SEVEN PROGRESSIVES
NYE, RUSSEL B.
Seven Progressives MEN OF GOOD HOPE. A Story of American Progressives, by Daniel Aaron. Oxford University Press. 329 pp. $4. Reviewed by Russel B. Nye THIS BOOK is. in the author's words, "an...
...Progressivism, as the author defines it, is that social philosophy "derived in part from Jeffersonian ideas about popular government, the pursuit of happiness, and the fulfillment of human potentialities, and in part from an unorthodox Protestant Christianity more urgent and fiercely evangelical than the bland reasonableness of the Enlightenment...
...Aaron that the idealistic and ethical concerns of the older progressives are essential to any liberal movement, but one must also concede that the doers as well as the thinkers are valuable, that the translation of ideas into results is equally essential...
...One must agree with Dr...
...Nevertheless, Dr...
...The sweep of 19th Century thought, from the transcendental radicalism of Emerson and Parker through the Utopian economics of George and Bellamy to the hard realism of Veb-len, provided much of the underpinning necessary to the political structure reared by the progressives of the next century...
...Aaron believes him to have been the lineal heir of the older progressive tradition...
...in the author's words, "an attempt to rehabilitate the progressive tradition . . . and to show that progressivism was not always the shabby thing it is now made out to be...
...This arrangement and emphasis arises from the clear distinction Dr...
...Nor can the concrete contributions to progressive politics of LaFollette, Wilson, or even of the two Roosevelts be written off quite so swiftly as lacking in the true spirit of progressive ethics...
...Aaron's book is a thoughtful study of progressivism and a valuable contribution to the history of the tradition it represents...
...Aaron chooses Emerson, Theodore Parker, Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry D. Lloyd, William Dean Howells, and Thorstein Veblen as illustrative "men of good hope...
...The post-1900 progressive was a practical politician who was willing to drop the ethico-religious baggage of the 19th Century to achieve swifter if less satisfactory results...
...LaFol-lete receives hardly more than a paragraph, though Dr...
...To chart the course of progressivism in America, Dr...
...It is chiefly, he believes, a middle class phenomenon, drawing its energy neither from the proletariat nor from the economic ruling class...
...If, as he suggests, the moral energy and idealistic enthusiasm of the older tradition can be hitched to the realistic approach of the later progressives, we may, as he hopes, develop a new and stronger movement...
...Theodore Roosevelt, Brooks Adams, and Woodrow Wilson receive a rather thorough going-over as "pseudo - progressives," while the progressive movement from 1912 to 1950 is sketched in broad strokes, the book ending with the New Deal and the confusion of the forties...
...The book's controlling thesis leads to some unusual omissions...
...Aaron, who is on the faculty of Smith College, does a skillful and timely job of reevalua-tion, though his book is not a complete story of American progressivism...
...Debs, Donnelly, Altgeld, the Populist movement, and the 1924 progressives are no more than mentioned...
...The earlier progressive, he writes, was a theoretical, idealistic reformer who believed in ethics, virtue, and justice as the proper ends of the democratic process, an idealist who did not allow the success or failure of his reform to obscure his vision...
...In the meantime, this book does a stimulating job of establishing the backgrounds for it...
...It begins at that point in history when "a moral and righteous minority" contrasts the ideals of "a pre-machine culture, neighborly and republican," with the "realities of a machine age" and take steps to remove the apparent discrepancies between them...
...That an interest in practical results presupposes an absence of idealistic motivation does not necessarily follow in all cases...
...Of the seven progressive thinkers treated at length in this volume, none had any direct, concrete effect on the actual machinery of democracy, and since progressivism is at least in part a political and economic philosophy, it should seem logical to count results, pragmatic as their motivation may be, as of some real value...
...Two-thirds of the volume, therefore, is given over to a series of extended essays, both perceptive and stimulating, covering seven 19th Century reformers, with a connective commentary joining the major chapters...
...The line that the author draws between the old and the new progressivism is a debatable one...
...Aaron is on solid ground, and his analysis of the confused progressivism of the thirties and forties, particularly in relation to the intellectual radicalisms of the times, is excellent...
...In his estimate of Adams, Croly, and of the Roosevelts, Dr...
...The seven men chosen by Dr...
...Aaron's opinion, meant a corresponding loss of ethical motivation within the movement, leading to the "bogus progressivism" of Theodore Roosevelt, to the "sublimated rhetoric" of Woodrow Wilson, and to the New Deal, which like Greenbackism or Populism was simply "another popular effort to get a larger slice of the American pie...
...Aaron were undoubtedly progressive "men of good hope," but in more or less dismissing most of the post-1900 progressives as pragmatic opportunists whose chief concern was results, he does not do full justice to the political aspect of progressivism, one of its more important phases...
...This, in Dr...
...The ideological backgrounds of both 19th and 20th Century progressivism—the Social Gospel movement, the trend toward political reform and direct legislation, the revolution in social and economic thinking spearheaded by Ward and Ely—are treated summarily...
...Aaron makes between 19th and 20th century progressivism...
Vol. 15 • June 1951 • No. 6
