QUIET WINDMILLS

...The collapse of the Socialists, however, merely gives emphasis to the fact that native American radicalism has descended far from the revolutionary spirit and ideals of Thomas Jefferson...

...In most respects, Ekirch's exposition is clear and accurate...

...Federalist centralization, the suppression of civil liberties in the Civil War, the nationalizing proclivities of the Teddy Roosevelt Progressives, suppression of dissent in World War I, Palmer's witchhunting epoch, and the aggrandizement of government in the New Deal and World War II constitute the milestones marking the steady descent...

...Mid: western Progressives, and especially those who followed Robert M. La-Follette, Sr., were primarily concerned with strengthening and extending the areas of democracy...

...His overall picture, however, is essentially correct...

...The Socialist Party is dead, the decentralists are dispersed, and the Progressives have progressed into obsolescence...

...However wrong they may have been in relying on strong government to effect reforms, the LaFollettites worked steadily to increase democratic controls and responsible government...

...The book ends with a survey of civil liberties, loyalty oaths, and Congressional investigations in these days of the police state...

...He points to Herbert Croly's cynicism of many democratic reforms, to the Progressives' advocacy of a program leading to a "frankly collectivist and paternalistic type of corporate state," and to the "intimate relationship between the aggressive foreign policy of the Progressives and their emphasis on nationalism in home affairs...

...Lacking a class to which it could appeal, its failure to capitalize on local discontents and to formulate local, state, and regional programs became ever more disastrous...

...But a half-century later, in 1952, the party had degenerated into a political sect, with no following and with no influence...

...He finds the enemy of liberalism, essentially, to have been the national government...

...Major defects in the Socialists were failure to build local organizations, or to attract labor support...

...Ekirch's sources have been too largely drawn from the so-called "liberal" journals of Eastern urban centers...

...A handful of tired intellectuals, a few professors, and a scattering of journalists raise plaintive voices now and then in behalf of some obscure civil libertarian cause, but their feeble efforts arouse nothing more than words...

...In The Decline of American Liberalism, Ekirch defines liberalism (not always Clearly and consistently) in terms of Jefferson's agrarian-democratic ideas and traces the gradual, and eventually precipitous, decline of these ideas throughout American history...

...At its founding in 1901, the Socialist Party was, like the Democratic and Republican parties, a composite of regional groups, each integrated in its region and each with a local program and a local organization...

...But more important was the lack of class consciousness in America...

...In The Socialist Party of America, David Shannon pinpoints one phase of the degradation of the liberal tradition...

...In general, they arrive at the same conclusion: the cause of liberalism in America received a body blow from Wilson during and after World War I and the coup de grace from World War II and its aftermath...

...In such a situation, post mortems are in order...

...Ekirch overlooks one important element in the picture—an element that has been emphasized many times in the pages of this magazine...

...Particularly noteworthy is his analysis of the Progressives as nationalists...

...Two recent reports, one on liberalism in general, and the other on a defunct political expression of liberalism, perform the autopsy...

...Perhaps at no time in American history since Thomas Jefferson announced his self-evident truths has there been less turmoil in the land, or fewer prophets calling on the people to repent...

...It had every reason to believe it would become a major party and enjoy electoral success comparable to that of Socialist parties in Western Europe...

...It was the abandonment of this principle that produced the tendencies to totalitarianism in later years...

...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine NO ONE will deny that American liberalism is in a decline and that the once fresh gusts of native American radicalism no longer spin the windmills in the American political landscape...

...Shannon cites the factional fights, the internal dissensions, the heresy trials, and the confusions that marked this downward path...