The Perils of High Morality

...the witchhunt being led by Attorney General A Mitchell Palmer, the Joe McCarthy of his era He also worked closely with groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union in the fight to secure amnesty for individuals caught up in the antiradical net Some years later Borah was one of the spokesmen demanding due process of law for Sacco and Vanzetti Yet the high morality that led Borah to act on behalf of the persecuted overflowed in other directions as well, and it is from these impulses that Ashby builds his indictment Along with such Progressives as the saintly social workers Jane Addams and Mary McDowell, Borah, when faced with a choice in 1928 between Al Smith and Herbert Hoover, chose Hoover largely because he favored prohibition Underlying this issue was a fundamental dilemma As hard as they tried, the reformers could not reconcile themselves to the fact that the world of their childhood, with its tree-fined streets, its moralistic veneer, and its personal politics m which government played a limited role was no longer possible m the 1920s Victims of a "conflict of culture"—the town versus the city, the fanner versus the worker, and the native born American versus the newly arrived immigrant—the Progressives were never able to come to grips with the rapidly expanding and, in their view, 'sinful cities" containing peoples of varied ethnic and racial strains Whatever faults the Progressives had seemed magnified in the person of William E Borah Indeed, Ashby shows that the reformist senator was a racist At a time when the Ku Klux Klan was riding high, he found nothing to criticize m the South's pattern of racial discrimination With violence against blacks rising in many parts of the country, he asserted that the bigots were not violating the Constitution by their actions The problem, he maintained, would be solved not by force or Federal anti-lynching legislation, but by leaving it up to the states Borah exhibited personal flaws too Often he appeared almost Hamlet-like in 'his indecisiveness, and would attack an issue, then hesitantly back away On some occasions, among them his spirited defense of the direct primary, his position was so self serving that Harold Ickes may have been close to the truth when he remarked that Borah was "always looking out for number one " The Spearless Leader successfully deflates the Borah myth, at least as far as his domestic policies were concerned, and challenges accepted notions of the Progressive movement One is persuaded by Ashby that the complacency of the 20s, with its emphasis on normalcy, was not the sole factor dulling the cutting edge of Progressive and radical criticism Many of the reformers' failures were self imposed (The question remains, though, why the conservatives in the Republican party often considered men like Borah threatening and tried to clip their wings As Ashby demonstrates, the regulars had nothing to fear from members of the Borah bloc, whom Chief Justice Taft dubbed those 'yahoos of the West") In the area of foreign policy the Borah legend fares somewhat better Unfortunately, however, Ashby devotes only one inadequate chapter to this aspect of Borah's career It is no longer tenable to view the sen ator from Idaho simply as a narrow nationalist whose opposition to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations helped to activate a spirit of isolationism Borah voted against the League with conservative Republicans like Lodge, but he did so for completely different reasons He believed that imperialist tendencies would be strengthened by the international body This rather shrewd analysis was labeled isolationist, but m reality it represented Borah's deeply held conviction that powerful countries had no business telling weaker ones what kinds of govern ment they should or shouldn't adopt With a degree of perception rare in those times, Borah sensed that making the world "safe for democracy" might lead to the suppression of every nationalistic and revolutionary tendency Thus, he opposed gun boat diplomacy, urged the government to keep hands off even if a country was drifting toward Communism, and sought recognition of Soviet Russia On the last issue he was hardly the "spearless leader" pictured by Ashby In each session of Congress after 1917 he presented a resolution to establish ties with the Russians, arguing that trade between these two countries was the surest road to peaceful coexistence While Borah may have erred in facing up to America's domestic problems, therefore, his ideas concerning our role in world affairs seem terribly modem and relevant Warning us that America is only one country in a rapidly changing and revolutionary world, he tried to direct attention to a kind of tolerance that others either couldn't perceive or thought Utopian And this will perhaps be recognized one day as the Idaho senator's most significant contribution to the nation's development...

...The Perils of High Morality The Spearless Leader: Senator Borah and the Progressive Movement in the 1920s By LeRoy Ashby Illinois 325 pp $10 00 Reviewed by Julian F. Jaffe Assistant Professor of History, Montclair State College To those of us raised in the liberal tradition, the current flood of books critical of the Progressive movement comes as something of a shock Only recently the Progressives were viewed m favorable terms, as a group of early-20th-century politicians, writers and social workers who sincerely attempted to bring government closer to the people and protect it from some of the shabbier practices of big business They were also credited with trying to secure a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth According to the conventional scenario, these reformers waged a tough fight against even tougher opponents and initially, at least, were somewhat successful By the time Woodrow Wilson was elected President their efforts had helped produce two antitrust laws, a graduated in come tax, the direct election of senators, and a start toward the purification of food and drugs LeRoy Ashby's book reexamines this picture in terms of one of its leading protagonists, Senator William E Borah of Idaho While Ash-by stresses the senator's accomplishments and even the sincerity of his convictions, he reveals that Borah was basically ineffective as a cham pion of reform, a victim of his own Fourth-of-July oratory who was, in the final analysis, hopelessly out of touch with the vast socioeconomic changes taking place in his day People sympathetic to the Progressives may find this judgment too severe, particularly since Borah at times demonstrated an element of grandeur in his politics During the Red Scare, following World War I, for example, he stood squarely for extending civil liberties to those expressing unpopular opinions, a position that was quite unfashionable among Establishment politicians Borah correctly sensed that the prevailing hysteria was largely an attack on liberal and prolabor forces and tried to counter it in the Senate with a bill to end "Palmerism...