Croly's progressive America - Herbert Croly, political philosopher

Public Interest, Fall, 1999 by Wilfred M. McClay

No knowledgeable scholar of American political thought would dispute the importance and influence of Herbert Croly's 1909 book The Promise of American Life. In the book's own day, Felix Frankfurter extolled it as "the most powerful single contribution to progressive thinking," while Walter Lippmann crowned Croly the "first important [American] political philosopher" of the century. It was the right book at the right time. Not only did it ride the wave of reformist energy that swept American life at the turn of the century, embodied in such towering figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Robert La Follette, but it also provided the era's scattered reform impulses with a eoherent philosophical basis. The book's success offers potent evidence of the enduring power of ideas in history.

Although it sold a piddling 7,500 copies in its heyday, it managed to reach the right readership: the tiny but formidable elite of forward-looking, confident, university-trained students of political institutions and social forces who comprised the brains and motive force behind the Progressive movement. Among the book's most admiring readers was former President Roosevelt himself, who in 1910, two years before his ill-fated campaign to regain the presidency, wrote to Croly,

I do not know when I have read a book which I felt profited me as much as your book on American life.... I shall use your ideas freely in speeches I intend to make. I know you won't object to my doing so, because, my dear sir, I can see that your purpose is to do your share in any way for the betterment of our national life.... I want very much to have a chance to talk to you.

Whether Croly's book was a cause or an effect of Roosevelt's New Nationalism, with its vision of a strong central government regulating a highly consolidated economy for the public good, there was an uncanny degree of convergence in the two men's thinking, indicating the extent to which Promise captured the Zeitgeist in its pages.

Historical significance is one thing and a present-day following is another; and though the book has its admirers, it is hard to find many people today who would testify under oath that they have actually read The Promise of American Life. In one sense, this is not surprising. It is an old book, and not easy to get hold of. Its 454 pages contain more than their fair share of ponderous, murky passages. Its leisurely exposition wanders, Mister Magoo fashion, over all the known universe, bumping into or stumbling over such diverse issues as labor unions, specialization, the Philippines question, the reorganization of state governments, municipal corruption, tax policy, and the Australian ballot. Because it was published nine decades ago, many of the issues raised by Promise, perhaps inevitably, are no longer of topical interest.

Still, this lumbering book, penned by an obscure and somewhat eccentric editor of an architectural trade magazine - who was later to become founding editor of The New Republic - remains worthy of our respectful examination. For one thing, it turns out to be a more interesting and complex book than either its proponents or detractors tell us. And its influence abides. Its fundamental ideas still flow unacknowledged through our national political discourse, permeating the agendas and rhetoric of both political parties. Nowhere else were progressive ideas expressed more powerfully. No book has been more effective in presenting a vision of what a fully consolidated and nationalized American polity and society might look like, and persuasive in arguing why such a transformation was necessary if the essence of America's promise was to be fulfilled. No book was more persuasive in showing how that analysis had to be followed all the way down the scale of social organization to the level of individual consciousness itself. And none contributed more to the fateful redefinition of liberalism in our century, from an ideology of the minimalist, decentralized state into an ideology of the activist, interventionist, and centralized national state.

Means and ends

Croly's book was so successful because it went far beyond merely offering a new political philosophy or a collection of novel policy suggestions. It did both those things, but it also gave vitality and plausibility to that philosophy and those ideas by folding them into a narrative. It presented its assertions and prescriptions as elements in a striking retelling of the story of America. The United States was founded, Croly argued, upon three not entirely compatible tenets: a belief in the virtues of pioneer individualism, a strong commitment to limited government (especially a limited central government), and an unflagging confidence in a national ideal that he dubbed "the Promise of American life," by which he meant the steady advance of democratic values and gradual amelioration of social and economic disparities. Much of our subsequent history, in his view, can be explained as a jostling for supremacy among these three principles, a conflict that has repeatedly jeopardized the Promise of American life.