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Pragmatic Democracy and Constitutional Government: Comments on Robert Eden*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Eldon J. Eisenach
Affiliation:
The University of Tulsa
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Abstract

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Type
Correspondence
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

References

1. Tulis, Jeffrey, The Rhetorical Presidency (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lowi, Theodore, The Personal President (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Barilleaux, Ryan, The Post-Modern Presidency (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

2. Gilbert, James, Designing the Industrial State (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1972), pp. 3125.Google Scholar

3. Cooley, Charles Horton, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1956, orig. 1909), p. 349Google Scholar.

4. Patten, Simon, quoted in White, Ronald and Hopkins, Charles H., eds., The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), p. 133Google Scholar; Batten, Samuel Zane, The Christian State; the State, Democracy and Christianity (Philadelphia: The Griffith and Rowland Press, 1909), p. 215Google Scholar.

5. George Herron, quoted from White and Hopkins, Social Gospel, p. 174; Croly, Herbert, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), p. 210Google Scholar.

6. Ross, Edward Alsworth, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 411–12;Google ScholarDewey, John and Tufts, James, Ethics (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1908), p. 304Google Scholar.

7. Cooley, Social Organization, p. 121.

8. Hadley, Arthur Twining, The Education of the American Citizen (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901), pp. 25, 27, and 35Google Scholar.

9. Buenker, John D., Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York: Norton, 1978)Google Scholar; Sarasohn, David, The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989)Google Scholar.

10. Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (12, 1982), pp. 113–32,Google Scholartakes this as a truism. For an excellent summary of the differences between Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, see Brand, Donald R., Corporatism and the Rule of Law (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 3395.Google Scholar

11. Wilson, Woodrow, Constitutional Government (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), pp. 16, 18, 20, and 51.Google Scholar

12. Wilson, Constitutional Government, p. 211, emphasis added.

13. Wilson, Constitutional Government, pp. 208–9.

14. Croly, Progressive Democracy, pp. 16–20, treats Wilson with the same contempt that he treated the Constitutional Unionists during the controversy over slavery. The ideas of both were built on massive contradictions.

15. Croly, Progressive Democracy, pp. 335–46; Abbott, Philip, The Exemplary Presidency: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 2938Google Scholar.

16. Both Croly, Progressive Democracy, and Witt, Benjamin Parke De, The Progressive Movement (New York: Macmillan. 1915),Google Scholarfairly burst with predictions of final victory.

17. Eden (p. 93, n. 64) beautifully captures this failure and this demoralization, quoting Dewey, John, Middle Works 13 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983), pp. 301–2Google Scholar.

18. Stettner, Edward A., Shaping Modern Liberalism; Herbert Croly and Progressive Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), pp. 144–57;Google Scholar and see Eden's summary, pp. 88–9, of Individualism Old and New for these same mystical cords in Dewey and on how far removed they were from current party-electoral discourse.

19. Adolph Berle, Sr., was a prominent Congregational churchmen who wrote extensively for Bibliotheca Sacra (so did young John Dewey), a major organ of modernizing evangelical theology and the social gospel published first at Andover Seminary and then at Oberlin under a new sub-title: A Religious and Sociological Quarterly. See Kuklick, Bruce, Churchmen and Philosophers: From Jonathan Edwards to John Dewey (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); andGoogle ScholarStevenson, Louise L., Scholarly Means to Evangelical Ends: The New Haven Scholars and the Transformation of Higher Learning in America, 1830–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).Google ScholarBerle's, father was the author of Christianity and the Social Rage (New York: McBride, Nast, 1914)Google Scholar which outlines the teachings of Christian Sociology in light of American social problems.

20. Herbert Croly got Taft-Hoover exactly right when he said that the Republican party, having sponsored an industrial-financial system outside the bounds of the Constitution, was now hopelessly trying to defend it on constitutional grounds of individual rights: “It built up a national economic system beyond the fortifications of the Constitution; but it wanted that system to enjoy both the privilege of unlimited expansion and the shelter of impregnable and definite walls.” Croly, Progressive Democracy, p. 101.

21. Sarasohn, Democrats in the Progressive Era, shows how Bryan and his ideas still defined progressivism in much of the south and west in the early decades of the 20th century. Against Eden (pp. 117–8), Berle was not inconsistent when he ridiculed Wilson as an obsolete, nineteenth-century liberal; he was only repeating conventional progressive wisdom. See Croly, Progressive Democracy, pp. 16–20.

22. Berle, Adolph Jr and Means, Gardiner C., The Modem Corporation and Private Property (New York: Macmillan, 1932);Google ScholarBerle, Adolph Jr, The 20th Century Capitalist Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954)Google Scholar.

23. Croly quoted in Stettner, Shaping Modern Liberalism, p. 157, from The New Republic, March 2, 1927, p. 35. Stettner reminds the reader that the method Croly was calling for “is no longer pragmatic but religious.”

24. Abbott, Lyman, The Rights of Man (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1901), p. 196.Google Scholar Croly ends Progressive Democracy on this same note, contrasting “law” as external “works” with a living democratic “faith.” Batten, Samuel Zane, The New Citizenship: Christian Character in its Biblical Ideals, Sources, and Relations (Philadelphia: Union Press, 1898), pp. 253–4,Google Scholar expresses the same idea this way: “There are many indications that the great movement for human freedom and social justice, begun in the Reformation, is about to take on new life and complete itself in what may be called the democracy of all life …. For democracy … is less a form of government than a confession of faith; it is the confession of human brotherhood … it is the recognition of common aims and common hopes….”

25. The issue has never been the existence of this vision or impulse, but its appropriate institutional locations and expressions and the relationship of the national government to those institutions—most notably today, the family.

26. Dunning, William Archibald, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: Harper and Row, 1965, orig. 1897)Google Scholar.

27. Lowi, The Personal President, p. 178.

28. Johnson, Donald B. and Porter, Kirk H., National Party Platforms, 1840–1972 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 362Google Scholar.

29. Beard, Charles, American Government and Politics (New York: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 100–1.Google Scholar Note that all his 19th century examples are from the “democratic” party. He was equally complacent about justifications for protections for free speech: “It is a hard, cold proposition: by what process are we most likely to secure orderly and intelligent government. … ?” Ibid., p. 36. His review of government control over speech, from the 1798 Sedition Act to sentencing a girl of twenty-one to fifteen years imprisonment “for taking part in issuing a circular severely attacking President Wilson's policy of intervention in Russia,” is done without any questioning of the government's right to do so. Ibid., pp. 107–9. In his Economic Interpretation Beard has no kind words at all for the Antifederalist position and doesn't even mention their greatest contribution, the Bill of Rights. See McCorkle, Pope, “The Historian as Intellectual: Charles Beard and the Constitution Reconsidered,” American Journal of Legal History 28 (1984), pp. 333–4.Google Scholar Beard is equally dismissive of Jefferson's and Madison's Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions addressed against the Federalists—resolutions which became the founding documents of Jeffersonian Republicanism and Jacksonian Democracy. Beard, Charles, “The Supreme Court—Usurper or Grantee?,” Political Science Quarterly 27 (1912)Google Scholar.

30. Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960; The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chaps. 2, 4, and 7.Google Scholar