From Science to Alchemy

This chapter details the historical developments that have gradually obviated any perceived need for a nuanced causal theory of the relationship between scientists and national performance. Contemporary political rhetoric expressing a faith in a hypothesized (yet little understood) causal connection between scientific expertise and jobs and wealth creation has roots in Progressivism. It also marks a significant transformation of the Progressive vision of how the federal government should use the natural sciences. Even as Progressives embraced vague and sometimes contradictory impulses and beliefs, Progressive governance sought social betterment primarily through the use of existing scientific expertise to achieve specific, identified goals. The Progressives' typical use of science was to develop standards and measures (for example, to ensure safe food). Recent decades, however, have seen the rise of vaguer measures of success—the overall number of scientists and engineers, working in any field, or the overall number of federal dollars allocated to research.

The Progressive Party and the Rise of Executive-Centered Partisanship

This chapter examines the wayward path of Progressivism from Roosevelt's Bull Moose campaign to the Obama presidency. Committed to “pure democracy,” many early-twentieth-century reformers hoped to sweep away intermediary organizations like political parties. In their disdain for partisan politics and their enthusiasm for good government, they sought to fashion the Progressive Party as a party to end parties. However, the Progressives failed in that ambition, and their shortfall has had profound effects on contemporary government and politics. By transforming rather than transcending parties, they fostered a kindred, though bastardized, alternative: executive-centered partisanship. The transformation of parties set in motion by the Progressives has subjected both Progressivism and conservatism to an executive-centered democracy that subordinates “collective responsibility” to the needs of presidential candidates and incumbents.

What Is to Be Done?

This chapter argues that the bottom-up tools developed by Progressives to generate and register the interests of the public have not kept up with the times. Progressives must now move beyond the innovations that their predecessors have successfully entrenched in the living Constitution. Without renewed critique and reconstruction, it is all too likely that these earlier achievements will degenerate into farce or tragedy. Like it or not, we face the very same issue posed by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 1: “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force”.

Barack Obama and the Traditions of Progressive Reform

This chapter discusses the Progressivism of President Barack Obama. Obama's progressivism is broadly based. First, he aspired to the ideals of the Social Gospel and invoked the idea of a shared national purpose, a common good that transcended the particular interests of the separate classes, ethnic groups, and regions that have shaped American political struggles. Second, he resurrected the Progressives' emphasis on political and economic reforms. Third, Obama inherited the Progressives' pragmatism, their uneasiness with dogma, their commitment to achieving moderate, incremental progress through trial and error, and their confidence in the application of the scientific method to politics. The obstacles to Obama's progressivism run deep as well. He has had to wrestle with four stubborn features of American culture that have hamstrung reformers since the nation's founding: persistent localism; distrust of the federal government; a deep ambivalence about engaging in world affairs; and a racism that appears nearly as entrenched in the twenty-first century as it was in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth.

The (Long) Administrative Century

This chapter discusses the emergence of regulatory governance from the Progressive movement. The Progressives laid the groundwork for an entirely new “branch” of the federal government by thinking comprehensively about how regulatory authority should be structured. These reformers created an enduring model for federal management of the marketplace: independent commissions and relatively independent executive agencies given quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, and quasi-judicial authority (that is, all the powers that the Constitution intentionally kept separate). Thus, the Progressive legacy can be traced not just to the growth of the administrative state but also to this ongoing determination to prove that agency governance can be reconciled with constitutionally separated powers. Without any firm resolution of this tension, twentieth-century governance was marked by these two systems of governance often working at cross-purposes, each compromising the integrity of the other.

Toward a More Inclusive Community

Many social welfare initiatives that have found their way into the administrative state can be traced to proposals advanced by the mobilized women of the Progressive era. These female reformers identified a range of new social problems and pressed government to address them with new policy initiatives. This chapter examines three particular tensions that emerged as the vision of a national community of newly empowered and aware citizens, operating at local levels to solve newly uncovered social problems, clashed with other values shared by the reformers. First, the inclusiveness of the project and the aspiration to build mutual respect among equals was in tension with the idea of maternalism, which employed sex differences and female sensibilities as the basis of social transformation. Second, there was a clash between the reform processes advocated and the substantive ends sought. Third, the aim of empowering citizens to act locally on their own behalf proved incongruous with a simultaneous emphasis on expertise and a keen interest in the specialized knowledge needed to solve social and economic challenges of the day.

Constitutional Conservatives Remember the Progressive Era

This chapter maps the contemporary right's nascent obsession with the Progressive era as a developmental phenomenon—as a stage in the trajectory of a political-intellectual movement advancing through time. To that end, it ventures three main claims. First, the recent conservative focus on Progressivism represents a shift on the right of understandings of the historical location or source of contemporary constitutional problems, an understanding informed by the sequence of constitutional conservatism's development through time: whereas (old) “originalist” legal conservatives adopted Progressive thinking in focusing their attention on countermajoritarian “activist judges” and criticized the New Deal for its weightless, substance-free pragmatism, recent conservatives have forged a more global critique of contemporary constitutional practice that moves beyond judges to the entire modern structure and theory of American government, finding its weighty and substantive blueprint in the Progressive era, and its extension and institutionalization in the New Deal. Second, this more foundational and comprehensive constitutional critique was forged outside legal academia in political science, particularly by Straussian political theorists. And third, the overarching character of this critique centered on the Progressive era serves a movement-building function by offering a set of understandings that can win the assent of the movement's diverse factions, including social conservatives and religious traditionalists, on the one hand, and economic conservatives and libertarians on the other.

Rights as Process

This chapter focuses on the distance between rights as claims and rights in practice. To survey rights in the Progressive century, it proposes to define rights less as a thing and more as a process, to wit: “A right is a claim, made against a person or action of another, either a citizen or governmental officer, enforceable in a court of law.” Like other processes, a “right” has a beginning and an end. The beginning is the claim itself; the end, its anticipated enforcement. The chapter begins by briefly situating the Progressive era in a broader story of rights as defined above. It then discusses a handful of rights disputes in state and federal courts from the Progressive era forward, and the definition proposed is briefly applied to particular cases. The cases were not selected on any special basis; others would have served as well. They are discussed only to give the approach a trial run. The point is not to put things in boxes but to consider rights in a fresh way, both over this historical span and in general.

Progressivism and the Disenchanted Constitution

This chapter begins by recovering the basic social democratic critique of the Constitution during the Progressive era, especially in the context of worries about the incompatibility between Tocquevillian myths and industrial realities. It then works through the political disagreement among Progressives over whether citizens needed to engage in a formal act of wholesale textual revision and even refounding. Both sides agreed that the 1787 framework had to be fundamentally altered, but internal and external critics reached different conclusions about whether change could be achieved without explicit rupture and whether surface constitutional fidelity would necessarily reproduce exceptionalist tropes. Finally, the chapter focuses on lessons for the present—especially on how Progressive-era critics press Americans to disenthrall themselves and to conceive of the Constitution instrumentally, to judge questions of constitutional support not by expectations of national fulfillment or on aspirational desires for the text, but instead by debates over political utility and effective freedom.

Rights Through Knowledge and Reason

This chapter focuses on the work of African American activists in the Department of Labor (DOL) during the Progressive era, and on two men in particular: W. E. B. Du Bois and George E. Haynes. The labor problem was in many ways at the heart of the Progressive project, and the establishment of the DOL and its forerunner, the Bureau of Labor, represented an early victory. Like many of these early institutional victories, the DOL was not a huge success. Its power was at the margins, and it rarely used such power for anything more than conciliation and tepid reformism. In the area of race, the DOL did little to disturb a racially fragmented labor market dominated by white employers and by unions that discriminated against African Americans. But the department, following the Progressive spirit of believing in the power of knowledge, science, and expertise to expose societal problems and begin the process of solving them, participated in a quite wide-ranging examination of black labor in American life. Some of this was through issued reports. Du Bois wrote three of these reports for the Bureau of Labor in the years around 1900. In addition, the DOL created the Division of Negro Economics, headed by George Haynes.