-->
American Politics: Progressives
and Renegades
P. Schultz
February 3, 2014
And, slowly, the light dawns. Things
begin to make sense. So let me begin.
I have been reading three books.
First, there is The Bully Pulpit: T.
Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. Second,
there is Island of Vice: T. Roosevelt’s
Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York. And third, there is A Renegade History of the United States. And
here is what emerged from these three books.
First, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Bully Pulpit. This is a rather
conventional history of Roosevelt and Taft, although I am more interested in
Roosevelt right now than I am in Taft. More especially, I am interested in Goodwin’s
account of TR as a police commissioner in New York City in the 1890’s, where he
served as president of the police board, a board of four men allegedly
bipartisan. Roosevelt and the board were considered to be “reformist” which
meant then that the members were not part of Tammany Hall, the Democratic
machine that had, on and off, controlled city politics in New York City.
What Goodwin writes about is TR’s
commitment to “reform,” which meant, for the most part, going after corrupt
policemen, drinking, prostitution, and dancing. Roosevelt and the board shut
down, or tried to shut down, the saloons on Sunday because that was what NY law
required. And this is, as noted above, all quite conventional on Goodwin’s
part, as is her assessment of TR’s activities that sometime read like she takes
herself to be Roosevelt’s publicist. For example, Goodwin writes that TR was
“convinced….that the only way to pry out…the taproot of corruption in the
police force was through the strict enforcement of the law requiring that
saloons be closed on Sunday.” [p. 209] Nowhere does Goodwin question this
conviction, presenting it as a fact and grounding it in the expertise of Jacob
Riis and Lincoln Steffens, two of New York’s most prominent and competent
journalists.
But through it all, and especially
after reading Island of Vice by
Richard Zacks, who goes into much more detail about Roosevelt’s time as police
commissioner and who gives a much fuller picture of the controversy TR and the
board created in the city, it is the intensity of TR’s actions that left me
puzzled. And in Zacks account, unlike Goodwin’s, the discriminatory character
of TR’s actions in, for example, closing the saloons on Sunday is crystal
clear. That is, the reforms that TR was pursuing fell much more strongly on the
middle and lower classes than they did on the upper classes, who could still
drink on Sundays in their private clubs because they were private clubs.
Zacks also provides context that
Goodwin does not, especially about the job that the police were expected to do
at that time, thereby rendering their “corruption,” as it were, more
understandable. The police were expected to perform various functions they no
longer perform today, such as inspecting buildings and overseeing elections.
They were also, as patrolmen, required to work through the night, walking beats
alone, for not a lot of money and with little time to recover or recuperate.
So, given these circumstances, I was
left puzzled as to why TR and others took the cause of “reform” so seriously,
pursued it with such intensity, and defended it with such vitriolic rhetoric. In
one meeting, Roosevelt compared those who disagreed with his campaign to close
the saloons on Sundays to “lynchers and white-cappers (i.e., white-hooded
Klansmen)” and he said that selective enforcement of the laws in these matters
“inevitably lead to anarchy and violence.” [p. 139]
But then as I read A Renegade History of the United States,
by Thaddeus Russell, this intensity, this agenda and its purposes began to make
sense. As Russell wrote: “Looking back from the twenty-first century, it may be
hard to imagine that most Americans in the nineteenth century believed
materialism was evil, thrift was virtuous, and the pursuit of pleasure was
dangerous at best.” [p. 208] That is, what lay at the base of what is called
“progressivism” was a concern with “the amusement problem.” For example, in
1875, Carroll D. Wright working for the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics,
found in studying the spending habits of ordinary Americans a bothersome, for
him, tendency to spend on pleasure. “Most troubling was the quantity of alcohol
being consumed, its effects on general spending habits, and the resulting
aggressiveness of workers for higher wages.” [ibid.] These phenomena, Wright
contended, undermined sobriety, industriousness, and thriftiness.
As Russell summarizes: “This ascetic
ideal was one of the criteria of respectability in nineteenth century America.
Indulgence in luxury was seen by both the wealthy and large portions of the
working class as un-American.” [p. 212] And this last phrase is, it seems to
me, the key. What the progressives were after was the “Americanization” of
everyone, a result that meant that all would behave in certain socially
acceptable ways and would identify themselves – or their “selfs,” it might be
said – with being “American” through and through. The pursuit of pleasure, for
example, the pleasures of drinking or dancing, was an obstacle to this
“Americanization” of the self. Read the following, written by one progressive
investigator:
“The longer and the
intenser the hours of labour, the more debasing the forms of recreation
become…the saloon will exist as long as there is overwork…Dancing is another of
the pleasures of the senses, innocent and delightful in itself but often
debased to the most vicious uses, and, when accompanied by drinking, as is the
case with public dance halls, is frequently provocative of sensuality. Dancing
is often loved as drink in loved. It is the element of abandon, of relief from
the absolute deadness that comes from overwork that can find pleasure only in
the most highly stimulating forms of amusement.” [p. 213]
As Russell summarized: There was
“bourgeois disgust over the new working-class culture [that] took the form of
well-organized campaigns against drinking, prostitution, and venereal disease, and
in the moral condemnation of working-class spending habits.” [p. 214] And this
seems an apt description of TR’s and the police commission’s “reforms” and
their motivation. In this light, the intensity that was puzzling seems to
evaporate in understanding. Dancing and drinking are phenomena that are
inconsistent with being, through and through, an American insofar as Americans
are defined by an ascetic ideal that privileges work over leisure and “Spartan
simplicity” – the phrase is that of Henry David Thoreau – over pleasure. And,
most importantly then, the intensity of TR’s “reform” spirit is explained not
by moralism but by the fact that these reforms were part of a political agenda
intended to change American life by purifying everyone of any “un-American” tendencies
or practices. This is, of course, important work.
So, what’s the light that dawned? Well,
that this project is on-going even today. As those who follow my blog know, I
have been arguing that most political activity in the U.S. can be explained,
understood as dedicated to maintaining the status quo. And such dedication is,
I think, very real, especially in the aftermath of the latest “recession” after
which there was a lot of popular unrest as reflected by the Tea Party and
Occupy Wall Street. Some changes were required. The trick was to limit these
changes to the periphery and to ensure that those changes that were made, such
as Affordable Care Act, not go too far and thereby undermine the prevailing order.
But now it seems to me that there is
more to the prevailing political activity in the U.S. than simply preserving
the status quo. The goal is to “Americanize” the American people, that is, to
have them identify as nothing more than human beings who are part of a social
order and who draw their sustenance from that order while committing themselves
to it wholeheartedly. We the people must put aside any characteristics or
loyalties that are not, fully and deeply, American. “Blacks” are or become
“African-Americans,” while gays and lesbians will be offered the opportunity to
become full-blown Americans by marrying, as marriage was and is one of the allegedly
defining characteristics of “Americanism.”
In the late 1800s and early 1900s,
when women were entering the workplace with increasing frequency, the
“reformers” were concerned because they saw these women as “dangerous, renegade
‘women adrift” because they refused “to limit themselves to the obligations of
daughters, wives, and mothers.” [p. 216] “By 1910…’women increasingly
frequented saloons’” and it was even noted by some “reformers” that “not all
the women in a West side saloon were prostitutes.” [p. 217] To quote historian, Kathy
Peiss: “Far from inculcating good business habits, discipline, and a desire for
quiet evenings at home, the work place reinforced the wage earner’s interest in
having a good time.” [Quoted in Russell, p. 217] And in this light, it is
interesting that Roosevelt, in defending his efforts to close saloons on
Sundays, saw this as a way of ensuring that families would spend Sundays at the
parks, together in peace and harmony.
Today, as illustrated by legitimation
of gay and lesbian marriage, the challenges are different but the project is, I
think, the same. But in many ways, the challenges are not different at all. For
example, in the early 1900s it was necessary to get Americans to accept our
budding empire, as evidenced by our occupation of the Philippines and our
frequent interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America, including the
building of the Panama Canal. Today, for the same reasons, we are inundated
with the heroism of our soldiers and with arguments that the U.S. is the indispensable nation in the world.
Moreover, even our alleged
“conservatives” want to nationalize our schools’ curricula, ostensibly for the
sake of “reform” and “improvement” of education as measured by standardized
tests. It is, however, pretty easy to see that the real motivation is
“nationalization” and, of course, in that regard “standardization.” And the
movement for charter schools, it is rather interesting to note, seems to
present no challenge to this standardization or “Americanization.” Almost
no proponent of charter schools that I know of has defended them as
facilitating less standardization. The arguments are almost all couched in
administrative or bureaucratic terms or in terms of lessening the power of
teachers’ unions.
In fact, I think a good argument can
be made that both political parties and both our “liberals” and our
“conservatives” share a commitment to this project of “Americanization.” Hence,
almost no one in the current political class is willing to take on our “militarization”
or the current patriotic fervor so evident in the nation. But even if liberals and conservatives
might choose different means by which to “Americanize” us, they still may be
said to share that common goal. Both want to make individuality or what Russell
would call “renegadeness” disappear into a life-long and almost all consuming commitment
to being “American.” And as TR knew so well, a little war – or even a rather
long war – every now and again is a great way to submerge people in the
nation’s cause. It is then that individuality disappears and that people
recognize the need to sacrifice, even to sacrifice themselves, for the sake of
America.
