Croly was an unabashed nationalist who craved a “national reformer...in the guise of St. Michael, armed with a flaming sword and winged for flight,” to redeem a decadent America. This secular “imitator of Christ” would brine an end to “devil-take-the-hindmost” individualism in precisely the same manner that the real Jesus closed the Old Testament chapter of human history. “An individual,” Croly wrote, sounding very much like Wilson, “has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” Echoing both Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, Croly argued that “national life” should be like a “school,” and good schooling frequently demands “severe coercive measures.”
Croly’s ideas garnered the attention of Willard Straight, an investment banker with J. P. Morgan and a diplomat, and his wife, Dorothy, a member of the Whitney family. The Straights were prominent philanthropists and reformers, and they saw in Croly’s ideas a map for the transformation of America into a “progressive democracy” (the title of another of Croly’s books). They agreed to support Croly in his effort to start the New Republic, a journal whose mission was “to explore and develop and apply the ideas which had been advertised by Theodore Roosevelt when he was the leader of the Progressive party” Joining Croly as editors were the self-described socialist-nationalists Walter Weyl and the future pundit extraordinaire Walter Lippmann.
Like Roosevelt. Croly and his colleagues looked forward to many more wars because war was the midwife of progress. Indeed, Croly believed that the Spanish-American War’s greatest significance lay in the fact that it gave birth to Progressivism. In Europe wars would force more national unification, while in Asia wars were necessary for imperial expansion and for the powerful nations to let off a little steam. Croly constructed this worldview out of what he deemed vital necessity. Industrialization, economic upheaval, social “disintegration,” materialistic decadence, and worship of money were tearing America apart, or so he—and the vast majority of progressives—believed. The remedy for the “chaotic individualism of our political and economic organization” was a “regeneration” led by a hero-saint who could overthrow the tired doctrines of liberal democracy in favor of a restored and heroic nation. The similarities with conventional fascist theory should be obvious.
One might defend Croly by noting that such ideas were simply”in the air” at the end of the nineteenth century, a common set of responses to a common atmosphere of social economic, and political change. And indeed, this is part of my argument. There were of course significant differences between fascism and Progressivism, but these are mainly attributable to the cultural differences between Europe and America, and between national cultures in general. (When Mussolini invited the leader of the Falange Espaiiola—the Spanish fascists—to the first Fascist congress, he adamantly refused. The Falange, he insisted, was not fascist, it was Spanish!)
Fascism was one name given to one form of “experimentation” in the 1920s. These experiments were part of the great Utopian aspirations of the “world-wide movement” Jane Addams spoke of at the Progressive Party Convention. There was a religious awakening afoot in the West as progressives of all stripes saw man snatching the reins of history from God’s hands. Science—or what they believed to be science—was the new scripture, and one could only perform science by “experimenting.” And, just as important, only scientists know how to conduct a proper experiment. “Who will be the prophets and pilots of the Good Society?” Herbert Croly asked in 1925. He noted that for a generation progressive liberals believed that a “better future would derive from the beneficent activities of expert social engineers who would bring to the service of social ideals all the technical resources which research could discover and ingenuity could devise” Five years earlier, Croly noted in the New Republic that the practitioners of the “scientific method” would need to join with the “ideologists” of Christ, in order to “plan and effect a redeeming transformation” of society whereby men would look for “deliverance from choice between unredeemed capitalism and revolutionary salvation-”
To better understand the spirit of this fascist moment, we need to examine how progressives looked to two other great “experiments” of the age, Italian Fascism and Russian Bolshevism. Some of this was touched upon in Chapter 1, but it’s worth repeating: liberals often saw Mussolini’s project and Lenin’s as linked efforts. Lincoln Steffens referred to the “Russian-Italian” method as if the two things constituted a single enterprise.
The New Republic in particular was at times decidedly optimistic: about both experiments. Some seemed more excited about the Italian effort. Charles Beard, for example, wrote of Mussolini’s efforts:
This is far from the frozen dictatorship of the Russian Tsardom; it is more like the American check and balance system; and it may work out in a new democratic direction...Beyond question, an amazing experiment is being made here, an experiment in reconciling individualism and socialism, politics and technology. It would be a mistake to allow feeling aroused by contemplating the harsh deeds and extravagant assertions that have accompanied the Fascist process (as all other immense historical changes) to obscure the potentialities and the lessons of the adventure—no, not adventure, but destiny riding without any saddle and bridle across the historic peninsula that bridges the world of antiquity and our modern world.
Such enthusiasm paled in comparison to the way progressives greeted the “experiment” in the Soviet Union. Indeed, many of the remaining left-wing footdraggers on the war became enthusiastic supporters when they learned of the Bolshevik Revolution. Suddenly Wilson’s revolutionary rhetoric seemed to be confirmed by the forces of history (indeed, Wilson himself saw the earlier fall of the tsar to the Kerensky government as the last obstacle to U.S. entry into the war, since he would no longer have a despotic regime as an ally). A wave of crusading journalists went to Moscow to chronicle the revolution and convince American liberals that history was on the march in Russia.
John Reed led the charge with his Ten Days That Shook The World. Reed was an unreconstructed admirer of the Bolsheviks. He dismissed complaints about the Red Terror and the mass murder of non-Bolshevist socialist revolutionaries easily: “I don’t give a damn for their past. I’m concerned only with what this treacherous gang has been doing during the past three years. To the wall with them! I say I have learned one mighty expressive word: raztrellyaf [sic] (execute by shooting).” The progressive public intellectual E. A. Ross—who will reappear in our story later—took a common tack and argued that the Bolsheviks had killed relatively few members of the opposition, so it really wasn’t a big deal. Reed and Ross at least acknowledged that the Bolsheviks were killing people. Many pro-Bolshevik liberals simply refused to concede that the Red Terror even transpired. This was the beginning of nearly a century of deliberate lies and useful idiocy on the American left.
When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Kerensky government, Wilson’s refusal to recognize them—and his subsequent intervention in Siberia and Murmansk—were denounced as “Wilson’s stab in Russia’s back” because most liberals saw the Bolsheviks as a popular and progressive movement. One British journalist writing in the New Republic proclaimed the Bolsheviks “stand for rationalism, for an intelligent system of cultivation, for education, for an active ideal of cooperation and social service against superstition, waste, illiteracy, and passive obedience.” As the historian Eugene Lyons noted, these crusaders “wrote as inspired prophets of an embattled revolution...they were dazzled by a vision of things to come.”
To be sure, not all left-leaning observers were fooled by the Bolsheviks. Bertrand Russell famously saw through the charade, as did the American socialist Charles E. Russell. But most progressives believed that the Bolsheviks had stumbled on the passage out of the old world and that we should follow their lead. When the war ended and Progressivism had been discredited with the American people, the intellectuals looked increasingly to the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy as exemplars of the new path that America had foolishly abando
ned after its brilliant experiment with war socialism.
Nearly the entire liberal elite, including much of FDR’s Brain Trust, had made the pilgrimage to Moscow to take admiring notes on the Soviet experiment. Their language was both religiously prophetic and arrogantly scientific. Stuart Chase reported after visiting Russia in 1927 that unlike in America, where “hungry stockholders” were making the economic decisions, in the Soviet Union the all-caring state was in the saddle, “informed by battalions of statistics” and heroically aided by Communist Party officials who need “no further incentive than the burning zeal to create a new heaven and a new earth which flames in the breast of every good Communist.”
That same year two of America’s leading New Deal economists, Rexford Guy Tugwell and Paul Douglas, pronounced themselves awed by the Soviet “experiment.””There is a new life beginning there,” Tugwell wrote in his report. Lillian Wald visited Russia’s “experimental schools” and reported that John Dewey’s ideas were being implemented “not less than 150 per cent.” Indeed, the whole country was, for liberals, a giant “Laboratory School.” Dewey himself visited the Soviet Union and was much impressed. Jane Addams declared the Bolshevik endeavor “the greatest social experiment in history.” Sidney Hillman. John L. Lewis, and most of the other leaders of the American labor movement were effusive in their praise of “Soviet pragmatism,” Stalin’s “experiment,” and the “heroism” of the Bolsheviks.
W. E. B. DuBois was thunderstruck. “I am writing this in Russia,” he wrote back to his readers in the Crisis. “I am sitting in Revolution Square...I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may he partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik “
DuBois offers a good illustration of how fascism and communism appealed to the same progressive impulses and aspirations. Like many progressives, he’d studied in Germany in the 1890s and retained a fondness for the Prussian model. An anti-Semite early in his career—in 1924 his magazines started carrying a swastika on the cover, despite complaints from Jewish progressives—DuBois applied for a grant in 1935 from an organization with known ties to the Nazis that was run by a well-known Jew hater who’d dined with Joseph Goebbels. He truly believed the Nazis had a lot of great ideas and that America had much to learn from Germany’s experiment in National Socialism (though later, DuBois denounced Nazi anti-Semitism).
And so it was with other pro-Soviet liberal icons. Recall how a year before Lincoln Steffens announced he’d seen the future in the Soviet Union, he’d said much the same thing about Fascist Italy. The heroic success of fascism, according to Steffens. made Western democracy—run by “petty persons with petty purposes”—look pathetic by comparison. For Steffens and countless other liberals, Mussolini, Lenin, and Stalin were all doing the same thing: transforming corrupt, outdated societies. Tugwell praised Lenin as a pragmatist who was merely running an “experiment” The same was true of Mussolini, he explained.
The New Republic defended both fascism and communism on similar grounds throughout the 1920s. How. a correspondent asked, could the magazine think Mussolini’s brutality was a “good thing”? Croly answered that it was not. “any more than it was a ‘good thing’ for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy.”
Charles Beard summed up the fascination well. Il Duce’s hostility to democracy was no big deal, he explained. After all, the “fathers of the American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could desire.” Mussolini’s dictatorial style was likewise perfectly consistent with the “American gospel of action, action, action.” But what really captured Beard’s imagination was the economic system inherent to fascism, namely corporatism. According to Beard, Mussolini had succeeded in bringing about “by force of the State the most compact and unified organization of capitalists and laborers into two camps which the world has ever seen.” The key concept for rationalizing progressive utopianism was “experimentation,” justified in the language of Nietzschean authenticity. Darwinian evolution, and Hegelian historicism and explained in the argot of William James’s pragmatism. Scientific knowledge advanced by trial and error. Human evolution advanced by trial and error. History, according to Hegel, progressed through the interplay of thesis and antithesis. These experiments were the same process on a vast scale. So what if Mussolini cracked skulls or Lenin lined up dissident socialists? The progressives believed they were participating in a process of ascendance to a more modern, more “evolved” way of organizing society, replete with modern machines, modern medicine, modern politics. In a distinctly American way, Wilson was as much a pioneer of this movement as Mussolini. A devoted Hegelian—he even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife—Wilson believed that history was a scientific, unfolding process. Darwinism was the perfect complement to such thinking because it seemed to confirm that the “laws” of history were reflected in our natural surroundings. “In our own day,” Wilson wrote while still a political scientist, “whenever we discuss the structure or development of a thing...we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin.”
Wilson won the election of 1912 in an electoral college landslide, but with only 42 percent of the popular vote. He immediately set about to convert the Democratic Party into a progressive party and, in turn, make it the engine for a transformation of America. In January 1913 he vowed to “pick out progressives and only progressives” for his administration. “No one,” he proclaimed in his inaugural address, “can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party...I summon all honest men. all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!” But he warned elsewhere, “If you are not a progressive...you better look out.”
Without the sorts of mandates or national emergencies other liberal presidents enjoyed, Wilson’s considerable legislative success is largely attributable to intense party discipline. In an unprecedented move, he kept Congress in continual session for a year and a half, something even Lincoln hadn’t done during the Civil War. Sounding every bit the Crolyite, he converted almost completely to the New Nationalism he had recently denounced, claiming he wanted no “antagonism between business and government.” In terms of domestic policy, Wilson was successful in winning the support of progressives in all parties. But he failed to win over Roosevelt’s followers when it came to foreign policy. Despite imperialist excursions throughout the Americas, Wilson was deemed too soft. Senator Albert Beveridge, who had led the progressives to their greatest legislative successes in the Senate, denounced Wilson for refusing to send troops to defend American interests in China or install a strongman in Mexico. Increasingly, the core of the Progressive Party became almost entirely devoted to “preparedness”—shorthand for a big military buildup and imperial assertiveness.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 distracted Wilson and the country from domestic concerns. It also proved a boon to the American economy, cutting off the flow of cheap immigrant labor and increasing the demand for American exports—something to keep in mind the next time someone tells you that the Wilson era proves progressive policies and prosperity go hand in hand.
Despite Wilson’s promise to keep us out of it, America entered the war in 1917. In hindsight, this was probably a misguided, albeit foregone, intervention. But the complaint that the war wasn’t in America’s interests misses the point. Wilson boasted as much time and again. “There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for.” he declared. Wilson was a humble servant of the Lord, and therefore selfishness could not enter into it.
Even for ostensibly secular progressives the war served as a divine call to a
rms. They were desperate to get their hands on the levers of power and use the war to reshape society. The capital was so thick with would-be social engineers during the war that, as one writer observed, “the Cosmos Club was little better than a faculty meeting of all the universities “ Progressive businessmen were just as eager, opting to work for the president for next to nothing—hence the phrase “dollar-a-year men.” Of course, they were compensated in other ways, as we shall see.
WILSON’S FASCIST POLICE STATE
Today we unreflectively associate fascism with militarism. But it should be remembered that fascism was militaristic because militarism was “progressive” at the beginning of the twentieth century. Across the intellectual landscape, technocrats and poets alike saw the military as the best model for organizing and mobilizing society. Mussolini’s “Battle of the Grains” and similar campaigns were publicized on both sides of the Atlantic as the enlightened application of James’s doctrine of the “moral equivalent of war.” There was a deep irony to America’s war aim to crush “Prussian militarism,” given that it was Prussian militarism which had inspired so many of the war’s American cheerleaders in the first place. The idea that war was the source of moral values had been pioneered by German intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the influence of these intellectuals on the American mind was enormous. When America entered the war in 1917, progressive intellectuals, versed in the same doctrines and philosophies popular on the European continent, leaped at the opportunity to remake society through the discipline of the sword.