanded of individuals under the proposed plan for political and economic reorganization,” he wrote in The Promise.
Croly concludes The Promise with the insistence that “the common citizen can become something of a saint and something of a hero, not by growing to heroic portions in his own person, but by the sincere and enthusiastic imitation of heroes and saints.” This will depend, he argued in the book’s final sentence, on “the ability of his exceptional fellow-countrymen to offer him acceptable examples of heroism and saintliness.” Croly’s critique of industrial-era inequality had by its conclusion become a call for, in his own words, the “creation of a political, economic, and social aristocracy.”
In recent years, the terms “progressive” and “liberal” have become interchangeable. But while the Progressives and the founding fathers of liberalism shared a hostility to various groups—big-city political bosses, the immigrant masses, pharisaical plutocrats, and laggard legislatures—their sensibilities were fundamentally at odds. Wells and Croly sought transcendence; they looked to the creation of a new elite, a separate caste with the wisdom to lead society to social salvation by breaking with the conventions of middle-class Victorian morality. Progressivism, which embraced a conventional morality, sought social control over the unruly passions. It was a largely middle-class Protestant movement that wanted to outlaw alcohol, gambling, and prostitution. Broadly speaking, Progressives hoped to tame the big corporations and big-city political machines so as 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 uplift.” They had no use for the saloon, sexuality, or socialism. In the words of President Theodore Roosevelt, they wanted to curb the power of big business so that the “worthy man” had the “chance to show the worth that is in him.” Influenced by the social gospel, they aimed to diminish class divisions by outlawing child labor and instituting an income tax. They wanted to build what philosopher William James described as a “middle-class paradise.”
After the 1912 election, the Progressives, led by a segregationist, Democrat Woodrow Wilson, placed their faith in pragmatic reason and the better natures of the American people. Expanded government, even if it skirted the limits of constitutionally permitted powers, they insisted, would serve as an efficacious engine of popular goodwill that could soften the harsh rigors of industrial capitalism. After the unfortunate interregnum of the 1920s, so the story goes, Progressivism, faced with the Great Depression, matured into the full-blown liberalism of the New Deal.
But that is not what happened. The first articulation of what we would today recognize as modern liberalism was shaped by the lyrical left of pre-WWI Greenwich Village and also by the split within the Progressive movement between those who supported American involvement in WWI and the philo-German opponents of the war.
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