"Populists, Progressives and New Dealers"
MANN, ARTHUR
Populists, Progressives and New Dealers The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. By Richard Hofstadter. Knopf. 328 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Arthur Mann Author, "Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age"...
...In the meantime, the author offers The Age of Reform as a prelude and spur to future studies of a major tradition in America...
...But they failed to understand, Professor Hofstadter explains, that their grievances derived from a world-wide agricultural depression in the last part of the nineteenth century...
...In 1948, when he wrote The American Political Tradition, the Columbia historian was convinced that American government must plan for a corporate economy...
...Since the end of the New Deal, a number of studies on social reform have appeared...
...It was the achievement of social reformers to democratize and humanize the most capitalistic and industrialized society in the world...
...If today's farmers are not a despised peasantry, it is at least partly because the Populists resisted the Europeanization of American agriculture...
...Yet the New Deal was long isolationist, Hofstadter notes, and it was World War II that destroyed its insularity and proved that pump-priming should be a philosophy and not merely a technique...
...Even when their philosophy was primitive, their concrete proposals were prophetic...
...History was a conspiracy on the part of these aliens to destroy the liberty-loving, Anglo-Saxon husbandman...
...Big business was harmful because it prevented the man on the make from proving himself in the competitive world...
...Resentment against the new led to a moral crusade to restore nineteenth-century Protestant standards of merit...
...The more industrialism and immigration transformed the United States, the more the Populists yearned for a golden age of Anglo-Saxon yeomen and small towners...
...The one wished to smash the trusts, the other to regulate them, but neither man looked at the economy in terms of what it could produce...
...It is symptomatic of contemporary liberalism that Mr...
...Students who follow will also want to include what Mr...
...Not until the enactment of the National Origins Plan did Marcus L. Hansen open up immigration as a field for historical research...
...For the Populist did not accept himself for the tight-fisted capitalist that he was...
...Yet the contemporary liberal, the author concludes, can learn little from yesterday's reform mind about how to think today...
...over the years, a number of their reforms have been adopted pertaining to transportation, credit, money and banking, storage, and the price structure...
...How else explain Wilson's passion to Americanize Europe, or the determination of the drys to legislate the wets out of existence...
...Richard Hofstadter's brilliant new book on liberalism from Populism to the New Deal reports that it has...
...he rather thought of himself as the celebrated yeoman, the repository of such republican virtues as honesty, wholesomeness, independence, temperance--as the pure and unspoiled child of nature...
...He writes within the tradition he criticizes and also points to the solid contributions made by liberals to the tone and structure of American civilization...
...Heirs of the Mugwumps, and recruited from the clergy, the bar, the new professoriat, and the old families, they inveighed against the monopolist and the political boss for sinfully choking opportunities in business and politics...
...His own book deals more narrowly with reform as it relates to the relationship of government to the economy...
...Nostalgic for an isolationist, homogeneous and individualistic nineteenth-century past, it refused to accept the twentieth-century present of an American mechanized, urbanized, bureaucratized and internationalized...
...Seen in this light, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt are more important for their similarities than their differences...
...insights sparkle on nearly every page...
...In the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, the liberals increased the numbers of those who enjoy the "great American bonanza," and built a number of devices into the economy to ease the shock of those who falter in the race for life...
...the learning is impressive without being pretentious...
...There are literally dozens of quotable sentences...
...Professor Hofstadter rates the Progressives more sophisticated than the Populists, but even they felt lost in the complexity of the twentieth century...
...Liberal America has produced its own astute but sympathetic critic...
...Frederick Jackson Turner, for example, first probed the meaning of the westward movement three years after the Census of 1890 disclosed the passing of the frontier...
...When innocence confronted the world, it found only wickedness: the wickedness of the "foreign" League of Nations, of Catholics, Jews and Negroes, of city people...
...They rather attributed their troubles to aliens: to Easterners, Wall Street, English capitalists and Jewish bankers...
...In a particularly penetrating insight, he observes that conservatives during the Thirties, not New Dealers, revived the rhetoric and values of the nineteenth century...
...Populism and Progressivism agitated for the extension of entrepreneurial opportunities, while the New Deal attempted to regulate an economy which was thought to have reached the limits of its growth...
...As important, Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted and worked with the machine, thereby welding together, for the first time, the immigrants of the city and the natives of the farms and small towns...
...It was this passionate longing for the past, and the fear of being brushed aside, that gave the Ku Klux Klan its paranoia...
...Earning a living was rather a test of character, and the men with the most and best character were supposed to earn the best livings...
...And so much the better, he concludes, for the reform mind lived in an unreal world...
...But what he has done is magnificent...
...Professor Hofstadter rejoices that the past half-century in America was a liberal half-century...
...This autopsy of the soft side of the reform intellect will tempt the New Conservatives to claim Professor Hofstadter--but wrongly so...
...The moralism of Woodrow Wilson is too other-worldly, while the opportunism of Thurman Arnold raises ethical questions which trouble Mr...
...Political leadership was similarly held to be a reward for merit...
...Reviewed by Arthur Mann Author, "Yankee Reformers in the Urban Age" assistant professor of history, Smith College It Has been customary for American historians to assess a major social force only after its expiration...
...The chapter on the New Deal is too sketchy, and it is doubtful that Thurman Arnold's revulsion for values was more representative of the New Deal than David Lilienthal's unabashed humanitarianism...
...Not goals but means, not values but techniques, not crusades but organization--these were the interests of the brain trusters...
...One is tempted to ask: Has social reform in America, like immigration and the frontier, expired...
...To such notions Professor Hofstadter rightly traces the isolationism, provincialism and racism inherent in the People's Crusade...
...To grasp this illiberalism, one has only to remember that out of Populist backgrounds came Tom Watson and Cole Blease, Martin Dies, William Lemke, Huey Long--even Pat McCarran...
...hence the direct primary to destroy the machine...
...The Populists are given credit for alerting government to its responsibility for the economic well-being of its citizens...
...As against Eric Goldman, who censured the Progressives for ethical relativism, Hofstadter criticizes them for moral absolutism...
...Except for the professors, Progressive leaders had lost status and power to the plutocrat and the "pol," a thesis that Hofstadter elaborates persuasively in perhaps the best and surely the most original section of the book...
...The representative New Dealer, according to the author, was Thurman Arnold, a hard-boiled thinker who rejected the secular evangelism of a Woodrow Wilson...
...It is one of the central theses of The Age of Reform that the New Deal is not a continuation of the Populist-Progressive tradition...
...The New Deal developed in response to depression, whereas Progressivism issued from an era of expansion...
...Hofstadter is only now convinced that we cannot return to the uncomplicated life of the past century which nurtured the Progressive and Populist minds...
...Hofstadter has left out: civil liberties, civil rights, labor, education, and equal rights for women...
...What particularly makes The Age of Reform an event is that Richard Hofstadter approached his subject without either the self-hatred of remorseful radicals or the Manicheanism of doctrinaire reformers...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 5
