Notes#11
February 22, 2001
Progressives in Peace and War
National Politics in the Progressive Era
Dominated by a single personality – TR
A young/vital
man in the White House; "Cowboy" "seven years
old"
physically active, intellectually
alert (and connected)
six years as president –
hovering over Taft administration;
back in 1912 as third-party
candidate – his most reformist moment/Debs to left
1915-1917 – the country’s
leading interventionist
Died 11919 -- 61
Fairly cautious president
– White House as “a bully pulpit”
Not out to destroy big
business; wanted titans like J.P. Morgan to be polite
Not all that much a friend
of labor – did not want them radicalized
Wanted to make government an
effective, efficient instrument to assist national
development
-- should have smart people in its employ; they should be able
to
identify, analyze and come up with workable solutions to problems …
Not much of the engineer
about TR – but an engineer’s mentality to much of
Progressivism;
ability to work with numbers, statistics
Engineer/social scientist
as alternative to the businessman/banker as public servant
Thorstein Veblen
Frederick Taylor –
Scientific Management
Herbert Hoover
E.R. A. Seligman
Progressive politics [TR] and
Progressive thinking [Wjames/J Dewey]--
Activist
Experimental/ Provisional/Testing
Open-minded/open-ended/ an
indisposition to establish a single TRUTH
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Now to do away with Philosphy departments…
“Pragmatic”
– Pragmatism
A philosophy or a disposition??
Not simply a synonym for
“practical/common sensical”
Charles Sanders Peirce
William James
John Dewey –
Instrumentalism/Constructivism
No single TRUTH, but some tests of utility – an idea’s
usefulness/”cash value”
Does “belief” in it to the point of acting on it produce beneficial
outcomes?
How can you tell? Not by Authority
But by testing/assessing consequences
Good consequences for you make an idea believable – for
you
Belief in God? “The Will/Right to
Believe”
Belief in the LAWS of Science??
Exchange between Wm. James and Henry Adams about the law of
thermodynamics
James died in 1910
Interesting Times in America
A government and political system seemingly equal to the challenges of
20th C
An economic system smoothing down some of its most exploitative edges, yet
continuing
to blast along
A social order with its vast inequities (the condition of most Blacks in the
South; immigrants in the cities;
Native Americans slotted off in reservations)
But providing more mobility for more of its members than any the social order in
the history of mankind
A cultural “awakening” or “coming of age” [ Van Wyck Brooks phrase ]
Cultural dependence upon Europe coming to a close – Emerson had thought so 70 years earlier – Repudiation of Victorianism – “The Genteel Tradition”
Europeans coming to America now not universally put
off by our cultural barrenness
Tocqueville in 1830s – Dickens in 1850s – Freud in 1909 (“America a
mistake”)
Americans not just consumers of European arts and
sciences –but producers
Painters
Photographers – Edward Steichen/ Alfred Steiglitz
Poets
Philosophers – James/Josiah Royce/Dewey…
Dance – Isadora Duncan
Theatre – Eugene O’Neill
John Butler Yeats (1912) – the painter, brother of
William, the poet – “Fiddles were tuning up all over America”
No place more so than in Greenwich Village, NYC
The word was out – If there’s no there there –Gertrude Stein on Oakland
Go to New York… 100s did do – from the heart of the heart of the country
A cultural rebellion against small
town America
pressing civil liberties/sexual freedom/inter-racial doings/ acceptable politics
New York as cultural center of country – after 1880s – consolidation of publishing here;
Proliferation of small magazines – support a community of writers/critics
The New Republic
-- Walter Lippmann and Randolph Bourne
The Seven Arts
The Masses
Attentive to European happenings – but not deferential
The Amory Art Show (1913) – TR review…
Politically on the Romantic Left -- socialists, many were
And internationally, pacifists – belief that war was an
antiquated/discredited instrument of
international relations
-- no big wars on Continent since Napoleon sent packing; just a
series of imperial dustups (Crimea/Boer/Franco-Prussian / Russia-Japan)
– Civil War was America’s
Widespread belief among European intellectuals (and their American counterparts) that European workers would not fight against each other under the flags of their respective states… William James of the Anti-Imperialist League; Jane Addams equally a pacifist
Shock attending “The Guns of August” in 1914 --
general reaction – Europe’s war – we needn’t get involved, emotionally,
politically, militarily
Jane Addams (1930) – “It is impossible now to reproduce that basic sense of desolation, of suicide, of anachronism, which the first hours of war brought to thousands of men and women who had come to consider war a throwback in a scientific sense.”
Certainly President Wilson’s early view – and President Nicholas Murray Butler and most of CU faculty – Some support for germany; and much concern with rising anti-German views – Germany the home of the University/Beethoven/ Goethe…
TR an exception – calls upon US to enter to help the British and French against the Hun
By 1916 – Growing concern that the Allies could lose; Germans renewed aggressive
use of submarines as if to test
American resolve to stay out; or nerve to get in…
1916 Election – Wilson defeats Charles Evans Hughes in part because he seemed more determined to stay out of the war in Europe
The Pragmatic Dilemma?
What is the problem??
James dead – “The Moral Equivalent of War”
John Dewey very much alive -- a public philosopher
Pacifism – an absolute [‘Thou shalt not kill”] that he uncomfortable with;
Equated pacifism with Quietism...
Any situation where application of force appropriate?
Dewey, it depends. An open
question… not a “don’t even think about it”
If what seemed to be interminable violence between two parties could be halted by the disinterested use of force by a third party
What if we did not intervene?
Possible triumph of Germans and their non-democratic governing ways; a global
setback for democracy
Intervention could be the means of insuring the ongoing progress of progressive ideas about the political and economic ordering of the world
Dewy lines up with the bellicose TR/the profiteering munitions manufacturers/ the England-can-go-no-wrong Anglophiles/ and the anti-German bigots in calling upon Wilson to intervene…
Dewey – US intervention “as the most economical method of securing the results which are desirable with a minimum of undesirable results”
Similar decision by Walter Lippmann
And by W.E.B. DuBois – Blacks supporting intervention as means of securing full standing in the society – ready to die for the country – should be worth something, eh?
Wilson -- "Make the world safe for democracy"?
Reaction on the part of his fellow Pragmatists who came out of this debate
clinging to old-fashioned principles that killing has no justification, that
it’s WRONG
Jane Addams – Hull House in 1917 becomes a recruitment station -- “War in the interest of democracy for the salvation of civilization [was] a contradiction in terms, whoever said it or however often it was repeated…”
The War itself – Gave fullest opportunity to
certain progressive dispositions
Prohibition – 17th
Women’s Suffrage – 18th Amendments
Vigorous government action – fast mobilization/drafting civilians
Use of psychological testing for the sorting of recruits
Employment of academics in military research and propaganda
Strict controls on business and labor – economy in governmental hands for the
duration
Hikes in income tax
(16th Amendment/1913)
Effective advertising/publicity campaigns to assure
national support for the war effort
War bond drives
An impatience with critics of the war, and with resisters
to the war effort
Not being passively tolerated -- Critics being identified, jailed, fired,
isolated –
Sedition Act/Espionage Act… violation of civil liberties
of wartime critics…
Suspicion about aliens/Bolsheviks...
NMButler – June talk to Alumni (really, to his faculty and students):
“So long as national policies were in debate…What
had been tolerated before became intolerable now. Whay had been wrongheadedness
was now sedition. What had been folly was now treason.”
Firings of anti-war professors – James McKeen Cattell/Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow Dana – resignation of Charles A. Beard
Randolph Bourne –
Expected as much of Butler or the CU Trustees – the poohbah of “the
governing class”
But of his admired professors??
“Twilight of Idols” – Would James have supported the war??
Couldn’t be sure … it all depends…
“What I came to is a sense of suddenly being left in the lurch, of suddenly finding that a philosophy upon which I had relied to carry us through no longer works.”
Pragmatism – “almost as our American religion”
Adjustment without values
”We suffer from a real shortage of spiritual values.”
Epitaph for Progressivism – “ “Its flowering appears in the technical organization of the war by an earnest group of young liberals, who direct their course by an opportunist program of state-socialism at home and a league of benevolently-imperialistic nations abroad. At their best they can give us a government by prudent, enlightened college men instead of by politicians.”
Bring back the pols – Warren G. Harding/Coolidge – whose greatest credential – reminded voters of McKinley – and the days before Americans found themselves with “that damn cowboy” and the “Princeton professor” as presidents…