The Challenge Ahead
PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Challenge Ahead The names that appear on the cover of this Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of The Progressive represent a...
...We can conceive of no more challenging assignment than to fight for their fulfillment, "giving and taking blows for the cause with joy in our hearts," during the second half century of our magazine...
...In some respects we seem to be as materialistic as the Communists but without their supporting philosophy and efficiency...
...The need for a philosophy which "carries deep conviction and strong appeal" was never more urgent than it is today as we stand arrayed against the Soviet Union in a decisive struggle for the minds and hearts of the uncommitted one-third of humanity...
...But its fundamental philosophy has remained unchanged—that a free government must do for the people, in their quest for a better life, what they cannot do as well as individuals...
...These laws have contributed immeasurably to the betterment of life in America...
...life of the community, and the recognition of all, regardless of color or creed, as equal partners in the human enterprise...
...It has been an indigenously American radicalism, not in any narrow nationalist sense, but rather in the sense that the Tennessee Valley Authority is a native American creation, differing as sharply from a Marxist-inspired program as democratic planning generally is different from state regimentation...
...Some of the issues have changed, to be sure...
...How have we fared in our quest to promote the general welfare and extend freedom...
...they might never have met a deadline— or a payroll, for that matter—if they had been thrown together and charged with the task of publishing this or any other magazine...
...No one who pores over the yellowed pages of this magazine can escape the conclusion that in every time of crisis, during every wave of hysteria— whether during the tumultuous prewar days of 1917, the postwar witchhunts, the World War II assault on the Nisei, or the madness of McCar-thyism—The Progressive stood firm for freedom...
...But the most compelling challenge lies in an area which was not much of a problem when this magazine was born—the field of foreign affairs...
...Two—Hundreds of millions of human beings, pushing their way up from colonial bondage in Asia and Africa, are embarked on a great revolutionary surge whose direction might well determine the outcome of the struggle between the Kremlin and the West...
...If The Progressive has indeed been radical, it has been a radicalism whose roots lie deep in the soil of our country...
...This is a remarkable admission from the man who has been the architect of our foreign policy for half the years since the end of the last war...
...The Progressive has fought on many fronts over the years, sometimes alone, often derided for harboring a "radicalism" that so many times became tomorrow's conservatism...
...This is not the place for an essay on American foreign policy—James P. Warburg handles that assignment ably on Page 47 of this issue—hut it is vital for the story we are trying to tell to emphasize here the three overriding developments since the first issue of this magazine was published: One—Our concept of democracy is being challenged as never before— by the ruthless, dedicated, and extraordinarily competent leadership of the Communist system in Russia and China...
...We must think anew, and act anew...
...As one moves from year to year among the bound volumes, he is struck anew by the everlasting truth of Lincoln's reflection that "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present...
...Tolerably well in some areas, but not much better than that...
...This means a far greater reliance on no-strings-attached economic assistance and the encouragement of indigenous cultures, and far less emphasis on military might and the export of American institutions...
...A few days later, however, the Secretary of State, now no longer talking to troubled churchmen, was back doing business at his old stand, with his nagging and negative views on how to approach the crisis of our time...
...But even a fleeting glance at the editorials and articles that appeared in these pages during the past half century confirms the melancholy conclusion that many of the basic issues remain unresolved...
...it has thought anew, and acted anew in the face of changing conditions and growing needs...
...Surely, when we concern ourselves with 'change,' we must not ignore the need to change ourselves...
...For 17 years the founding LaFollette poured his fighting spirit into its columns, and after his death in 1925 a succession of owners and editors sought to find their way along the broad path he had charted...
...This means that we would recognize, and respond to, the universal hunger of the human heart not only for social security, and all that implies by way of equality of opportunity, decent employment, and minimum social and economic safeguards, but the universal hunger of the human heart for social significance, and all that implies by way of dignity and freedom for the individual, opportunity for education and participation in the...
...Many of the reforms for which The Progressive fought have become laws of the land...
...Whatever, and however great, might have been their differences on specific issues, this was their common denominator—a relentless devotion to the concept of equality of opportunity for all and a conviction that the goal would be achieved, however fitfully, by the free decisions of an enlightened people...
...And yet as a nation we find ourselves unprepared to meet the gravest challenge freedom has ever faced...
...These three facts of life mark the most significant difference between 1909 and 1959...
...There is still a staggering job ahead in the fields of health, housing, full employment, conservation, agriculture, social security, control of monopoly, planning against depression and recession, tax reform, and civil rights and civil liberties...
...In the first issue of this magazine in January, 1909, Robert Marion La-Follette, Sr., wrote: "We shall hit as hard as we can, giving and taking blows for the cause with joy in our hearts...
...But, said Dulles, there is one other way, and that the most important, in which we are lacking...
...It came as something of a shock recently when, of all people, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles spoke up in agreement...
...But all of them, and the countless others whose names could not be recorded on the cover, shared a profound dedication to the betterment of the human enterprise by democratic methods...
...Three—The United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain have enough stockpiles of nuclear weapons to wipe out all human life on earth...
...The lack of affirmative philosophy and purpose in the conduct of American policy has been emphasized repeatedly in these columns...
...In terms of works, we seem to be treating freedom as an opportunity for moral license and our productive power often seems to be dedicated to frivolities rather than fulfilling vital human needs...
...PROGRESSIVE "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free" The Challenge Ahead The names that appear on the cover of this Fiftieth Anniversary Issue of The Progressive represent a cross-section of the distinguished company of men and women who have contributed to the columns of this magazine during the past half century...
...Put another way, The Progressive is as radical as the Preamble to the Constitution which asserts that the aims of the American government are, among other things, to promote the general welfare and preserve freedom...
...We have been enmeshed for more than a decade, in fact since shortly after World War II, in a sterile, inflexible foreign policy which consists largely of reacting to Soviet actions, often in a way that plays squarely into Soviet hands...
...It is impossible to read some of those early numbers without an immediate awareness of how relatively uncomplicated life must have been in those halcyon days...
...No one who loses himself in the bound volumes of LaFollette's Magazine and its lineal descendant, The Progressive, can doubt that the magazine has been faithful to its crusading mandate...
...The Progressive has spelled out these generalities in specific terms during the past 50 years...
...Many find us lacking...
...Thus, over the years, The Progressive has fought to promote the general welfare by pioneering, usually long before the ideas were widely accepted, in a struggle for a progressive tax program spearheaded by the income tax, for the conservation of natural resources, for a comprehensive program of social insurance, for a broad system of public housing, for the development of our great river valleys along the democratically planned lines of TVA, for federal aid to education, for a national health insurance program, for a federal program of public works to provide self-respecting jobs for the unemployed, for minimum wage legislation, for an effective anti-trust program, and a host of other measures designed to promote the general welfare in the social and economic realms...
...They do not seem to make an especially homogeneous group...
...This, we believe, The Progressive has done during its half century of crusading...
...Addressing the National Council of Churches of Christ in Cleveland, Dulles said: "Today, when despotism rides high, our society is closely ob^ served...
...In terms of faith, we seem unable to articulate a basic philosophy for our times which carries deep conviction and strong appeal...
...The faith and philosophy of whose need he had talked so earnestly were forgotten in his shrill preachments in behalf of a made-in-America morality based on military power...
...We know of no better philosophy, for world affairs, than the progressive approach to American problems during the past half century—an approach that emphasizes the promotion of the general welfare and the extension of freedom...
...We are prouder of that chapter of The Progressive's story than of any other...
...In the long struggle to preserve and extend liberty in our land, The Progressive has fought without reservation to safeguard the freedom of the individual and extend the freedom of minorities whose race, or color, or creed has reduced them to the status of second-class citizens...
Vol. 23 • January 1959 • No. 1
