Progressivism, Old and New

I

I HAVE sometimes thought that, if ever I looked back upon a well-rewarded life, one chapter in the ensuing autobiography would bear the title: ‘Second Thoughts on Having Cast a Presidential Vote for Parley Parker Christensen.’

Time crops the roses. Christensen you may remember only faintly. But it was less than three short years ago, in the cellar of a rug-store in West 47th Street, New York, — a cellar temporarily converted into a polling-place, — that I put a cross beside the name of this Utah barrister who had come from the West to lead the Farmer-Labor Party. I cannot pretend that I did it with great gusto. Of Christensen himself I knew nothing save that he was six feet two, an Odd Fellow, and an Elk. Personally, he seemed to me an unexciting candidate to vote for. I left the rug-store mentally serene but emotionally flat. Somehow, though there was no reason for it, I felt as guilty as if I had been caught voting twice.

And I dare say that there were others who shared the feeling with me. None of us, I suppose, was voting for Christensen as a candidate. We thought that we were voting for him as a principle. We objected to a choice between two parties that failed to offer any choice — parties whose chief political conviction seemed to be the necessity of turning each other out of office. We looked forward to a day when parties would be moderately cohesive — when ‘ Republican,’ for instance, would mean either Mr. Lodge or Mr. Hearst or Mr. Pinchot, but not all three of them at once. We believed the American genius to be capable of sustaining, ultimately, a form of political campaign which was not a contest in evasion but the submission to the voter of a choice between conservatism on one side, progressivism on the other. We thought we saw, in a vote for Christensen, a vote for such an order. And we rallied, here and there in modest groups, to his somewhat pallid banner.

Christensen was beaten. He got, if I remember rightly, one vote in ninetynine. Thereafter, as promptly and completely as if the earth had swallowed him, he disappeared. But he prophesied, on the eve of his departure, a revolt within the ranks of the major parties well before the next election. And that prophecy has been echoing and reëchoing ever since. Senator Borah’s is the latest voice to take it up. ‘Unless there is a complete change of programme on the part of the Republican Party,’ he has recently asserted, ‘a change through the adoption of a liberal and constructive policy, there will be a formidable third-party movement in 1924.’

We are witnessing, in fact, a series of political disturbances unlike anything in 1920, and far more auspicious for a young insurgency. The last Congressional elections bore evidence to that. An unprecedented number of stand-pat leaders — Calder, Mondell, du Pont, Townsend, McCumber, Kellogg, Freylinghuysen •— marched up the hill and down again. Into the Senate have come Brookhart, Frazier, Wheeler, — to join La Follette, Ladd, and Norris, — rebels who ran off with the insignia of Republicanism and Democracy in their own states, pursued by angry party-regulars. The November elections were by no means a clear-cut ‘progressive’ victory; they are still being interpreted, in fact, as each man wants to interpret them for himself: a rebuke to everything, from Daugherty to Isolation. But certainly it may be said of them that they revealed a measure of dissatisfaction with post-war problems resolved in terms of pre-McKinley policy.

Subsequently we have had, first an impressive show of strength on the part of the Farm bloc in the Senate; then a conference of forty ‘ progressive’ senators and representatives in Washington; and finally another conference in Cleveland, to consolidate a ‘people’s legislative bloc.’ To be sure, the Old Guard still controls the machinery of both major parties. It holds the keys to campaign coffers. The rebels are a small minority. But in their successes last November, their blocs, their challenges to a somewhat less confident majority, more than one prophet in our midst discerns the rise of a ‘new Progressivism,’ model 1923, definitely headed toward an attempt to assert itself in 1924. This time, its partisans declare, the insurgent movement is founded in realities, growing of its own accord. It is not the forced product that it was in 1920. Neither is it, as in the days of Roosevelt, a bolt from the ranks on the part of the personal followers of an ambitious leader. This time the Presidential cart is not before the horse; the platform is coming first, the captain later on.

In short, the leaders of this 1923 Progressivism bid those of us who cast a vote for Christensen three years ago to pluck up courage, come out of the storm-cellar, or the rug-cellar, and survey the modern scene. Here is the thing you have been waiting for. Here is a new Progressivism.

We come to the top step, at any rate. We shall be forgiven if after two false starts we ask for time. Of what does this ‘new’ Progressivism consist? How does it differ from the old?

Even its official leaders, so far as it has any, are inclined to disagree about it. Progressives in the Senate are divided in three camps. There is a conservative Right Wing, led by such men as Owen, of the Democrats, and Capper, of the G. O. P. There is no Centre. And then there is a radical Left Wing that pivots on the leadership of Brookhart and La Follette, Frazier, Wheeler, Ladd, and other downright party rebels. Still farther to the Left, perhaps, — for the reason that he has cut loose entirely from the two old parties, — is Shipstead of Minnesota.

On the surface the difference between Left and Right is this: the Right is ready to throw a wrench into the existing machinery of politics and finance only when it feels it has to, the Left for the sake of the ensuing crash. That, however, is not where this new Progressivism essentially lacks unity. For any political alliance is bound to have factions varying from radical to conservative within the broad limits of its own special faith. More characteristic is the fact that this 1923 Progressivism, like its predecessors, is mobilizing around a few points of special interest. Its leaders agree on enough points, chiefly in the matter of farm legislation, to give them cohesion in the Senate. But they by no means agree about a host of other matters, such as the right way to enforce the eighteenth amendment, the justice of an eighthour day for farmhands, the comparative merits of Sunday blue laws, compulsory arbitration, moving-picture censorship, government ownership of railways, land-taxes, Russia. American Progressivism has not the same community in culture and conviction that characterizes, say, Liberalism in England. Instead, it is something more objective, localized. There is no tradition and no set of principles broad enough to bring Progressives together, all along the line.

Too much ought not to be made of this distinction. I have overstated the situation on both sides. Certainly a good measure of the homogeneity in British Liberalism is pure protective coloring. Nevertheless, the distinction is real enough, and there is every reason why it should be. Not only is Progressivism in its infancy in America, as an organized doctrine of political faith, with none of the history of British Liberalism behind it: more important is the influence of geography. It is easier to achieve homogeneity in a tight little island like Britain than across the sprawling plains and mountains of a continent. A score of local issues and enthusiasms inevitably intrude on every party’s interests. Progressivism suffers — or, it may be, profits — from the same separatism that has affected the evolution of the older parties. The chances are that it will never be the same thing, at the same moment, in both Emporia and New York.

What are we to take, then, as a fair sample of the ‘new’ Progressivism? Something from the West, certainly. Something, if we are to choose the group that sets the pace, on the style of Brookhart, Frazier, Wheeler, Ladd. Progressivism, let us say, such as suits a radical who has not yet broken with a stand-pat state machine, but captured it — a farmer who waves Jove’s lightning over ‘Wall Street’s’ head.

That is not a complete description of the 1923 Progressive, but it will do well enough to start with.

II

If you turn back to the 1912 Progressive platform (you will have hard work finding it anywhere except in 1913 almanacs), you will observe one point which seems odd in 1923: very little emphasis was put on any special interest of the farmer. In fact, not until the seventy-second paragraph of that Covenant with the People did the farmer even enter. Then he was told that ‘the development and prosperity of country life are as important to the people who live in cities as they are to the farmers.’ He was further assured, and not without reason, that increase of prosperity on the farms would promote the interests of the people living there. And he was guaranteed that this new party pledged itself ‘to foster the development, of agricultural credit and cooperation, the teaching of agriculture in the schools, agricultural college extension, the use of mechanical power on the farm, and to reëstablish the Country Life Commission.’

Adequate; but not very stirring reading for the farmer. And perhaps, looking back across a decade, we may say that the 1912 Progressive movement had little of the agrarian revolution in it. Essentially it was a smalltown movement. Its agricultural programme, you will note, was introduced with an assurance that it was a matter of importance for ‘the people who live in cities.’ The delegates to the 1912 Convention decked themselves in bright bandanas. But they bought them in the stores on Main Street. The colors were too shiny ever to have come from farms.

The first real distinction between Progressivism in 1912 and 1923 is a new stress upon the interests of the farmer. Naturally enough the Farm bloc itself believes in that. But an agricultural plank led the programme of the Progressive Conference in Washington; and another agricultural plank had first place in the conference at Cleveland, despite the fact that here was an assembly more industrial in its make-up. The interests of the man behind the plough are given precedence. And the reason is not difficult to find.

For protest is the core of political insurgency, and the farmer has a grievance which he is asserting with increasing vehemence. That is the substantial fact behind the Farm bloc — and behind 1923 Progressivism as it exists to-day. The farmer believes that he is not getting a just return on the value of his capital and the investment of his energy. And something, he insists, must be done about it.

There are friends who tell him to be patient, that things will come out happily a little later. These are the people inclined to accept as constitutional the grumblings of the farmer. ‘He would n’t be happy if he were n’t complaining.’ But from available data it is difficult to escape the conclusion that falling prices have hit the farmer harder than any other producer in the country. The National Bureau of Economic Research, for instance, estimates that last year the average farm family received an income of something like $900. That is well below the income of the miner and the railway-man, the bricklayer and machinist. And from those earnings should be deducted something for a temporary depreciation of land values — and something more, fairly, for interest, on investment. Dollars are bigger leaving the farm than coming back to it. What the farmer sells to-day is anywhere from fifteen to thirty per cent nearer pre-war prices than the things he buys.

All this may be transitory. But it is natural enough, meanwhile, that the farmer feels dissatisfaction; that he is tempted to believe that the trouble with these dollars — too small at one time, too large at another — is a scarcity of money. That inspiration has occurred to the American farmer several times before, and has been identified with two of the most disastrous failures in the history of the country’s politics: the Greenback movement of the eighteen-seventies, and the Free Silver movement of the nineties. On both occasions the farmers were caught in a jam of low prices, insufficient credit, and unfair discrimination on the railways. There was a chance, when they turned to politics, that they would work out a constructive economic programme. But the conviction that in the price-structure lay the root of all imaginable economic evils ran away with their imagination. First, greenback paper. Then, free silver. In both cases an agrarian revolution wrecked itself on the rocks of Easy Money. The price-situation vanished long before the advocates of its solution could get within striking distance of political control.

To-day, save for an actual demand that currency be inflated, the situation of the seventies and the nineties is faithfully reproduced. The demand may come to-morrow. Part of Henry Ford’s appeal to the price-worn farmer lies in the belief that he would make it. And if there is a danger here, it is nowhere more real than for Progressivism itself. What the movement needs is a sound programme of agricultural finance. Easy Money is a skyrocket that might light the summer sky. What it would set afire we know from two brisk conflagrations in the past.

III

Look back again to that 1912 programme drawn at Armageddon, and it is not only the appearance of the farmer in the role of angry plaintiff that marks the new Progressivism from the old: other changes wrought by this last decade are apparent.

Progressivism, in the days of Roosevelt, had three chief rallying-cries. ‘Down with the trusts,’ came first. The 1912 platform was full of it. ‘Concentration of vast wealth . . . unguarded and uncontrolled by the nation . . . enormous, secret, irresponsible power . . . insufferable in a free government. . . . Preserve its good while eradicating and preventing its evils. . . . Strong Federal Administrative Commission . . . active supervision . . . trained watchfulness.’ — ‘Under such a system of constructive regulation,’ said the 1912 Progressives, ‘legitimate business, freed from confusion, uncertainty, and fruitless litigation, will develop normally in response to the energy and enterprise of the American business man.’

With denunciation of the trusts, in 1912, went demand for government at first-hand: government of the People directly by the People. Direct primaries — direct election of Senators — direct initiative, referendum, and recall. And to those planks was added, regularly, a programme of ‘social welfare’ couched in the terminology of the Settlement Worker. These three codes were the core of Roosevelt Progressivism. It is unnecessary to observe that in eleven years we have got an unconscionably long way away from them.

For of the trusts we hear comparatively little now. The cartoonists still make use of them. Occasionally there appears on the editorial page that familiar figure, fat, silk-hatted, with checkered vest of dollar-signs, who doles out oil or coal or groceries to a small unhappy Private Citizen. For the rest, the trust, has passed — to be sure, it may be only for the moment — into the limbo of tandem bicycles, polkas, freewill vs. predeterminism,as an all-absorbing topic of debate. It may be that the same apostasy sent it there — the perpetual aspiration of the simian mind for something new and interesting. Or it may be that collectively we came to doubt our chance ever to affect the destinies of giant corporations through any such modest instruments as ‘strong Federal Administrative Commissions . . . active supervision . . . trained watchfulness’ — and did n’t know what else to do about it.

In either case, the word ‘trustbuster’ has gone the way of ‘abolitionist’ and ‘free-soiler.’ It may reappear. But if it persists, to-day, it must be somewhere in the fastnesses of Kentucky hills, where they say that Elizabethan English reigns supreme. We hear little of trusts — and little of that second slogan of the 1912 Progressives: the demand for ‘direct legislation.’ Never a matter easy to dramatize, always remote from the exigencies of the family budget, this latter issue has sifted gently into the hands of reform organizations founded especially to keep breath in its uninteresting body. Its value I do not question. But of its inability to arouse popular enthusiasm there is no great room for doubt.

Only the last member of the old Progressive trilogy — ‘social welfare’ — do we have with us still. Mr. Lusk now calls it Bolshevism.

IV

What stands out in the new Progressivism, in contrast to the trust-busting and direct legislation of the old — perhaps filling the void left by the whittling away of those enthusiasms — is a far wider interest in all matters economic.

There is more talk, for instance, of the community of interest between producers, — whether producers in the cornfields or machine shops, — and of the necessity of coöperation in politics between urban labor and the farmers. To the conference at Cleveland came delegates of Railway Brotherhoods and Garment-Workers, Moulders, Painters, Plasterers, and a score of others, to agree upon a platform with the farmers’ Granges. It is a Platonic sort of courtship, no passion lost on either side. Both groups know simply that they share one solid economic interest: hostility to the merchant-middleman who reaps a profit at both ends of distribution. But after that the case for partnership is not so clear. We have yet to see what the farmers will say to a proposal by the trades-unions to unionize farm labor. We have yet to see what will happen if the merchant-middleman should actually be eliminated, perhaps through development of cooperative distribution, and the two groups of producers be pitted directly against each other, in a tug-of-war for profits. There are more obstacles, ultimately, in the way of a thoroughgoing partnership than the optimistic partisans of that programme usually point out. But emphasis upon such a partnership as the one pivotal point in the strategy of accomplishing results — that is definitely a new note since 1912.

It is not the only ‘economic’ innovation. The Farm bloc, the Cleveland conference, camp gatherings of farmerlabor people elsewhere, now talk in terms of taxes, credits, railroads, oil, and water power. Even the Right Wing of the Farm bloc demands, for instance, new levies on ‘undisturbed surpluses and stock dividends’: quite another matter than the ‘gradual inheritance and income tax’ which was all the 1912 Progressive platform had to say about taxation. Again, the farmers and the unionists who met at Cleveland demanded ‘introduction of genuine democracy into industry and agriculture’ — a programme more ambitious than the ‘social-welfare’ planks of 1912. Most of the emphasis that used to go to visions of political control over the Oil Trust and its nine-armed brothers in the Family Octopus, now goes to matters such as finance, freight-rates, transportation, ‘privilege.’

It might almost be said, in fact, that the lines of conflict are really drawn in the field of economics, and not of politics at all. Organized labor confronts organized capital in the workshops. Cooperative societies struggle with commission men and speculators for control of crops. Labor banks and coöperative loan associations compete with trust companies and commercial banks for credit. The economic rivalry that lagged behind political insurgency is coming to the front. And unquestionably the farmer-labor faction takes a greater interest in it. New coöperative organizations on the farms have put up the price of raisins, apples, oranges, tobacco. Labor banks are operating in a dozen different cities. One, founded by the Locomotive Engineers in Cleveland, began business with resources of $650,000; to-day, twenty-eight months later, its resources are $25,000,000 — almost forty times as large. A Garment Workers’ bank was opened in New York within the last few weeks. It took a squadron of police to handle ten thousand men and women jammed in the street before its doors. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars on deposit at nine o’clock in the morning — double that sum, at the end of the bank’s first six hours’ business.

There is an unmistakable shift in interest from politics to economics. In part, that may be the result of a general unpopularity into which politics has lately come. ‘Too much politics’ during war days, too much governmental control, has been followed by reaction. There is something symbolic in one recent incident, of questionable importance in itself. A few weeks ago a certain State Senator, Chappelear of Pickaway County, introduced into the Ohio Legislature a bill making it unlawful for thermometers to register more than 79 degrees in summer, or less than 42 in winter. ‘If the temperature is regulated,’ declared the author of this revolutionary measure, ‘and the heat of summer stored up and saved by law, as daylight is now conserved by ordinances in various cities of the state, the blessings of such action will be incalculable.’ Certain portions of his address suggest that Senator Chappelear was not entirely in earnest. But with the spirit of his effort more than one constituent has surely sympathized. Government, during the war, ‘regulated’ everything. Why not regulate the temperature? Somewhere in Washington is a vast, impersonal bureaucracy — remote, gigantic, meddlesome. ‘Government’ is no more popular than the plague—‘politics’ no more exciting than a Sunday evening.

To that state of mind, it is more than likely, are due some of Mr. Harding’s troubles in the White House. The confusion of mind and the lethargy with which the Republican party has met his successive efforts are perhaps merely the reflections of a wider lethargy and confusion of mind, about politics in general, throughout the country.

V

There will probably come a quickening of interest in the political scene when the brass bands of rival factions begin to celebrate the opening of new campaigns. And with that quickening of interest we shall observe still another difference between Progressivism in 1912 and 1923. At least so far as its leaders are concerned, this later Progressivism is a far more irreconcilable affair with which to deal.

The Progressivism of 1912 was earnest, even apostolic. Its campaign programme boiled with indignation. ‘Armageddon . . . invisible government . . . unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics . . . a new party to build a nobler commonwealth . . . born of the Nation’s awakened sense of injustice . . . country belongs to the people who inhabit it..’ There was a spirit of evangelism about 1912 Progressivism; those who attended its conventions will remember how fleeting were the intervals between successive hymns.

And yet, for all their moral indignation, the 1912 Progressives were not Avenging Angels descending from the skies to visit swift destruction on their foes. Theirs was more the crusader’s spirit of a political Salvation Army. It is these Left Wing agrarian leaders of 1923 who feel themselves Avenging Angels. The farmers’ turn is coming. They herald a day of retribution. Their programme is atonement for past sins.

These Left Wing leaders are, in fact, more definitely class-conscious than the Roosevelt Progressives ever were. Not class conscious, for a moment, in the sense in which the Marxians use that term. There is no Socialism in this farmers’ movement; its first abiding principle is private ownership of land. The whole background from which it comes is a middle-class array of farm and fireside. No Marx can bid these workers ‘Arise — You have nothing to lose except your chains!’ That would be beside the point. ‘Arise!’ declare these Western leaders, ‘ You have everything to lose except your chains — Ford tractors, farm machinery, electric lights, victrolas.’

Nevertheless, in the sense of opposing to the moneyed interests of the East their own farm alliance of the West, these agrarian radicals reveal a spirited class-consciousness. They assail the bankers tirelessly. One of the reasons why they champion the soldiers’ bonus is ‘because Wall Street does n’t like it.’ Their policy of isolation (except in so far as modified by the farmer’s concern over loss of European markets) is due in large part to animosity toward a real or fancied ‘ring of international bankers.’ In a very real degree the philosophy of this new Progressivism is sectional.

Some of us may not like to face the fact. Progressivism, we feel, is another of those finely abstract things like Liberty and Justice that can bridge the widest spans. But Progressivism, as even the Right Wing of this new agrarian mutiny projects it, is a policy of sectional retaliation. ‘Before the farm bloc was organized,’ declares Senator Capper, ‘there was a railroad bloc, an oil bloc, a steel bloc, a sugar bloc, a Chamber of Commerce bloc — none of them making very much noise, but all of them well organized and getting in their work just the same. To us it seemed about time for a farm bloc to get into the game.’

An eye for an eye and a bloc for a bloc. Again we are turning back, not to the insurgency of 1912, but to the agrarian revolts of the seventies and nineties. The great political struggle in this country, our own substitute for the industrial class-warfare of the Marxians, has been the long struggle between a debtor farming class and its creditors in the cities. Turn back to another Cleveland Conference, — this one in 1875,— to Donnelly’s Anti-Monopolist, to the speeches of ‘Brick’ Pomeroy and General Weaver and James Buchanan, to the argument of Solon Chase about free coinage and ‘them steers’ of his that made him a prominent figure in the public eye for half a decade — and you will find much that same enthusiasm for ‘blocs ‘ and inevitable well-deserved retaliation that characterizes this Western Progressivism of to-day. Or compare Brookhart, Shipstead, and La Follette, hurling challenges at Wall Street — with Bryan in the nineties: ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. . . . We beg no longer; we entreat no more; we petition no more. We defy them. . . . This is a struggle between the idle holders of idle wealth and the struggling masses who produce the wealth and pay the taxes of the country. . . . You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard. I tell you that the great cities rest upon these broad and fertile plains.’

That is what they really feel to-day, these Western leaders. Theirs is the role of an Avenger — and if fate offers opportunity, an Avenger capable of quite desperate things. Done in the Lord’s name, to be sure, and for the good of an opponent’s soul; but done with a grimness unlike the evangelism of Bull Moose bandana-days.

That fact, too, we must bear in mind as we survey this heterogeneous new Progressivism. Increasingly economic in its aims and impulse, increasingly Calvinistic in its tone, in its ears still rings the echo of that speech before the Cross of Gold: —

‘ Burn down your cities and leave our farms — and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in this country.’