New Directions for Old Hats

I think we'll try something new for a while. Let's review everything and anything we come across: TV, books, movies, people, sunsets, ideas, pet names, etc. I think it'll be fun.

I'll start with this abbreviated review of Richard Hofstadter's classic, The Age of Reform

"Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform stands now, as it probably will for some time, as one of a handful of standard texts for students of American history. It is not difficult to see why. From its elegance of prose to its author’s novel contentions as to the motives and mindsets of the Populists and Progressives (the latter for him being only Roosevelt’s supporters, really), Age of Reform is quite brash and demands attention.

Hofstadter’s most famous—or perhaps most outrageous—assertions in Age of Reform concern the Populists who, he argued, suffered an ironic journey to an even more ironic fate. While the criticisms of his treatment of Populism are legion and famous (see Alan Brinkley’s essay on Hofstadter in Liberalism and Its Discontents, Norman Pollacks’ numerous diatribes, and Richard McCormick’s "Progressivism: A Contemporary Reassessment" in The Party Period and Public Policy), his most vocal critics have not given him the credit he deserves for identifying a strain of thought that had tormented intellectuals dating at least as far back as the contemporary, William James.

To wit: intellectuals, in formulating their reform philosophies and putting them into practice, had never successfully confronted man’s irrationality and the role it would play in reform. Populism, on the surface anyway, was irrational. Hofstadter identified the Populist impulse quite strikingly as a panic response by agrarians to the decline of the mythological stature of the farmer in American society. Though this is controversial, and may even have been repudiated by the author himself, there is a great deal of merit in the idea that members of an industrializing society might have put stock in outdated notions of pastoral righteousness and might have acted irrationally when confronted with evidence of disjunction with the "past."

The specifics of this line of argument are not so charming or acceptable. It has been said that Age of Reform was written with precious little primary research, and thus the evidence that Hofstadter claimed for his position—a position, again, that I find perfectly reasonable—is highly suspect. The Populists in question are a carefully-selected lot (as are his Progressives later on); though we see Tom Watson often, there is little else of southern or western populism and thus the reader gets the idea that these regions contributed little to the midwestern folks Hofstadter was talking about (and, as a side note, Watson appeared as less of a pragmatic leader than a frothing maniac—a portrait refuted by other severe critics of Populism like Barton Shaw).

Though the author tried to be nice in places, the entire discussion was clouded by a thread of scorn—I could not help but recall Walter Lippmann and his derision of backward-looking reformers (in Lippmann’s case, the Progressives), each attempting to claw his way (and take America, too) back to a past shrouded in self-delusional fantasy and late Victorian propriety.

Not only is Populism history’s greatest anachronism, then, it was also a paranoia club; seeing in history a conspiracy of powerful interests (70). Whether this delusion was defensive (Hofstadter implied that Populists could not see themselves as losers in an age of impersonal forces, so they constructed a scenario in which they were yeomen, divorced from the market and preyed upon by industry (73)) or a more cynical, less coherent amalgam of silverites, xenophobes, and anti-semites, one can hardly mourn their passing.

It is helpful, however, that Hofstadter included in his discussion of Populism an epilogue of sorts. Farmers, we are reminded, did eventually realize many of their protectionist goals and did recapture a bit of their stature. Ironically, it was only after the death of third party politics and the adoption of interest group voting behavior, to say nothing of the elimination and consolidation of tens of thousands of farms, that led to this "victory" (95, 109). Agricultural interests gained a strong political voice, as a minority interest, only when farmers could finally admit to being businessmen (121,124).

In the same manner in which status anxiety informed the Populist movement, so too did it drive the Progressives. Hofstadter took a crib from C. Vann Woodward’s Origins of the New South when he splits the Progressives into two generations and locates their concerns in economic and social status. Just as Woodward’s old southern elite faded in the face of the New South industrialist, so did Hofstadter’s "Mugwump" elite inadvertently relinquish power to the upstarts of the machine age. Never mind that Woodward was wrong for all the right political reasons.

Upon realization of this blunder, of course, the old elite reemerged and fought for its customary respect but, finding itself losing ground relative to the vast fortunes of the nouveau riche, it channeled its energies instead into a reform movement (135-148).

The second generation of Progressives included intellectuals, alienated professionals and clergy, the new, industrial middle class, and displaced agrarians. A wonderful delineation of this shift can be found in James Kloppenberg’s Uncertain Victory, concerning the angst of the aforementioned James when it came to actually joining the fray. He, at least, realized that theory cannot measure up in practice; what would one expect from the founding pragmatist?

A variety of causes united the Progressives: urban chaos, political corruption, fear of immigrants, a disdain for elitist leadership and laissez faire economics, a growing shift towards the politics of consumerism; and in the case of social scientists a vested interest in reforms that would put their services in demand (155). In fact, and contrary to what I have read elsewhere (i.e., Brinkley), it seems that Hofstadter deviated from his status/interest dichotomy enough that he was able to assemble just as disparate a group of "progressives" as any other historian has. Like them, his tale ends in a confusion of just what exactly, other than self-identification and Rooseveltism, qualified them as a cohesive movement.

Just as Lippmann did with Wilson and his supporters, albeit in a derisive way, Hofstadter locates his Progressives in a nostalgic tradition where they looked to "recapture a bright past in which there had been a future" (227). However, Hofstadter saw in Wilson someone earnestly trying to make sense of the new reality in terms of old values, not a fool sticking his finger into the proverbial dike to hold back progress. Unlike many contemporaries, who struggled mightily to reconcile the best of individualism with the emerging hierarchical industrial society, the Wilsonians were fighting anything that stood in the way of the self-made man. Unlike for Lippmann, these were not Americans looking expectantly to "science" or managers, or to be "a nation of employees, at best of administrators" (227). FDR was the betrayer of this modest dynamism of the early 20th century.

In my opinion, the most interesting part of the analysis of Progressives is the notion of guilt as a motivating factor in reform. Whether it be the guilt of an absentee elite, wracked by conscience for allowing the evils of the world to come to the fore, or the imputation of personal guilt to the readership of McClure’s (204). Where Lippmann saw in muckraking journalism merely the chronicling of the same ills over and over until it lost all meaning, Hofstadter saw the very nature of progressive thought. The Protestant Progressive mind would not allow for social evils without blame, and so the ethos of personal responsibility demanded the assignation of guilt (204-212). Few have accepted Hofstadter’s notion that all reform was simply a performance to assuage guilt, but the solemn, accusatory preface to Steffens’ The Shame of the Cities demonstrates the power that such thinking held for contemporaries (208).

Ultimately, Progressivism proved unable to fulfill its promise, even though, like Populism, reform legislation did find its way, eventually, onto the books. Unlike the agrarian measures, though, Progressive reform utterly failed to changing the underlying structure of society and politics (just as Lippmann and James predicted), because most measures of political accountability were designed for the age and its people. When Progressivism was no more, these measures could be seen as obviously futile attempts to "legislate a mood" (266).

Additionally, Hofstadter’s Progressives suffered from Hofstadter himself: positing that they had worked within a narrow framework of consensus and accommodation, in this case to the new organizational society, Hofstadter was then able to sigh that they had mortgaged possibility by necessity. This is a far cry from the intense hopefulness that the era embodied not only for Progressive intellectuals but for Hofstadter’s contemporaries as well. Finally, his assertion that the New Deal effectively discarded the rules of reform is similar to Daniel Rodgers’ analysis of the chaotic nature of Roosevelt’s grand experiment; but Hofstadter, sensing the need to close with a downer, lays at its feet the very death of Progressivism."

What you got?