Jacob Conrad
-------------------
Rorty, p. 48 [Herbert] Croly, like Dewey, urged people to set aside the individualist rhetoric of nineteenth-century America. That rhetoric has been the mainstay of the American Right throughout our century, and is now, bafflingly, being treated as characteristic of liberalism by the so-called communitarians. But neither Croly nor Dewey, nor the leaders of the trade union movement, had any use for what the communitarians call "liberal individualism." Croly wrote that 'a more highly socialized democracy is the only practicable substitute on the part of convinced democrats for an excessively individualized domocracy.' ... From 1909 until the present, the thesis that the state must make itself responsible for such redistribution [of wealth] has marked the dividing line between the American Left and the American Right. We Americans did not need Marx to show us the need for redistribution, or to tell us that the state was often little more than the executive committee of the rich and powerful.
p. 49 Many Progressives who never dreamed of fomenting a revolution or urging the nationalization of the means of production were happy to call themselves "socialists." Twenty years before Croly, the great Wisconsin economist Richard Ely had identified the "New Nationalism" with "the American type of socialism," and had asked his audience to realize that "from every land the wage-earning classes are looking to America for inspiration and direction." Ely's book _Social Aspects of Christianity_ argued that industrial capitalism had produced "the farthest and deepest reaching crisis known to human history." He hoped that American intellectuals would throw themselves into the struggle to give the masses what they wanted and deserved.
p. 60 Because a lot of my relatives helped write and administer New Deal legislation, I associated leftism with a constant need for new laws and new bureaucratic initiatives which would redistribute the wealth produced by the capitalist system. I spent occasional vacations in Madison with Paul Raushenbush, who ran Wisconsin's unemployment compensation system, and his wife Elizabeth Brandeis (a professor of labor history, and the author of the first expose of the misery of migrant workers on Wisconsin farms). Both were students of John R. Commons, who had passed on the heritage of his own teacher, Richard Ely. Their friends included Max Otto, a disciple of Dewey. Otto was the in-house philosopher for a group of Madison bureaucrats and academics clustered around the LaFollette family. In that circle, American patriotism, redistributionist economics, and Deweyan pragmatism went together easily and naturally. I think of that circle as typical of the reformist American Left of the first half of the century.
In a message dated 06/22/2002 10:05:20 AM Central Daylight Time, debsian at pacbell.net writes:
> William Appleman Williams grew up in the farming community of
> Atlantic, Iowa, and later registered as a Republican who preferred Nixon
to
> Kennedy in 1960; but always dreaming of old-fashioned egalitarian
> communities,
> Williams developed into something of a ‘Christian socialist’ or
‘socialist
> of
> the heart.’ A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and injured World War II
> veteran, Williams first became radicalized by his involvement following
the
> war
> in civil rights activities in Corpus Christi, a harrowing experience that
> henceforth left him shy about engaging in direct-action politics.
> Nevertheless
> determined ‘to make sense’ out of everything that was going on in America
> and
> the world at that time, Williams decided to become a historian at the
> University of Wisconsin, where a high- powered and heavily Beardian
history
> department favored economics and points of conflict in the study of
American
>
> history, in sharp contrast to the prevailing ‘consensus’ history of the
> ‘Cold
> War liberals,’ particularly those at Ivy League schools. Williams also
spent
>
> several months in England working with Labour scholars. Always fascinated
by
>
> the instructive experiences of the Soviet Union, his first book sur veyed
> American- Russian relations, particularly during the Russian Revolution.
For
>
> most of the fifties Williams was a lone voice, writing frequently in left-
> wing
> journals such as the Nation, Science and Society and Monthly Review.
> Although
> denounced by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as ‘a pro-Communist scholar’ and
later
>
> hauled before to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Williams
> eventually produced his celebrated Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959)
and
> The
> Contours of American History (1961). In these classic works he insisted
that
>
> the United States had always been an imperialist nation (Vietnam was no
> aberration) and that American policy leaders, particularly ‘liberals’ in
the
>
> tradition of Jefferson, Jackson, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt,
> consistently
> believed that American civilization could not survive without an ever-
> expanding
> frontier or by maintaining an ‘open door’ for American trade and
political
> ideology throughout the world. The tragic result was involvement in two
> world
> wars (and a cold one) and staunch opposition to social revolutions almost
> everywhere, while at home the American elite had developed a ‘corporate
> liberal
> capitalist state’ that negated any sense of genuine community or
responsible
>
> citizenship. Lacking any viable socialist alternative, Williams sought
> inspiration in such ‘enlightened conservatives’ as John Quincy Adams and
> Herbert Hoover. Radicals not only could but must learn from conservatives.
> Only
> forty years old, Williams had shaken historical studies as no one else had
> since Charles Beard. Meanwhile, back at Madison since 1957, Williams was
> developing the ‘Wisconsin School of Diplomatic History,’ which produced a
> number of scholars who substantially rendered the study of American
foreign
> relations more complex and much more rooted in economics. They
particularly
> challenged the ‘Cold Warriors’ by arguing that the United States had been
a
> much more aggressive power than the Soviet Union. This revisionist
> scholarship
> inspired and contributed greatly to a wave of ‘New Left’ history that
swept
> across the nation in the next two decades.