2
Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Progress

Despite their extravagance, the phrases come easily to Barack Obama’s lips: let’s “meet history’s test” by “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Why stop there? While we’re at it, we can repair the moral universe by decisively closing the gap between the real and the ideal. Seizing the moment, and with our best change-agents in charge, we can “remake the world as it should be.”1 This trust in “fundamental” but never final transformations, in continual progress toward an unspecified but ever more egalitarian condition of social justice and political wholeness, inspired and guided by visionary and compassionate leaders, themselves inspired and guided by history with a capital H, and the entire cosmic process culminating in the growth of the State with its master class of expert administrators—this is modern liberalism in a nutshell. It began almost exactly a century ago in the Progressive movement, determined to reform and re-form American political life. During the New Deal it changed its name and some of its methods but not its essential goals. Obama’s asseverations come easily to him, in part then, because statesmen whom he admires have asserted them many times before. They sound familiar because they are familiar, the topoi of liberal rhetoric that have been drawn on by generations of journalists, professors, and politicians.

It wasn’t always so. In 1886, the year after the appearance of his first book, Congressional Government, and while he was toiling away as a young faculty member at Bryn Mawr, Woodrow Wilson wrote to a close friend:

I believe . . . that if a band of young fellows (say ten or twelve) could get together . . . upon a common platform . . . with reference to the questions of the immediate future, [and] should raise a united voice in such periodicals, great or small, as they could gain access to, gradually working their way out, by means of a real understanding of the questions they handled, to a position of prominence and acknowledged authority in the public prints, and so in the public mind, a long step would have been taken towards the formation of such a new political sentiment and party as the country stands in such pressing need of—and I am ambitious that we should have a hand in forming such a group. All the country needs is a new and sincere body of thought in politics, coherently, distinctly, and boldly uttered by men who are sure of their ground.

Three years earlier he had disclosed to his fiancée a “solemn covenant” he had made with the same friend, Charles Talcott, while both were undergraduates at the College of New Jersey (as Princeton was still called then). “We swore,” Wilson said,

that we would school all our powers and passions for the work of establishing the principles we held in common; that we would acquire knowledge that we might have power; and that we would drill ourselves in all the arts of persuasion, but especially in oratory . . . that we might have facility in leading others into our ways of thinking and enlisting them in our purposes.

Not your typical student (nor faculty) braggadocio, but then from the beginning Wilson was keen to win a new kind of political greatness for himself. He set out to found, or help found, “a new political sentiment and party” that would appeal to the “thirst & enthusiasm for better, higher, more hopeful purpose in politics than either of the present, moribund parties can give.”2 Beginning as an intellectual insurgency in universities and high-toned journals, but always intent on assuming political power behind leaders with well-educated ambition and well-honed oratorical skills, this was liberalism in embryo, the new movement for which Wilson aspired to conquer first the public mind, and then the public.

He was not the only young man to feel the tug of these new ideas. But he did something that none of his other great contemporaries, not even Theodore Roosevelt, managed or quite attempted. As undergraduate, graduate student, professor, and university president, Wilson spent three decades in the academy contemplating the failings of the old American constitutional system, testing his critique of it, and preparing the rhetorical case for its transformation. He had developed a new theory of the presidency and of the whole political system long before becoming president; no president since has done anything remotely comparable, and none before him, either, except the founder-presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and especially James Madison. But though they’d thought deeply and written much about the overall design of the political system, none of these famous thinkers had conceived of the executive as the center and leader of it, as had Wilson. To be sure, Alexander Hamilton had insisted on the necessity of an energetic executive in American politics—but he never became president, and besides, “energy” was not the quality Wilson was looking for in the position, much less the constitutional fidelity on which Hamilton had insisted even in his most high-flying moments.3 Among Wilson’s immediate predecessors and his opponents in 1912, William Howard Taft was deeply learned in the law, a cagey and effective administrator of the Philippines, and an astute defender of representative government; but his political thinking always had a touch of Whiggish legalism to it. In his wide-ranging career his favorite job was chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Teddy Roosevelt certainly broke new ground in office but vouchsafed his “stewardship” theory of the presidency only after the fact; at the time, to many observers, his guide seemed to be mostly animal spirits. As his chief opponent in 1912 noted, acidulously, “life does not consist of eternally running to a fire.”4

Of the great captains of Progressivism, Woodrow Wilson was the most clear-sighted and the most consequential. Not only one of its supreme theorists, he stole from TR the honor of being the principal model for future progressive political striving in general, and especially for the inspirational parts of presidential leadership. As Richard Hofstadter was not the first to point out—TR whaled away at the theme—Wilson was in some respects a very conservative Progressive.5 In 1912 he sought to position himself as the moderate, the all-round sensible reformer, with Taft the stand-patter to his right and the increasingly radical and desperate Roosevelt to his left. It worked, though the salient fact was that Taft and TR split the GOP vote, allowing Wilson with 42 percent of the popular vote to become only the second Democratic president since the Civil War. Far from being disqualifying, Wilson’s “conservatism” was the flip side of his incipient liberalism. The roots of his peculiar conservatism were twofold, based on book learning at Princeton and later Johns Hopkins, and on his own political bloodlines, as it were. His family was southern by choice, having moved from Ohio to Staunton, Virginia, where Thomas Woodrow was born, and then to Georgia; as a young boy he had seen Robert E. Lee travel through Atlanta after the surrender. The Democratic Party was rooted in the Solid South in Wilson’s lifetime, and he claimed to understand the South instinctively, especially its celebration of custom and family life, and its suspicion of individualism and “abstract” reason and equality. His Progressivism would prove remarkably congenial to southern prejudices—as president, he would resegregate the District of Columbia and drive from office many black federal employees—though there was never any doubt he wished to subsume southern-style conservatism into Progressivism rather than vice versa.6 He saw the affinities with the antebellum and postbellum South that the Republican Progressives like TR did not, or at least disdained. His youthful desire to found a new political party thus easily gave way to the desire to instill a new sentiment into the old Democracy. Wilson helped to begin the conversion of the states’ rights, reactionary Democrats into the national party of liberalism. FDR completed the conversion (the Dixiecrat influence lingered for decades, to be sure), but Wilson was among the first to conceive that the losing party in the Civil War, stained by its support for slavery and disunion, could be reborn as the hopeful and egalitarian party of the future; that the champion of the sovereign states could reinvent itself as the champion of the progressive State. Wilson’s so-called conservatism thus helped to make him the founding father of Democratic Party liberalism.

The Progressive Movement

Progressivism was much bigger than Woodrow Wilson, of course. As an intellectual then political movement, it was eclectic, so eclectic that some historians beginning in the 1970s pronounced it a will-o’-the-wisp.7 But no one at the time thought Progressivism so various and contradictory as to be meaningless, much less nonexistent, though its adherents battled furiously over its political agenda. In 1912, each of the three major presidential candidates considered himself a Progressive, though only Theodore Roosevelt ran as the candidate of the Progressive Party. The raging disputes among TR, Wilson, and Taft showed the difficulty of reducing a complex intellectual movement to a single antitrust policy, or a common attitude toward the initiative, referendum, and recall. But even bitter disagreements over policies did not obscure the premises shared by almost every major figure who called himself or herself a Progressive. The most intense disputes usually occur among coreligionists, after all. Progressivism’s intellectual roots go back to the 1890s and even earlier—to the rise of the American research university after the Civil War, and to the shifting focus of politics after Reconstruction. Historians, journalists, and ordinary citizens understood that at the time, and most historians since, even those addled by the 1960s, have admitted the obvious, too.8

As a political label, “the Progressive movement” did not come into widespread use until after Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, which ended in 1909. The term peaked during his double-barreled run for the same office in 1912, first in the Republican Party and then, when he realized he couldn’t win the nomination and bolted the GOP national convention, as the alpha moose of the Progressive Party. But as a term for a certain reformist sensibility and an emerging set of issues, the adjective progressive had been current since the 1890s—first in England and then in Germany and America. By the time Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann launched the New Republic in 1914, they naturally embraced the term to define their magazine’s political position, and by the same token proudly enrolled themselves in the crusading Progressive movement.9

Most Progressives assumed that the social problems and grievances they confronted were new, outgrowths of the unprecedented development of the modern economy, and proof that one stage of American politics had ended and another, more difficult, and less clearly defined one had begun. “There are no precedents to guide us,” lamented Lippmann, “no wisdom that wasn’t made for a simpler age.”10 The old politics had ended with the Civil War, not in a blaze of dialectical clarity but amid the smoke and noise of battle. Arms had not yielded to the toga, a point not lost on Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and many other future Progressives who fought in the war. For four score and nine years American politics had revolved around the nature (“partly federal and partly national,” Madison said cryptically) and expansion of the Union, the status of slavery within it, and the resulting powers of the national government. But as the Progressives saw it, those issues had been settled, once and for all, by Appomattox: the Union would brook neither secession nor slavery, and the Constitution would furnish whatever powers were necessary to the Union’s preservation. The primacy of the nation had been established in fact, whatever its status in theory might have been. Clarified and strengthened by the Civil War amendments (the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth), the Constitution stood confirmed now as an antislavery document. Law and will and right were one.

Actually, there was a great deal of unfinished business left over from the Civil War, having to do especially with the civil and voting rights of black Americans. When Reconstruction ended and the last battalions of federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, those issues were left in the hands of southern whites, who began almost immediately to erect the legal superstructure of Jim Crow. One might think that for Americans keen on crafting a purer and higher politics, here lay a vast open field for their best efforts. Whatever efforts the would-be Progressives devoted to the vindication of black citizens’ rights, however, were certainly not their best, nor even very numerous. Though no friend of slavery per se, Wilson was incensed by Reconstruction and often defended or at least extenuated the South’s resistance to it. In his five-volume history of America, for example, he wrote, “the white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.”11 The nascent Progressives weren’t the only ones to lose interest in the unfinished Reconstruction agenda; the whole country was straining to reunite the sections, to put the issues of the war behind it, to face the future like a normal nation. Still, the belief that history obeyed the laws of progress provided an additional moral sedative, calming fears that a discriminatory regime in the South and elsewhere could be other than temporary and, in the end, even beneficial for blacks. For most Progressives there was no need to focus on the fading issues of a fading—and simpler—era, which would take care of themselves in due course. The question was, what were the issues of the dawning age? What was American politics supposed to be about henceforth?

The millions who enlisted in the Progressive movement, small businessmen, newspaper editors, teachers, suffragettes, lawyers, doctors, ministers, and many others, worried about the new conditions of life facing the country—daunting problems like mass immigration, urban slums, declining economic opportunity, and the concentration of wealth. They waxed indignant over notorious abuses by railroads, corporations, and political machines. Back of these instances lay the general complaint that American government, city, state, and federal, had ceased to belong to the people and had become a captive of the “interests.” Where corruption had not taken hold, inefficiency reigned. The old forms of government seemed no match for new problems and new temptations. “The old political formulas do not fit the present problems; they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age,” said Wilson. To anxious citizens, Progressivism offered itself as nothing less than the urgent attempt to save American democracy in the only way it could be saved: by purifying, deepening, and updating it. In the words of the Progressive Party’s 1912 platform, the movement strove “to build a new and nobler commonwealth.” Reconstruction of the South may have failed, but reconstruction of the whole country and its government was now in order. As a first step, Progressives had to expose, to borrow the party platform’s language again, the “invisible government” behind the “ostensible government.” Behind the public forms and formalities of democracy—the Constitution and laws—reigned a “plutocracy,” to use the popular term of the day, a wealthy ruling class hiding behind closed boardroom doors and mansions with high hedges. “The government,” Wilson said, “which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” As a result, “The life of the nation . . . does not centre now upon questions of governmental structure or of the distribution of governmental powers. It centres upon questions of the very structure and operation of society itself, of which government is only the instrument.” On the campaign trail that year he put the indictment sharply: “The masters of the government of the United States are the combined capitalists and manufacturers of the United States.” The gravest threat to American democracy came from within, from the interests (not James Madison’s “factions,” unjust combinations that could arise either from interests or passions) who hid behind the rights of private property in order to exploit and rule the people. Imperiled by its own civil society, democracy faced an unprecedented challenge. “To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics,” declared the Progressive platform, “is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”12

Similar indictments had been lodged by the Populist movement in the early 1890s. Despite their common hatred of “the interests” and affection for direct democracy, the two movements disagreed profoundly on the cause and cure for America’s problems. The People’s Party, as it was called, had diagnosed the ill as “corruption,” meaning a falling away from the wise and honest standards set by George Washington and the nation’s founders. “Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench,” as the preamble to the party’s platform, adopted in Omaha, Nebraska, at its first national convention in 1892, declared. “The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few . . . and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.” In a language of agrarian protest that would have been familiar to Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson, the Populists denounced as “usurers” the bankers and bondholders who kept interest rates high to feather their own nests and impoverish the “plain people,” that is, the “producing class,” as opposed to the coupon clippers with their “gold-bearing bonds.” Nor were these scheming oligarchs confined to the United States. “A vast conspiracy against mankind has been organized on two continents,” the platform asserted, “and it is rapidly taking possession of the world.” In writings under his own name, the preamble’s author, Ignatius Donnelly, an editor, novelist, Minnesota politician, and ardent believer that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays (Donnelly wrote two books to prove it), pointed to the “Israelites,” that is, the Jews, as key actors in this international conspiracy. “The world is today Semitized,” as a character in Caesar’s Column, Donnelly’s hugely popular 1890 utopian novel, explained. Officially, the People’s Party kept silent on the question.13 But in the decisive respect the Populists were reiterating or at any rate reformulating time-honored complaints about the pernicious effects of the “money power” on the “equal rights and equal privileges” of citizens. They breathed not a word of a new age that had allegedly anachronized the morality of the good old Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

What the Populists offered as a solution was the traditional resort of farmers who had gone too far into debt, or who, to put it more charitably, had the misfortune of growing crops in the great post–Civil War deflation, when commodity prices fell for decades. The remedy was inflation, a huge increase of the money supply to be fueled by bimetallism, the “free and unlimited coinage of silver” at a 16:1 ratio to gold. In addition to this panacea, however, they proposed new steps: public ownership of the railroads, telegraphs, and telephones; a graduated income tax; the Australian or secret ballot; the initiative and referendum; direct election of senators; and various reforms of labor law, including “the further restriction of undesirable immigration,” especially low-wage Chinese workers.

The future Progressives had zero sympathy with the main item on the Populist reform agenda, dismissing soft-money policy as economic moonshine, a combination of “economic disaster” and “financial dishonor,” as TR once put it.14 With the secondary prescriptions there was considerably more sympathy, and the Progressives borrowed unapologetically from the list, as did reformist Republicans and Democrats in the following decades. In journalist William Allen White’s words, the Progressives “caught the Populists in swimming and stole all of their clothing except the frayed underdrawers of free silver.”15 On these smaller or less central questions the People’s Party often sounded downright Progressive. “We believe that the powers of government—in other words, of the people—should be expanded (as in the case of the postal service) as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an intelligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify,” the platform announced, “to the end that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the land.”

Yet even when advocating the expansion of governmental powers, the Populists revealed the line that separated them from their successors and later liberals. The People’s Party called for expanding government’s powers, not its majesty or superintendence over the people itself. New powers were needed to restore government to its old authority, but that authority still reported to the people and the Populists never renounced the people’s prudent jealousy of governmental power. “We assert our purposes to be identical with the purposes of the National Constitution,” said the Omaha Platform’s preamble; even when calling for public ownership of the railroads, it insisted on an accompanying constitutional amendment that would put all government workers under a strict civil service system, “so as to prevent the increase of the power of the national administration by the use of such additional government employees.” The national executive and central administrative power could not be suffered to expand, in short, lest they upset the Constitution’s internal checks and balances and thus the people’s control over their own national government. Somewhat contradictorily, the party called for a larger administrative power without an administrative state. Though they disliked bankers, the Populists distrusted ambitious and profligate politicians as well. The country’s money “should be kept as much as possible in the hands of the people,” safe from bankers and government officials alike, even if the latter spouted pleasant-sounding redistributionist or protectionist nostrums, of the sort then associated with tariff policy. The postal service reform alluded to earlier involved the creation of postal savings banks—an easy and safe way for small earners to save money at the nearest post office branch, rather than having to trust a bank. Suspicious of elites, the Populists sympathized with the workingman. “Wealth belongs to him who creates it,” they declared, “and every dollar taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. ‘If any will not work, neither shall he eat.’ ”16 This was not exactly the ethic of the future entitlement state. Individual Populists were sometimes crankier or more radical, but the movement and especially the party always came back to the principle that the powers of government should only be expanded in keeping with “the good sense of an intelligent people” and “the teachings of experience.”

However much it may have paid “lip-loyalty” (TR’s word) to the same standards, Progressivism in fact respected them only to the extent they jibed with a third authority, quite distinct from either popular prudence or the maxims of experience. Democratic good sense could not take the place of expertise, objected the Progressives, and mere experience could never discover the deep, systemic causes of the present discontents. What the Populists lacked above all was a theory, a doctrine, by which to explain the chronic inadequacy of the present distribution of government powers, and by which to prescribe the far-reaching extensions of those powers to meet the needs of the new age. Backward-looking when they should have been forward-looking, nostalgic when they should have been scientific, they could never grasp the extent to which the U.S. Constitution and its spirit were the source of late-nineteenth-century America’s problems.17 They continued to insist that the Constitution had been betrayed, when in most respects, retorted the Progressives, it had simply become outmoded. Or worse: Charles Beard, J. Allen Smith, and other Progressive historians argued that the rapacious rule of corporations, trusts, and millionaires, was more or less what the Constitution had set out to enshrine.18 Looking back at William Jennings Bryan and the Populist movement’s other tribunes, Woodrow Wilson found it hard to hide his contempt for their “crude and ignorant minds.”19

In politics, names matter; in this case, they speak volumes. The Populists were, well, populist; the People’s Party believed in the people’s rule, enhanced in many respects but still broadly faithful to the constitutional ideas of the great farmer-presidents like Washington, Jefferson, and Jackson. By contrast, the Progressives believed first and foremost in a doctrine of progress. Wilson issued this panegyric to it in The New Freedom, still the most important book of campaign speeches in the history of modern liberalism:

Progress! Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonymous with life itself, and yet men through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were tales of the past. The ancestor wore the heavier armor and carried the larger spear. “There were giants in those days.” Now all that has altered. We think of the future, not the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development—those are modern words.

From the country’s beginning, out of necessity, choice, habit, and fetish, Americans had striven to improve their material and moral condition. “The American people are not naturally stand-patters,” Wilson observed. “Progress is the word that charms their ears and stirs their hearts.” Progress was never a dirty word then, though its exact meaning was disputed and the relation between material and moral progress frequently regarded as problematic. “From the conclusion of this war,” Jefferson warned in the early 1780s, “we shall be going down hill.” The people “will forget themselves, but in the sole faculty of making money, and will never think of uniting to effect a due respect for their rights.” Lincoln said that the Declaration of Independence contemplated a “progressive improvement in the condition of all men everywhere,” but he also spoke of our “progress in degeneracy,” as indifference to slavery’s evil—and even proslavery arguments—gained traction before the Civil War.20 This separation and potential conflict between moral and material progress marked a significant exception to Americans’ modernity, in Wilson’s sense of the word. Still, in general they regarded it as a blessing that in the New World material and moral progress were possible, and they looked forward to a future better than the present in many respects, if not all. Two additional exceptions to this “modern” outlook were, however, conspicuous. One was the old Christian insistence on the world’s fallen condition, which no amount of prosperity or moral improvement could redeem. Whether worldly progress was therefore a snare and delusion, a matter of indifference, a genuine if second-rate good, a gracious sign of God’s favor, or some combination, was hotly debated among and within the dizzying variety of Christian sects. To saved souls a perfectly happy future was indeed reserved, on that all believers agreed; but the blessed future was not of this world and its advent and character remained inscrutable to man here below. Such views may have been losing ground in the higher seminaries, but they remained potent.21

The other exception touched directly on Wilson’s political aims. For Americans have from earliest times regarded the Founders and their handiwork with a certain reverence and awe. Most Americans thought there were giants in those days, and ever since looked up, and back, to Washington, Jefferson, and the other Founders both as venerable guides to the Republic’s principles and as timeless exemplars of political wisdom more generally. As the distance from the Founders grew, so did their reputation, an effect predicted and counted on by the most far-sighted Framers, who regarded such “prejudice” as indispensable to political stability and good government. A rational constitution had to know the limits of popular reason.22 To this “blind worship” of the Constitution and its principles, Wilson intended to help put an end. In this respect, which he regarded as the crucial one, Americans (not just Populists) remained mired in a premodern world, unable to address the very different problems of the present and incapable of imagining the “more glorious time” to come, “in comparison with which the present is nothing” and the past less than nothing. Nonetheless, the rise of Progressive sentiments presaged a new era of politics in which the blinders finally were coming off.

We are the first Americans to hear our own countrymen ask whether the Constitution is still adapted to serve the purposes for which it was intended; the first to entertain any serious doubts about the superiority of our own institutions as compared with the systems of Europe; the first to think of remodeling the administrative machinery of the federal government, and of forcing new forms of responsibility upon Congress.

This statement, from the opening pages of Congressional Government, seems to imply that the “purposes for which [the Constitution] was intended” remain a relevant standard in judging it today. By the time the reader reaches the book’s final paragraph, however, the futility of such an appeal has become clear. The point is to transform the constitutional system, albeit gradually and without violence.

The charm of our constitutional ideal has now been long enough wound up to enable sober men who do not believe in political witchcraft to judge what it has accomplished, and is likely still to accomplish, without further winding. The Constitution is not honored by blind worship. The more open-eyed we become, as a nation, to its defects, and the prompter we grow in applying with the unhesitating courage of conviction all thoroughly-tested or well-considered expedients necessary to make self-government among us a straightforward thing of simple method, single, unstinted power, and clear responsibility, the nearer will we approach to the sound sense and practical genius of the great and honorable statesmen of 1787. And the first step towards emancipation from the timidity and false pride which have led us to seek to thrive despite the defects of our national system rather than seem to deny its perfection is a fearless criticism of that system.

Wilson would devote his life to that “fearless criticism,” and to refounding American government as “a straightforward thing of simple method, single, unstinted power, and clear responsibility.” His way of honoring the Founders was not to live up to their principles but to imitate their example by a fresh stroke of “political genius” surpassing, and superseding, their own.23

By opposing the special interests and ushering in new forms of government, the Progressive movement understood itself to be advancing the public interest. One of its most attractive qualities (and one of liberalism’s, too) was its insistence on asserting the dignity of the public realm as over against the private world of interests. Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, Taft, Henry Cabot Lodge, Elihu Root, and many other spirited men in that generation rebelled against the idea of a republic enthralled by the likes of Jay Gould, J. P. Morgan, and Commodore Vanderbilt. Though they despised the political influence wielded by the captains of industry, they disliked even more the popular fascination with such men, which smacked of Mammon-worship. To exaggerate slightly, there was something Aristotelian about the Progressives’ indignant assertion of the supremacy of public over private good, of politics over economics, of statesmanship over the moneymaking arts. On occasion, they claimed the pedigree explicitly. Richard T. Ely, one of Wilson’s principal teachers at Johns Hopkins, wrote that modern critics who demanded that economics bow to ethics had basically “gone back to the Greeks, notably to Plato and Aristotle, who subordinated all economic inquiries to ethical considerations.” These “older and sounder conceptions” had been prevalent, he explained, “until a wave of revolutionary materialism in the last century swept over the world.” Wilson himself, in his textbook, The State, stressed that “Aristotle was simply stating a fact when he said, ‘Man is by nature a political animal.’ ”24

This impulse to rescue politics from its economic servitude stimulated an outpouring of new biographies of American and European statesmen—including the thirty-nine volumes of the American Statesmen Series, written by Henry Cabot Lodge, TR, William Graham Sumner, and other leading men of the day, and published by Houghton Mifflin—not to mention an influx of talented young men (and a small but growing number of women) into politics. Compared to the politicians of our time, the leading public figures of the Progressive generation were giants—literate, deeply learned, and serious about their calling. Compared to the generation that had preceded them, epitomized by the post–Civil War presidents whose names are hard to remember and whose accomplishments are just as elusive, the Progressives appeared a return to the Republic’s golden or at least silver age. For their own part, they fixed their gaze on Lincoln. Against his towering example, the politicians of the Gilded Age looked like pipsqueaks, as they would have been the first to admit. The prestige of the martyred president cast its shadow over the whole landscape of American politics. To the Progressives, who were after all mostly Republicans, Lincoln was the very beau ideal of a statesman. When he took the oath of office at his second presidential inauguration, TR wore a ring, given him by his friend and Lincoln’s former secretary, John Hay, which contained a lock of Lincoln’s hair clipped from his head after the assassination. But saving the Union and freeing the slaves was a hard act to follow. Leaving aside the now abandoned experiment of enforcing upon the South the terms of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, what was left for the Lincoln-loving statesmen of the Progressive movement to do?25

Quite a bit, it turned out, though their efforts were guided not by Lincoln’s principles or his own understanding of his career, but by the effects of his policies on the subsequent development of American nationhood.26 TR regarded Lincoln as a thoroughgoing democrat and nationalist, not unlike himself. Wilson saw him as a nation-builder and frontiersman whose eye was on the future. They agreed with Herbert Croly that the sixteenth president stood for a new nationalism based on a deeper sense of democracy, now understood as the perfection of human brotherhood and therefore of man himself. The Progressives thought of themselves as defending nationalism against sectionalism, righteousness (one of their favorite words, though not one of his) against selfishness, even as Lincoln in his day had defended the Union against “the special interests of cotton and slavery,” to quote Roosevelt’s New Nationalism address. They sought not merely to emulate Lincoln, however, but to incorporate and transcend his work. He had been a democratic Bismarck, willing to wage total war in a “supreme and final struggle” between the “forces of health, of union and amalgamation” and the “forces of disintegration.” As a result, the United States emerged as a real nation, a united or unitary political community, for the first time. Alas, its constitution and political principles, its “literary theory,” remained frozen in the past. American democracy remained largely a formal thing, often a mere matter of votes and the dollars to buy them. Political democracy needed to be extended and deepened; it fell short of social democracy and social justice; its moral tone wanted righteousness. This “new nation,” in Wilson’s phrase, lacked a proper State to guide, but also to express, its spirit. The great Progressive task thus involved replacing the country’s obsolete, eighteenth-century government with a modern State, bringing the United States to completion, finally, as a mature nation-state.27

The Fourth Branch of Government

Building that State was the ultimate purpose of Wilson’s “new political sentiment and party.” It was no coincidence that he came to this resolve while an undergraduate at Princeton and restated it after graduate study at Johns Hopkins. For the “defects” of the Constitution and the virtues of the State that might replace it were persistent themes of his university education. Before turning to the character and teachings of this new science of the State, we ought to consider the organs that transmitted it, namely, the research universities that began to appear in America after the Civil War. The rise of the university changed not only American higher education but also American politics, in ways that are not widely recognized. Run your finger down the front page of the daily newspaper or down the column of a news Web page, however, and you will see evidence of the changes. In very many stories you will see reference to one or more “experts” offering up an expert opinion on some question or other—the causes of high unemployment, cures for juvenile delinquency, the future of terrorism, etc. Most of the experts will be professors, or Ph.D.s who work in think tanks or in government, or if not Ph.D.s then holders of comparable degrees in the professional schools of law, business, or medicine. Before the rise of the university, America was a country almost entirely bereft of such experts and of such expertise. It was a rather different America.

Not that the United States lacked higher education, for even at the time of the Revolution the Americans boasted more colleges than their erstwhile mother country. Prior to the last third of the nineteenth century, however, these schools overwhelmingly were liberal arts colleges of one sort or another, often connected to churches, and “in some respects,” note Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, “more like today’s secondary schools than today’s universities.” They did not have faculties of specialized scholars organized into departments; “everyone taught almost everything”; few teachers had had any sort of advanced education beyond a B.A., because such education wasn’t available in America, except to a small extent in theology and law. Consequently, the notion of “a college professor as an independent expert with a mission transcending the college where he happened to teach was almost unknown.” Until late in the nineteenth century, colleges probably had much less influence, cultural and political, than churches did, though in the formation of individual minds—for example, Madison studying with John Witherspoon at the College of New Jersey—a college education could be a significant influence. But then Witherspoon was also a clergyman, an exception proving the rule. If any jobs required a B.A., they must have been few and far between; hence the economic benefits of higher education were small compared to today.28 For the irrelevance or at least limited influence of colleges in those days the most striking symbol is the speeches at Gettysburg on November 19, 1863, at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery. Edward Everett, not wearing lightly his Harvard A.B. (he was class valedictorian) and Prussian Ph.D. (the University of Göttingen), and being not only a former Harvard professor but also a former president of Harvard College, spoke first, for more than two hours. His speech began with a long discussion of ancient Athenian funerary rites, and proceeded to a detailed exposition of the Battle of Gettysburg. The second speaker, Abraham Lincoln, who estimated “the aggregate of all his schooling did not amount to one year,” spoke for about two minutes.29 Who gave the more significant address?

With the rise of the university began a new chapter in American history. The change came slowly: the first Ph.D. was granted in 1861 by Yale, and in 1869 Charles W. Eliot began his forty transformative years as president of Harvard. When he introduced the elective system, it not only empowered students but also encouraged the faculty to organize itself along more scholarly and specialized lines. But it was not until the founding of Johns Hopkins as a research university in 1876 that the modern university, dedicated to uncovering new knowledge discipline by discipline and focused more on graduate than undergraduate education, put down deep roots. Graduate departments and schools proliferated in the 1880s, including at leading state universities like Michigan and Wisconsin, and by the 1890s, with the founding of the University of Chicago and reforms at Columbia and Princeton, the research university had established itself. By Wilson’s presidency the two dozen or so major research schools, still recognizable as such today, were in place.30

Between the Civil War and World War I, the reformers of the American academy looked to Germany, especially to Prussia, for inspiration. There were exceptions—Cornell’s founders, for example—who took Oxford and Cambridge as principal models. But Germany had the most advanced, well funded, and comprehensive institutions of higher education in the world, and Americans had a penchant for studying there that stretched back to the early nineteenth century, when a handful of Americans including Everett and the historian George Bancroft ventured to Germany for advanced degrees and a de rigueur visit with Goethe in Weimar. In addition, Germans emigrated to the United States and began teaching here, notably Francis Lieber, who arrived in 1827 to begin his career as an author and educator at South Carolina College and later Columbia, where he became America’s first professor of political science. After the Civil War, these rare birds were joined by a much larger migration of young Americans who went to Germany to study (access was easy and inexpensive, like the beer) and came home sporting German Ph.D.s. They returned as evangelists for the German system of higher education, too, and helped encourage and staff America’s emerging research universities. A who’s who of Progressive intellectuals, this cohort educated, in turn, a second generation of thinkers, who didn’t need to escape to Germany to earn graduate degrees. Wilson was a member of that second generation, trained at Johns Hopkins by German-educated scholars, particularly the historian Herbert Baxter Adams and Ely, an economist-cum-sociologist who was also a pioneer of the Social Gospel movement.31

What above all attracted the Progressives to the German academy, however, was its direct connection to political life. Before the Left’s avant-garde became captivated by the Soviet Union as the model society of the future, it fell in love with Germany. In Germany all universities were owned and operated by the State, and all professors were civil servants, many of whom, especially the professors of political science, served as advisors to the government and as legislators. This marriage of knowledge to power proved immensely attractive to the young men who had gone abroad seeking both. Many were struck by the planned efficiency of Prussia’s wars to unify the German nation—as against the bloody, protracted mess of the American Civil War.

It’s amusing to see their puppy love in action. Frederic C. Howe, a Johns Hopkins Ph.D., wrote a book celebrating Robert M. La Follette’s Wisconsin as “an experiment in democracy,” marked above all by the close connection between the state government and the state university. “Social science in many of its basic dimensions began as a reform movement,” the political theorist John Gunnell observes, and nowhere was this truer than in Wisconsin. Howe began his paean: “Wisconsin is doing for America what Germany is doing for the world.”

Just as the German burgomaster builds with a far-seeing vision to promote the comfort, the convenience, the health, the beauty of the city; just as the German empire has been consciously developing the education, training, and efficiency of its people, just as the state-owned railroads, waterways, harbors, forests, and mineral resources are used for the upbuilding of the fatherland . . . so Wisconsin is building a commonwealth in a conscious, far-seeing, intelligent way. It is becoming an experiment station for America.

In this epic of Germanification, the University of Wisconsin at Madison had a crucial role.

The state university . . . is a scientific research bureau, using its faculty and equipment in the service of the state. Professors are connected with almost every department of public administration. State problems are studied in the schools of politics, of agriculture, of mechanical engineering. Experts from the university are employed on railway, taxation, and industrial problems, and in extending the influence of the university throughout the state. . . . The university is largely responsible for the progressive legislation that has made Wisconsin so widely known as a pioneer.

And what of popular government?

Scientific thoroughness characterizes politics as in no other place in America. Legislation is preceded by exact knowledge of the abuses to be corrected and the ends to be achieved. Laws are made as simple and direct as possible. The politician has almost disappeared from the state-house. He does not thrive in this atmosphere. There is little partisan thinking, and little partisan legislation.32

Although “calling in the expert,” as Howe phrased it, accomplished some good in Wisconsin, it would be naïve not to acknowledge the threat to equality and the consent of the governed posed by self-proclaimed experts in public administration whose newfound power the Progressives found so exhilarating. “Wisconsin is making the German idea her own,” Howe wrote. “The university is the fourth department of the state. . . . There is no provision for this in the constitution, no reference to it in the laws.”33 Exactly. A distinctive mark of the Progressive movement was the aspiration to turn the university into the fourth branch of government, with no constitutional or legal limits on its informal powers. That Prussia was a kingdom with an entrenched aristocracy, that Germany was a not-very-constitutional monarchy, seemed not to discomfit those who wanted to import Teutonic institutions. Wisconsin wasn’t Prussia, to be sure, though a lot of Germans were loose in each. But the presumption was that the university could be trusted to define the state’s social problems, prescribe cures, and then evaluate the success of the very programs it had recommended. Everything depended on the integrity and wisdom of the experts, which could only be judged by . . . the experts, with perhaps a few of the vanishing politicians looking on weakly. Tenure and academic freedom (Lehrfreiheit, the Germans called it) tended to reinforce the argument’s circularity. Political pressure on universities and faculty members wasn’t uncommon in the nineteenth century, but it decreased as the university ideal took hold.34 Still, nothing separated Progressivism from Populism, or for that matter from all previous American democracy, more sharply than this faith in the presumptive expertise, integrity, and political authority of the academic mandarins. Though the civil service is often called the fourth branch of government, the bureaucrats form, in a larger perspective, a subdivision or extension of the academy reflecting experts’ viewpoints and interests, more faithfully than the public’s. For all of its emphasis on the people versus “the interests,” the Progressive movement did not trust the people to govern themselves unless under the influence of the “exact knowledge” of an expert class.

The Doctrine of Progress

The modern State and the modern university thus had a symbiotic relationship from the beginning. They were two parts of the same reform project. High on the agenda of the builders of America’s research universities, therefore, stood the creation of academic departments to house the new social sciences, which were essential to the university’s (and the State’s) task of experimenting on society, that is to say, on the people. A great deal of effort went into building up the natural sciences as well, and soon Ph.D.s in chemistry, engineering, agronomy, and other fields poured out of the graduate schools. In a democracy that had always been fascinated by inventions and improvements and the pursuit of material well-being, these academic developments made perfect sense, and for the most part needed no new theory to justify them. Yet the new social sciences—economics, psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, and political science—based on new assumptions about man and society, formed a different case. Far more unified then than now, they stood at the center of Progressive reforms. In these departments especially, the purpose of the university as a whole, which meant its place in modern society, came into sharp focus.

Wilson did not discover, much less invent, these new social sciences. He studied them in college and graduate school, and then modified them until he had shaped his own version of political science—which by precept and example, as we shall see, he taught to modern liberalism. Broadly speaking, these disciplines all conceived of themselves as historical sciences, in a sense that none of their precursors would have recognized. Whether discussing economics, family structure, race, religion, or forms of government, they assumed that the starting point of science was “the historical sense,” the notion that all thought is a child of its time. As Wilson wrote nonchalantly, “The philosophy of any time is, as Hegel says, ‘nothing but the spirit of that time expressed in abstract thought’; and political philosophy, like philosophy of every other kind, has only held up the mirror to contemporary affairs.”35 History is not merely a record of what has happened (one damn thing after another, said a historian famously), but is something hitherto unknown, a dimension of reality shaping or determining all thought and thoughtful action in an epoch, like an invisible magnetic force moving iron filings. Even as the power of magnetism had to be discovered, so did the force of history.

Whereas a magnet arranges filings in the same pattern, however, history marks every epoch as unique. Yet these differences link up, because history isn’t the realm of chance, fate, and accident, but of order, specifically of a kind of orderly development. History with a capital H shows that out of the apparent disorder of human events, order emerges, without being intended by anyone. Connecting age to age, history’s logic arranges all events and cultures into a rational sequence from the simplest to the most complex, from the least free society to the most free. As society changes, so does the human mind and human nature with it. In fact, the mind changes first, though it isn’t fully conscious of the change. Over thousands of years man becomes more aware of himself, of his freedom and reason. He grows up. The process might be called teleological, except that the end was not visible or foreseeable from the beginning, as one knows an acorn will become an oak tree and nothing but an oak tree. For millennia man did not, and could not, know he was meant for freedom: the ancient Athenians saw no contradiction between slavery and their democracy, according to Hegel. Caesar could not have known that by conquering Gaul he made inevitable Rome’s conquest centuries later by Germanic tribes, thus ushering in the Christianization of Europe, feudalism, the Renaissance, the nation-state, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the final emergence of universal freedom in the rational State—but inexorably each event led to the next.36 Though these developments couldn’t be known in advance, and each was the occasion of passionate and bloody conflict, they make perfect sense in retrospect. Hence it’s not man’s nature but his history that explains what he is today.

G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) was the philosopher who first articulated this notion of history as the story of man’s necessary development, or progress. In many ways he laid the deepest underpinnings of modern American liberalism, though his thought had to be adulterated and democratized before that could happen. Conservatives often mistake Hegel for a relativist because he argued that morality, like all thought, changes with the times. But the changes ceased with the end of history, when philosophy culminated in wisdom and true morality. Hegel’s so-called relativism ended in absolutism, perhaps the severest and most self-satisfied in the history of philosophy.

His lectures on the philosophy of history take the reader on a Cook’s tour of world civilization, traveling from east to west (after a short stop in prehistoric Africa), with visits to the “oriental mind,” the Greek and Roman minds, and finally the Germanic one. For history to be rational it had to be a work of mind; but mind could be historical only if it were a collective mind or spirit (Geist) that could be embodied in a historical age. Hegel’s famous concept of the Volksgeist met these needs. Each culture or folk mind (e.g., classical Greece) passed from youth to maturity to decline, but handed the torch to a successor just in time. The essence of the fading culture was preserved in the transfer, so that nothing important was lost and the subsequent folk mind could begin where the last left off. And so the world mind (Weltgeist) progressed, from the consciousness, as Hegel put it, that One is free (the principle of oriental despotism), to the understanding that Some are free (the Greeks and Romans), to the knowledge, finally, that All human beings are free (the Christian insight, perfected in the Germanic mind). This change in moralities, according to Hegel, was the most highly moral thing in the world.37

The debt that Progressive idealism owed to German idealism was enormous. Progress in the Hegelian sense bred the lofty assurance that history had a meaning and direction, that it pointed inevitably to human liberty and human flourishing. Small wonder that many Progressives found it so easy to identify change with improvement. If history guaranteed an ethical and intellectual consummation, after all, how dangerous could change or experiment be? Almost any change had the character of improvement, they figured, or at least greased the skids for improvement. The same idealistic reasoning undermined or at least dangerously weakened the case for political moderation: why settle for less now, when soon, very soon, you can have it all? Why tolerate imperfect justice when perfection is within reach? The feeling of righteousness that came from being on the right side of history, and being applauded for being on the right side of history, could easily substitute for the deep self-knowledge that had always been the accompaniment and requirement of true righteousness.38

These temptations arose partly out of Hegel’s own system and partly out of modifications of it by his students and their epigones, including the Progressives. After all, Hegel taught that progress came to an end. This hard doctrine was compelled by his premise that all thought is a child of its time—which meant that Hegel’s thought was a child of his time, no less relative to the age than any previous thinker’s. Why then was his notion of the rational State any less preposterous or mistaken than the divine right of kings, or suttee in India? The difference was not in the principle of historical relativity but in the nature of the times. This was the significance of his elusive idea of the “end of history,” revived and made fashionable by Francis Fukuyama after the end of the Cold War. Hegel’s teachings could be true because he philosophized, at the “Absolute moment” when relative knowledge ceased and absolute knowledge began. (It was still not easy, of course, to become the first Wise Man, but Hegel was up to it.) Truth remained relative to history, but when history turned Absolute, so to speak, so did truth. Nonetheless, truth would be off to the races again if the conditions of Absolute knowledge did not persist, if history as the story of man gaining maturity and wisdom did not have a Finis at the end. Hence the end of history, which didn’t mean that births, deaths, and other events ceased, or that scientific inventions and artistic productions stopped. It meant that no important ethical, philosophical, and even political truths remained to be discovered or understood anymore.39

The flip side of the end of history was the advent of the “rational State.” Hegel saw it, in outline at least, in early nineteenth-century Prussia. History culminated in this final and highest form of human government, which protected the freedom of every individual equally but was a constitutional monarchy, not a democracy. To be rational, you see, government had to be confided to “those who know,” not to the many who don’t. Most countries were not ready for this consitution, but in due course all would be.

It would be going too far to say that what remained to be accomplished was merely administrative, but it was close enough for a certain dispiritedness to set in among many of Hegel’s followers. The end of history meant the end of philosophy or of the quest for wisdom, and the beginning of the reign of complete wisdom, world without end, amen. This implied the end of thinking, in the Socratic sense; and the end of obedience, in the biblical sense, to a mysterious God who was separate and apart from the world and who existed in eternity, not time. The wisdom now available to man was entirely of this world and free, absolutely free, of all skepticism and humility; it could be deemed superhuman, except that it came into existence by or through man’s own unconscious labors over the ages. Its possession depended on the completion of a historical process over which no thinker or philosopher had control, and by which his or her own “thought” decisively had been controlled. To that extent Hegel’s wisdom was at once superhuman (like a revelation or a miracle) and subhuman (like a deterministic response to an outside stimulus). What it wasn’t was properly human, suitable for fallible and free men who are neither gods nor beasts. Once government could be based on such wisdom, it no longer needed to be limited due to man’s intellectual and moral imperfections.40

So the end of philosophy also meant the end of politics and liberty, in the sense of deliberating over opposing principles of justice and the public good. Those grand disputes belonged to the past, when man could only desire to know; now he knew, and could see with his own eyes the clashing theses tamed into syntheses. Nevertheless, wars between nations and poverty within nations would continue to occupy public attention, Hegel thought, and his students made the most of it. Still, how interesting could such residual issues be when history itself was over? Alexandre Kojève, Hegel’s greatest twentieth-century interpreter, put his own existentialist-Soviet spin on the dispiritedness at history’s end: “There is no longer fight nor work; History is completed; there is nothing more to do. . . .”41 Politics was doomed to be replaced by administration, by bureaucratic management of the society and economy. Hegel’s followers, the most impressive ones at least, rebelled against this life sentence without parole. His acolytes on the Right doubted that the Germanic folk mind—the modern West—could long persist in such an unhealthy state. None of its historical predecessors had. Like them, the West seemed doomed to decline, rationalized Christianity to decay—though hugely different accounts of that decline issued from Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Oswald Spengler.

On the Left, Karl Marx tried to save progress, temporarily, and even a form of idealistic striving, from history’s pitiless end. Unable to reject the Hegelian framework, he settled for upending it. But turning Hegel on his head meant putting his feet on the ground, inasmuch as the master had tried to build his system on ideas, on reason, on intellectual production rather than material production. By putting economic change in the driver’s seat and relegating Geist to an effect or by-product of the mode of production and its resulting class relations, Marx invented the most powerful form of left-wing economic determinism. And he helped confuse American Progressives ever afterward over whether socioeconomic development drove politics, or vice versa. Most important, he revised the understanding of the so-called end of history. The end is near, Marx argued, and it’s close enough that the more sensitive among the proletariat and its vanguard may discern some of the arrangements concerning the initial transition from capitalism to socialism. But it’s not close enough to understand, except in the vaguest way, what the actual end of history, the stateless society of communism, will be like. That heaven remains beyond our ken, but not—and this is crucial—beyond our striving. By locating man on the suburbs, perhaps even the distant exurbs, of paradise, Marx created space for one last great political action, one final rampage of ruthless statism, one sweetly dying gasp of idealism, before politics and idealism were retired to the museum of proletarian oppression.

The Progressives were not great admirers of Marx and in fact abhorred his strategic recommendations—fanatic partisanship, class warfare, and violent revolution—as hopelessly reactionary. Yet like the Marxists, the Progressives needed an account of history that would explain progress—the rationality of the historical process—without ruling out future installments. So they borrowed from the Marxists the notion that the moment of truth, the moment when Truth emerged from ideology and when the relativity of all previous thought became clear, could be separated from the full-fledged reign of wisdom at the end of history. The truth about past thought and action, argued the Progressives, could be well enough understood in light of the present, even though the present as yet caught only a glimpse of the future. Having wrestled with his own passions, Augustine would have recognized the Progressives’ dilemma: bring History to an end, O Lord, but not yet. More honest or at least more impatient, the Marxists enlisted Revolution to close the gap once and for all between history and the end of history, between the world as it is and the world as it should be—and soon will be. The Progressives, however, replaced Revolution with Evolution, and set out not to advance or force the end of history but to endlessly approximate it. Their approach to the perfect society would necessarily be asymptotic, as the mathematicians say: the curve of social progress would touch the line of complete social justice only at infinity. The scheme had the great advantage of giving Progressives something to do forever. And it kept the old idealism up: from any point on the curve, no matter how close to perfect social democracy, infinite progress was still possible, and yet more obligatory.

As attractive as this prospect was, it evaded rather than solved the problem that a morality claiming the high ground of history had finally to command that ground. Progress, as opposed to mere change, must have a fixed point or standard by which to be measured. If the goalposts are constantly receding, you aren’t making progress. (Wilson liked to quote Through the Looking Glass as “a parable of progress.” Out of breath after a furious race, Alice exclaimed, “ ‘Why, we are just where we were when we started!’ ‘Oh, yes,’ says the Red Queen, ‘you have to run twice as fast as that to get anywhere else. . . .’ ’’)42 If History never ends, then it cannot be shown to be rational, much less happy or moral. Unending progress is what Hegel condemned as “bad infinity,” no progress at all. The Progressives took this problem and turned it into an opportunity—for endless State-building. They called to their assistance the other major intellectual current of the era, Social Darwinism.

The Evolution Revolution

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, the year after the Lincoln-Douglas debates. By the time of Lincoln’s presidential inauguration the book was being taught at Harvard, and Asa Gray, its leading proponent on the faculty, was explaining it in a series of articles in the Atlantic. In a way, Darwinism was old news. Charles Lyell and other geologists, studying rock sedimentation, had proposed in the 1830s that the earth was a product of slow evolutionary forces, and hence older than the orthodox Christian dating of the world. Even earlier, in his Second Discourse, Rousseau had sketched a speculative history of a process, entirely accidental, by which man over many eons had emerged from non-man. Darwin didn’t renounce speculation entirely but he emphasized the data points in the fossil records and among living species, connecting the data by an account of evolutionary change as the law of life. Despite its emphasis on slow, marginal alteration, Darwin’s theory had a revolutionary effect; it hit hard and fast, an Evolution Revolution. As John Dewey said fifty years later, Darwin accelerated “the transfer of interest from the permanent to the changing.” Darwinism did not merely question the truth of the old notion of unchanging species; as a cultural phenomenon, it threatened to make obsolete the whole search for unchanging truths. On the Origin of Species “conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition,” explained Dewey, and its effect on biology inspired the transformation of philosophy and the social sciences, too. It “freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life.” Darwinism did not refute the older natural philosophy, much less the biblical view of the world. It rendered them passé. Then and now, natural selection had Christian adherents who argued that its evolutionary effects were secondary causes by which the First Cause acted. But neither Darwin nor his followers were terribly interested in the possibility. As Dewey commented presciently, “intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions . . . that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.”43

Social Darwinism, the application of Darwinism to social problems, is usually depicted as a smug phenomenon of the Right, an elaborate rationalization of capitalism by its beneficiaries and supporters in the Gilded Age. Andrew Carnegie’s name invariably comes up, and William Graham Sumner’s, the iconoclastic professor of sociology at Yale. In fact, Carnegie, a follower of Herbert Spencer, was one of the few millionaires who could be considered anything like a self-confessed Social Darwinist. (It didn’t prevent him from being a major philanthropist.) Most businessmen in those decades, according to historian Paul Boller, “explained themselves to the world in terms of hard work and Christian stewardship,” not the survival of the fittest.44 The standard accounts conjure and condemn Social Darwinism as a plutocratic ideology, despite the fact that Sumner and many others who defended laissez-faire economics despised “plutocracy,” which they associated with the high protective tariff and what we’d today call crony capitalism. Laissez-faire economics long predated Darwin, of course, who said in fact that the idea of natural selection had come to him from reading Malthus’s Essay on Population. This identification of capitalism and the so-called robber barons with Social Darwinism is, however, a conceit of modern liberalism: a tendentious simplification that permits historians to celebrate the Progressives as humanists and moralists who were withal principled foes of the cruel Social Darwinists. The two sides in this liberal morality play are readily identifiable even today in Barack Obama’s speeches. He enjoys nothing so much as abominating the “trickle-down economics” of the “Social Darwinists” who deny the moral truth that they are their brother’s keeper. “There’s something bracing about the Social Darwinist idea,” he allowed once, “the idea that there isn’t a problem that the unfettered free market can’t solve.” As a philosophy it means “every man or woman for him or herself,” he said on another occasion. The problem is it “requires no sacrifice on the part of those of us who have won life’s lottery,” implying that the Social Darwinist test is not one of fitness but of plain dumb luck.45

For these purposes “Social Darwinism” stands in for the sheer greediness and low glower of the American bourgeoisie. It functions as a term of opprobrium, conveying contempt for the business end of American civilization, not merely for the millionaires but for the millions on the make. One would never guess from its usage now or then that the more influential and probably the more numerous Social Darwinists were on the Left, not the Right, that the new social sciences in the new universities were suffused with the Darwinist spirit, and that Progressivism depended on it for an important component of its doctrine of progress.46 At this point we need to invoke another scene from Through the Looking Glass—the famous exchange in which Humpty Dumpty tells Alice, “When I use a word, . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” For to the liberal mind Social Darwinism is immoral, and the respectable Darwinism of the Progressives has got to be something else: call it “Reform Darwinism,” or evolutionary social science, or “the method of intelligence.”47 Their squeamishness is all the more paradoxical because modern liberals pride themselves on defending Darwinism against the yokels and yahoos on the Religious Right who allegedly want to suppress it; liberals have delighted in replaying the Scopes Trial, well, ever since the Scopes Trial. But they fought hard to keep “Social Darwinism” as a term of abuse against the defenders of free-market economics. More slyly, they used the term to suggest that the opening debate of the modern era was between antigovernment ideologues who lacked a sense of humanity, on the one hand, and warm-hearted pragmatists keen to use science to alleviate human misery, on the other. And granted, “Social Darwinists” like Sumner were exactly the kind of opponents the Progressives would choose for themselves if they could—and so they did, over and over again, in their own accounts of their history. Shoved out of the picture was the mainstream of the American political tradition, which for a century already had debated the size and purpose of government and the provision of social welfare in terms of natural rights and republican self-rule, rather than in terms of competing Darwinian imperatives.

The truth is that there were always many varieties of Social Darwinism, depending on the unit—individual, class, race, nation—thought to be waging the struggle for existence, and depending on whether human progress was thought continuous or discontinuous with natural selection. For instance, laissez-faire advocates envisioned the individual competing against everyone and everything, Marxists and a few Progressives looked to classes as the relevant antagonists, but most Progressives embraced either race or nation as the key (TR and Wilson embraced both). The two best-known American sociologists split over whether human evolution remained subordinate to natural forces—Sumner regarding Malthusian scarcity, the “land-man ratio,” and human passions as inescapable constraints; and Lester Frank Ward holding that once man had discovered the principle of evolution, he could master it and henceforth control his own destiny free of natural determination. Almost any dispute between “Social Darwinists” and Progressives, therefore, was actually a dispute among different types of Social Darwinists.48

Out of this school of thought, broadly considered, came two signal contributions to Progressivism. First, Social Darwinism eased, by denying or simplifying, the end-of-history problem. The Absolute moment now could be translated as Darwin’s discovery of “the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favored races in the struggle for life,” to use the full title of his blockbuster. Once the principle of evolution had been understood, much of previous science, religion, and philosophy crumbled into dust. The nature of nature could now be seen clearly; the age of Absolute Knowledge had begun. Even though Darwin’s breakthrough came on behalf of “the principle of transition,” as Dewey called it, that principle was itself not subject to transition. Like the Hegelians, the Darwinians exempted themselves from their critique of all previous knowledge. However much all knowledge or all scientific knowledge was now understood to be provisional, changeable, experimental, pragmatic, even socially constructed, this understanding of science was itself absolutely true, and final. No evolution past the principle of evolution was possible. Despite the insistence on a Darwinian Absolute moment, Social Darwinism attempted by and large to dispense with the end of history: “the struggle for life” was never ending, and its point was the straightforward one, for the organism to survive, or to survive long enough to breed. History did not need a rational peak or point of fulfillment beyond that.

Or did it? As biology and history became one, the truth of progress took on a new solidity and, indeed, loftiness. Not human experience alone, but the whole book of nature testified to the inevitability of progress. Herbert Spencer—the British sociological guru who actually invented the phrase “survival of the fittest” (Darwin regretted not incorporating it into Origin of Species, and added it in subsequent editions)—proposed a kind of unified field theory that made the principle of evolution the key to all nature and thus to all science. He set out in his ten-volume Synthetic Philosophy to integrate biology, geology, and even cosmology with ethics, psychology, sociology, economics, and history. The grand synthesizing principle was the law of progress that he adapted from a German biologist’s description of the development of an egg: “Evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, through continuous differentiations and integrations.” In other words, man and the universe both developed in stages from simple to more complex; that was the law of both nature and history. A British mathematician soon hatched his own devastating parody of Spencer’s principle: “Evolution is a change from a nohowish, untalkaboutable, all-alikeness, to a somehowish and in-general-talk-aboutable not-all-alikeness, by continuous somethingelseifications and sticktogetherations.”49

Nonetheless, Spencer’s ideas exerted a huge influence on Carnegie, Sumner, and Wilson, among others. Even Ward, who broke with Spencer and Sumner over the “psychic factor” in evolution, shared Spencer’s confidence that man was no exception to nature’s ever upward movement. In Dynamic Sociology (his reply to Spencer’s Social Statics) and in his own know-it-all six-volume Glimpses of the Cosmos (originally planned to fill a dozen volumes), Ward bent Social Darwinism in a “reform” direction, arguing that with man’s evolution into a rational animal, human reason had become an evolutionary force unto itself, capable of accelerating and perfecting human nature and society rather than depending on the wasteful ways of nature. Man was capable of rational planning or “telesis,” as Ward called it, and planned evolution or “artificial selection” would be incomparably more efficient and humane than natural selection, even as animal eugenics was much more successful than nature’s own lax breeding habits.50

Though Darwinism shared Hegel’s confidence in the unplanned emergence of order, most of its variants cut against his insistence that human consciousness was fundamentally different from, and higher than, animal consciousness. His account of history as the development of freedom, including freedom from natural determination, didn’t comport with the usual mechanisms of natural selection; and his view of the end of history as the ethical and intellectual peak differed in kind from Darwinism’s grim account of survival as the natural measure of all things. Yet Ward’s emphasis on the radical emancipation of mind from nature, and Spencer’s elevation of nature’s purpose from mere survival to a certain kind of complex flourishing, helped smooth the way for the strange confluence of freedom and determinism, of German idealism and evolutionary science, that marked Progressive thought. Despite ample contradictions and blind spots, this thought would become the seedbed of modern liberalism.

The Living Constitution

Woodrow Wilson wasted no time in putting these doctrines to work. As Princeton’s president, invited to lecture at Columbia University in 1907, and as a candidate for the U.S. presidency five years later, he expounded a new theory of politics to diverse audiences in similar language. The only difference was that when speaking as an academic, he silently attributed the account to himself; when speaking to the people, he attributed it, or at least its organizing thought, to someone else, “a very interesting Scotsman” who visited him one day at Princeton. As a politician, it’s usually better not to seem original, especially if you are introducing new modes and orders to an established country, aspiring in effect to become its refounder.51 In any event, Wilson attributed not to Hegel but to the unnamed Scotsman, an expert on seventeenth-century philosophy, “the fact that in every generation all sorts of speculation and thinking tend to fall under the formula of the dominant thought of the age.” For the American Founders, the Zeitgeist had formed under the influence of “the Newtonian Theory of the universe”; nowadays, “since the Darwinian Theory has reigned among us,” everyone is likely to express everything “in terms of development and accommodation to environment.” “In our own day,” he told students at Columbia, “whenever we discuss the structure or development of anything, whether in nature or society, we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin. . . .” The Founders’ understanding, “a sort of unconscious copy of the Newtonian theory,” was the best available at the time, but remained “sort of unconcious” precisely because it was the product of its times, which weren’t end-times. The Founders couldn’t appreciate “that government is not a machine, but a living thing,” and so couldn’t grasp the proper limits of Newtonianism, which was true partially, that is, for physical and mechanical systems alone. Philosophical captives of their age, the Founders understood all nature to be a realm of regular, predictable motion according to fixed laws. Nature meant matter in motion, obeying the law of gravity; in the case of human matter, obeying also the law of self-interest. With their eighteenth-century blinders, they couldn’t see that matter was ultimately obedient to Spirit, and to Spirit’s motion or evolution in history. The Constitution’s Framers were “scientists in their way,” but merely “the best way of their age.” By the early twentieth century, however, men could know, and know that they knew, with certitude. Darwinism, including its view of government as a kind of organism, Wilson declared, “is not theory, but fact.”52

True to their theory, the Founders “constructed a government as they would have constructed an orrery,” one of those miniature solar systems that move when you crank them, every planet revolving in fixed relation to every other and to the sun. “The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation,” Wilson said, pointing to its “mechanically automatic balances” that held every department rigidly in place, even as the solar system is kept orderly by reciprocal gravitational forces. Congress checked the president, the president checked the Congress, the judiciary checked both of the elected branches, the state governments balanced the national government, and so forth. With separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, not to mention Montesquieu’s discourses and The Federalist to explain it all, American politics turned into a Darwinian nightmare. This celestial or mechanistic theory produced a government that tended to go in circles (ellipses, for you sticklers) instead of forward. It wasn’t progressive. It didn’t evolve. And that, according to Wilson, was exactly what its authors had wanted.53

Fortunately, they didn’t know what they really wanted, or needed. Being “practical men,” they were bad theorists; they “made no clear analysis of the matter in their own thoughts.” Montesquieu, whom Wilson regarded as the Founders’ chief philosophical guide, had written a very long and complicated book, which they followed as faithfully as they could; but they had a government to found. “Though they were Whig theorists,” the Framers “were also practical statesmen with an experienced eye for affairs and a quick practical sagacity”; their unconscious Newtonianism left room for a Darwinian cunning, or perhaps a Hegelian insight into the future. They bequeathed America “a thoroughly workable model,” which has had “a vital and normal organic growth,” due not to the model itself but to its gaps and omissions, its incompleteness, and especially to its openness to have “the influences and personalities of the men who have conducted it and made it a living reality.” In short, the genius of the Framers had been to make a government of men, not of laws, a government open to change despite itself. Their theory had been “inorganic,” their practice “organic,” as Wilson summarized matters. If the Constitution’s theory or principles had been followed, or followed more strictly, the country “would have had no history.” That is, it would have died or, at best, deteriorated into a changeless, steady-state society like those in the distant past.54

But the problems facing the country had multiplied and intensified in the new age dominated by the special interests, mass immigration, and mass production. The workarounds that had sufficed in the previous century were increasingly inadequate to the twentieth. Whereas the conflict between the Founders’ and the Progressives’ political science didn’t need to be and couldn’t be articulated previously, it had to be insisted on now. It had to be confronted on the level of theory, even though Wilson and the Progressives sometimes pleaded that they had no “theory,” strictly speaking; they had history, and thus facts or actualized concepts, on their side.

This ambiguity was part of Wilson’s rhetorical strategy. He could in one breath call for revolution based on a new theory for a new age, and in the next recoil in horror at the very mention of theory, much less revolution. “Why are we in the presence, why are we at the threshold, of a revolution?” he asked on the campaign trail in 1912. “The transition we are witnessing,” he cautioned, “is no equable transition of growth and normal alteration; no silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into another, its natural heir and successor.” On the contrary, society was radically questioning its foundations and stood “ready to attempt nothing less than a radical reconstruction,” which could be held back from becoming a revolution only by “honest counsels” and “generous cooperation.” Probably no age “was ever more conscious of its task or more unanimously desirous of radical and extended changes.” Yet far from auguring a “bloody revolution,” these desires for radical change could usher in a “silent revolution” in which America recovers “in practice those ideals which she has always professed.”

He could, and did, go on like this for pages. Advocating revolution, counseling cooperation lest the revolution turn violent, then denying that the coming political change will be radical or revolutionary at all, except perhaps in the sense of the last act of the American Revolution, in which the Framers “put aside” the Articles of Confederation in favor of the Constitution (in effect, a real change of regime, though not advertised as such)—he made sure to raise expectations of radical reform while covering himself against any hint of promoting radicalism. Up hill and down hill his prose scampered, promising a radical break with the past that would be anything but a radical break with the past.55

So after he warned us, for instance, that this will be “no equable transition of growth and normal alteration,” no “silent, unconscious unfolding of one age into another,” we find him affirming a page later that this will indeed be “a silent revolution,” and fifteen pages later that “you cannot tear up ancient rootages” or “make a tabula rasa upon which to write a political program. . . . You must knit the new into the old.” In a much-quoted statement, he went on to say, “If I did not believe that to be progressive was to preserve the essentials of our institutions, I for one could not be a progressive.” It depended, of course, on what one considered essential. His carefully calculated alternations have bewildered more than one historian. On some days Wilson appeared a southern Democrat, friend of laissez-faire, and unfeigned admirer of Edmund Burke; on others a crusader for a new world order, critic of laissez-faire, and ambitious tribune of the “new freedom.” And while he played the conservative more noticeably before he went into politics, and championed “radical reconstruction” more forcefully after 1910, no period of his life was without some mixture of the “two Wilsons.” Both his defenders and his critics, however, tend to overlook the persistent unity of his point of view. To his mind, Burkeanism and Progressivism seemed not in the least incompatible. “There is nothing so conservative of life as growth,” he said at Princeton’s sesquicentennial. “Progress is life, for the body politic as for the body natural. To stand still is to court death. Here then . . . you have the law of conservatism disclosed: it is a law of progress.”56

Like Burke, though for different reasons, Wilson was suspicious of abstract principles—particularly natural rights—in politics, and was an opponent of the radicalism of the French Revolution. There is much in him that modern-day conservatives of a traditionalist stripe might like, though they’d regret it soon enough. He criticized Thomas Jefferson’s “speculative philosophy,” for instance, in terms that Russell Kirk could have approved, as “exotic” and “very aerated.” Jefferson’s theory “was un-American in being abstract, sentimental, rationalistic, rather than practical . . . ,” Wilson charged. He remained a Progressive of a decidedly historicist and idealist type, not at all interested in understanding the past as it understood itself, much less recommending its revival. His appeal to Burke was rendered more plausible by the prevailing fashion of interpretation, which in the course of the nineteenth century had moved in utilitarian and evolutionist directions, well represented by Walter Bagehot and the so-called English Historical School. Again, one should pay careful attention to the thoroughly political context of Wilson’s rhetorical appeals, and to his usual masterly control over language. He could sound Jeffersonian or libertarian, too, when he wanted. Much ink was spilled then and since over his statement to the New York Press Club in 1912 that “the history of liberty is the history of the limitation of governmental power.” TR lambasted him for it. But Wilson never said that the future of liberty consisted in the limitation of governmental power. The future, he said repeatedly, would demand greatly expanded State powers, though not equally enlarged on every front.57

Power limited by all the familiar devices of American constitutionalism, from separation of powers to federalism, was a prescription for disaster, he maintained. Government “is not a machine but a living thing. . . . It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” The competition of life demanded cooperation within each organism, so that it might constantly adapt to new external challenges. “No living thing can have its organs offset against each other as checks, and live,” he concluded, very much in line with Hegel. Checks and balances make for a “fatal” warfare among the branches, rather than their “intimate, almost instinctive cooperation,” which is essential to health. “Living political constitutions,” therefore, “must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.” This “is not theory, but fact,” he emphasized, “and displays its force as fact, whatever theories may be thrown across its track.”58

Though he may have borrowed the phrase from Bagehot, Wilson for all intents and purposes is the inventor of the theory of the “living constitution.” It marks one of his two decisive contributions to the shaping of modern liberalism. Since the 1980s, the term has come up mostly in the discussion of judicial rulings and confirmation fights for liberal nominees to the federal courts. But Wilson applied it not merely to the judiciary but to the whole political system, and to the executive more than the other branches. He was the first president to criticize the Constitution, to call it time-bound and incapable of meeting modern problems due to the very spirit and institutions of government that had once been its proudest boast. A living constitution had to be able to evolve, to change quickly its structure and function, to expand its powers to confront society’s novel problems. Our eighteenth-century government had been designed, so Wilson charged, with the opposite end in mind. It sought to keep the Constitution as changeless as possible, and the times in tune with it; it managed the first, but not the second. As a result our evolving or, indeed, galloping social and economic problems had far outpaced any political solutions. What we needed, instead, was to keep the Constitution in tune with the times, or slightly ahead of them if possible, and for that either the old forms of government had to be drastically amended, or the forms retained but an entirely new spirit breathed into them. As a young man, he proposed the former course, going so far as to suggest constitutional amendments to scrap the Constitution’s separation of powers in favor of a British-style parliamentary system. That proved impracticable, and he soon adopted the second strategy of new wine in old bottles. Plan B assigned to the president the crucial role of infusing the spirit of the living constitution into the old body of our laws and institutions. New kinds of presidential rhetoric and legislative agendas, new forms of expertise, regulation, and bureaucracy, and new Supreme Court justices and jurisprudence would be called for, all coordinated by the executive.59

Broadly speaking, this was the agenda of American liberalism over the next century, right up to the present day. Important new items would be added in the second and third waves of the liberal advance, but the fundamental alterations in the American political system were rooted in the turn from a “limited Constitution” (Hamilton’s phrase) to a living one. Although Wilson presented it as an implication or application of Darwinism, substantively it owed even more to the theory of the State developed in nineteenth-century Germany. Hegel was the fountainhead of this State theory, but it had undergone several mutations by the time American universities began to flog students into studying it, and it would undergo more.

Before new wine could be put into the old bottles, the latter had to be emptied out. The living constitution implied a sweeping rejection of traditional American political principles, a point Wilson rarely could afford to make unambiguously, as we’ve seen. But if we briefly survey his own account in The State—his political science primer published in 1889, when he was a junior faculty member at Wesleyan—the departures from American orthodoxy will become clear. The State was part of the pioneering wave of American social science textbooks, designed to assist students who lacked German and Germanic attention spans.

First of all, the modern reader will be shocked to encounter the initial question raised in the book. What races shall we study? This question arose because Wilson relegated forms of government, once the heart of politics, to second or third place. The old political science had understood forms of government to embody partisan views of justice—who should rule, and for what ends. The choice among competing regimes had been the essence of politics, and of political science, an analysis still very much alive in the Declaration of Independence. But Wilson’s assumption, following Hegel, was that there is never really much choice among regime types. Forms of government vary with the culture or folk mind, which varies with history, and thus political science is the story of the evolution from oriental despotism, to aristocracy, to democracy (Wilson thought that history had already left Hegel’s constitutional monarchy behind). Rather than ever-present alternatives—even if some were less likely than others, depending on political conditions—the regimes were way stations in a one-way journey of political change. They “do not affect the essence of government” but “exhibit the stages of political development,” to quote Wilson. As Fukuyama puts it today, liberal democracy is “the final form of human government,” and except in very backward places in very marginal parts of the world there is no question of choosing any other form, certainly not in the long run. If you wish to encounter future princesses and lords, like Princess Leia and Lord Vader, you have to turn to science fiction.

But why focus on the races? Every world-historical culture was the possession of a people, a nation with its own peculiar religion, language, and ethnic or racial composition. History didn’t choose the Greeks, the Romans, or the Germanic peoples randomly, after all, nor ignore the Africans capriciously. Each Volk was uniquely fitted by temperament, breeding, and even geography for the role it had to play. Here Social Darwinism entered into and modified the picture, by accentuating the racial or biological element that Hegel, though not all those inspired by him, had played down. (Not that he’d ignored it completely: African Negroes, he wrote, exhibit a lack of self-control and weak or nonexistent moral sentiments, while Germans display a becoming inwardness and “heart.”) As a Progressive concept, race invited the promiscuous mixture of biological and cultural explanations precisely because it was tied to the idea of national evolution. The resulting notion of the State was “organic,” all right, but in a new and illiberal way: the State was “the creation and expression of the racial community of the nation.”60

Each “race” got the form of government it deserved, therefore, when it deserved it. And here is another unpleasant surprise for the modern reader. Wilson admitted that to be thorough, “every primitive tribe, whether Hottentot or Iroquois, Finn or Turk,” ought to be studied. Practically, though, it was enough to know “the political history of the Greeks, the Latins, the Teutons, and the Celts principally, if not only, and the original political habits and ideas of the Aryan and Semitic races alone.” A paragraph later he admitted that the Aryan race, by itself, would be his focus. “The existing governments of Europe and America furnish the dominating types of today,” he explained. “To know other systems that are defeated or dead would aid only indirectly towards an understanding of those which are alive and triumphant, as the survived fittest.” Political progress and the survival of the fittest precisely reinforced and confirmed each other. Did the “fittest” refer then to prowess in war or refinement in ethics, to Macht or Recht? The answer was that the two went together: Wilson presumed, without benefit of argument, that the societies that won their wars and survived their disasters, that were “alive and triumphant,” were morally better than those “defeated or dead.” But if the Nazis, ardent devotees of the Aryan if not the Semitic races, had triumphed in their war, or at least evaded total defeat, would that have proved them morally right? Of course not, and Wilson would have been among the first to agree that the fight was not over, or that this was no ethical advance because the “essentials” of the past had not been preserved. But these kinds of objections would suggest merely that his character was better than his principles. They would not extricate him from the problem that the Nazi constitution had passed the fundamental Darwinian test of survival, which he upheld as the historical, the “factual” standard of fitness. The bankruptcy of Progressive morality was never more than one lost war away.

Wilson had to face a preliminary version of the question after the outbreak of World War I. He had always tempered his Teutonic intellectual enthusiasms with a passionate love of British culture and parliamentary democracy, and had no trouble condemning, privately at first, the Kaiser’s policy and form of government. TR was more open with his condemnation, despite the fact that he, and Wilson to a lesser extent, had spent decades extolling the achievements of the Teutonic, Aryan, and Anglo-Saxon races. After the bloody family feud broke out between the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons, however, the Progressives, with a few exceptions, spoke far less amicably of their German ancestors. Besides, who exactly belonged to these races was always a question, especially in America with its increasing ethnic and racial heterogeneity. Hegel had written carefully of the Germanic, not merely the German, nations. But even at their most latitudinarian, the ranks of the Aryans, Teutons, and Anglo-Saxons in America did not include blacks, Irish, Chinese, and the “rabble,” as John Burgess called them, of the Slavs, Czechs, Hungarians, and southern Italians. Invested heavily in the racial basis of politics, some Progressives undoubtedly sympathized with H. B. Adams’s friend, the English historian Edward Augustus Freeman, who speculated that America’s social problems might be solved if only “ ‘every Irishman [were to] kill a Negro and be hanged for it.’ ”61 But the nature of American democracy did not permit Teutonic fantasies to keep politicians away from millions of immigrant voters for very long in any case, and the rabble who were initially fodder for the urban machines soon became fodder for Progressive uplift. This had stern and less stern modes, the former well represented by Roosevelt (no hyphenated Americans!) and the latter by, say, the social critic Horace Kallen (“cultural pluralism”). In many cases, however, the Progressives complicated the problem by imagining they were asking immigrants to subordinate their race to, or blend it with, the superior Anglo-Saxon one, rather than to exchange their previous political beliefs and habits for republican ones—as Jefferson and Adams, despite their disagreements, would have formulated the problem. The Founders viewed immigration as a question of citizenship, the Progressives as mainly a question of racial consciousness.62

For Wilson, the world dominance of the Aryan nations traced back over millennia to their ancient patriarchal family structure. Such families, “in which descent is traced to a common male ancestor, through a direct male line, and in which the authority of rule vests in the eldest living male,” were either native to the Aryans or at least adopted early in the race’s development. Non-Aryan families, by contrast, had a messy history of polygamy, polyandry, and promiscuity. Such disorder produced nothing but savage and stationary societies. Patriarchalism lifted the Aryans toward legitimate kingship as an early organizing principle, and gave them a leg up in the struggle for existence. Wilson’s strange defense of patriarchalism as a political principle, albeit a primitive one, recalled its even more robust defense by Sir Robert Filmer, the seventeenth-century advocate of absolute monarchy best known as John Locke’s whipping boy in the Two Treatises of Government. As a clue to just how hostile Wilson’s political understanding was to the natural rights principles of the Constitution, this issue is extremely revealing. Filmer based the case for absolute monarchy on God’s original grant of political power to Adam, which allegedly had descended ever since to the eldest males of the main extended families of mankind, conveniently organized into nations that ought to be headed by divine-right monarchs, who were conveniently in every case the heads of the existing royal families. It was one of the most absurd arguments in the history of political philosophy. Locke spent hundreds of pages refuting it, drawing a bright-line distinction between what he called “paternal power” and “political power.” The one, the power of fathers over their families, had nothing to do with the other, the power that equal human beings entrusted to political officeholders to protect life, liberty, and property. The second kind of power was qualified, limited, voluntary, and revocable. The first kind applied within families—private societies held together by love rather than formal laws, and ruled by the presumed wisdom of the parents rather than by consent. The parents, note, not the father alone. Locke took great delight in reminding his readers that God had commanded “honor thy father and thy mother” equally, not honor thy father as the family godhead.

Family and political authority were thus two different things, just as civil society and civil government were distinct (though overlapping) realms. Wilson affirmed the opposite, not only as a matter of historical record but as a matter of lingering justice. All government originated in kinship, he emphasized. “The original State was a Family. Historically the State of today may be regarded as in an important sense only an enlarged Family: ‘State’ is ‘Family’ writ large.”63 His purpose was not to bring back absolute monarchy, of course, but to clear the way for the comprehensive and compassionate authority of the modern State. Liberals ever since have cavalierly asserted that America is one big family, and that we are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. President Obama is very fond of the brother’s keeper appeal, using it countless times in his speeches.64 We need not fear government’s increasing power to be our keeper, according to liberals, because it operates as merely the most efficient instrument of our brotherly and sisterly duty to care for one another. Obama doesn’t notice that God himself was pressing a narrow inquiry—in a missing persons turned murder case—when Cain replied with that famous rhetorical question, Am I my brother’s keeper? God did not expect Cain to regulate Abel’s shepherding or improve his diet, but to respect his brother’s life and liberty. To that extent, at least, God was on the side of limited government. In a modern society numbering millions of inhabitants, the unwritten law of love will provide a watery bond, indeed, and government’s efforts to enforce it will have to be out of all proportion to the intensity of “family” feeling. Hence the oleaginous compassion that has to be invoked and insisted on whenever government and family are confused. And why do liberals who regard the State as one big family never wonder how a family of all brothers and sisters is possible? Where are the parents in this metaphor? Who wields the adult discretion guaranteeing that the fearful authority of a national family—wielded by our big brothers and sisters who work for the State—will be used for the children’s benefit? Like Obama, Wilson had no difficulty in seeing himself as the responsible grown-up in the room, and government as the wise father or at least the ever-present nanny, despite his insistence that “free men need no guardians.”

Nor is the family relationship consensual. Children do not get to elect their parents, or to throw them out of office. Wilson’s larger point was that government, based in kinship, was also originally an involuntary association. The Declaration had argued that all men are created equal, that as adults they are naturally free of each other’s authority, and that they therefore had the right to choose their society and government with a view to their own safety and happiness. The Declaration’s authors were far from believing that all or even many governments had ever begun under such happy auspices, of course. They were well aware that most regimes spring from “accident and force,” in the words of The Federalist, not from “reflection and choice.” But then they didn’t think that history provided the standards for morality. The Progressive assumption, we have seen, is quite otherwise. “The facts of government mirror the principles of government in operation,” as The State expressed it. “What government does must arise from what government is; and what government is must determine what government ought to do.” Wilson had little patience, accordingly, for “the defects of the social compact theory” and set out to replace it almost entirely. That theory was simply unhistorical. In primitive society, “the individual counted for nothing; society—the family, the tribe—counted for everything. Government came, so to say, before the individual.” Any rights that individuals possessed came from their membership in the group, in society. There were no “individuals” by nature, hence no individual or natural rights, and hence neither social compact nor inherent limits on government. You could no more choose your government than you could your family, for the two were the same. To support his case against the free society Wilson turned to Aristotle, citing his dictum that “man is by nature a political animal,” or rather revising it to say man is “a social animal.” For though Aristotle’s Politics had no precise equivalent of the “state of nature” in which unaffiliated human beings encounter each other as free and equal, he had sharply distinguished between the family and the city or political association, precisely on the ground (among others) of the freedom—supported by nature not society, and guided in the best case by reflection and choice—that men have to found new cities and reorder or revolutionize old ones. Wilson had to reinterpret Aristotle and the ancients to bring them in line with his historicist account of the growth of the State.

The Progressives’ purported return to Aristotle was therefore vitiated from the start. It was impossible to return to Aristotle in the spirit of Darwin or via the premises of Hegel and the historical school. The attempt resulted only in the radicalization of the definition of “progress” as it moved farther and farther away from “the laws of nature and nature’s God” as standards of political right. Man could not be by nature a political animal if his nature was itself a reflection of his society and its stage of historical development. That’s why Richard Ely’s translation or gloss of Aristotle was so telling: man is by nature not a political or even a social being, exactly, but a “State being.” Wilson well understood that the nature of primitive government, the individual’s complete submergence in society, was not the final word. Still, it was preserved as a “moment” in the fully developed democratic State of modern times. Through a historical sequence already explicated by Hegel and his disciples, the State had gradually come to cultivate, and at the same time to incorporate, the individual as such. “Men were no longer State fractions,” Wilson wrote of the epic turn; “they had become State integers.” What had begun as an unconscious project finally became a conscious one. The State, which had casually given birth to the individual, now dedicated itself to him. Compared to the ancient State, the modern one is “largely de-socialized,” meaning it no longer absorbs the individual but “only serves him” by furthering his growth and self-realization. The State now existed for the individual, not the individual for the State. Yet these “State integers” still had no existence, and no proper rights or liberties, outside of the fostering State.65

What Wilson taught us to call a living constitution depended on this living State. The term, the State, was confusing then and remains so today. Its English language meaning, especially in the American context, suggested a part of some larger whole—a political subdivision of the Union, for example; or as a synonym for national government, the state as distinguished from society. Its German sense, though, was something else again. Der Staat, as Hegel had taught generations to conceive it, was the whole not the part, a synonym for the country or for the whole people politically formed. The State was the self-expression of the nation or Volk, “the organic body of society,” as Wilson put it, without which the nation itself “would be hardly more than a mere abstraction.” Not the result of a contract or compact, the State grew out of shared religious, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic identity, and necessarily expressed that identity. State and society were united, then, and the idea of the State as a necessary evil or as a potential threat to society was, from this point of view, absurd. They were the same organism, the same living people. It was only in and through the State that individual liberty and the moral life were possible. That, and the rational and ethical peak attained finally in the modern State, were what Hegel tried to convey when he pronounced the State “the image of God on earth.” The German and English senses of the term were thus quite opposed to each other, and limited government made as little sense to the first as it made great good sense to the second. The confusion came from trying to make German political science (revealingly called Staatswissenschaft, the “science of the State”) speak American English—or English speakers handle German political ideas. In any case, Wilson gave his heart to Hegel but his tongue to the American voter, whom he reassured that the modern State did not rule but “only serves.”66

Wilson emphasized that with the historical emergence of the individual, the ancient idea of statecraft as soulcraft had been discarded. It’s not the task of the democratic State to “prescribe the whole life of its citizens,” to educate them to virtue. It must respect their freedom, their dignity as free and rational beings. But that implied not merely protecting their negative liberty to be secure in life, liberty, and property, but also their positive liberty. The latter involved not merely freedom from evils but freedom for the realization of all the goods, moral and intellectual, that were entailed by the State’s promise of complete human development at the end of history. (If there were serious moral or intellectual desires left unsatisfied, history could not have ended yet.) In Wilson’s words, “the individual must be assured the best means, the best and fullest opportunities, for complete self-development.” Government’s new purpose was partly to provide the conditions for that self-development, and partly to equalize the existing, unequal conditions that the capitalist economy provided to individuals and families. In other words, after sketching the huge distinction in principle that individual freedom made to the modern State, Wilson walked the argument back, stressing that it made only a very small difference in practice. For to fulfill its new mandate to provide or equalize the conditions for “complete self-development,” in the name of freedom, not virtue, the State had assumed a vast portfolio of activities, nearly as vast as it had ever been but now harnessed to an unprecedentedly ambitious, and amorphous, goal. Wilson’s State made Plato’s Republic look modest. Plato’s city had simply to educate every citizen’s soul to its natural perfection as a member of the farmer, artisan, or guardian class. The means to that end were successively more fantastic, involving the noble lie, communism of property, women, and children, and finally the lucky emergence of philosopher-kings. Whereas Plato’s scheme depended decisively on chance, Wilson’s depended on the inevitability of primitive forms of life being superseded by advanced ones, or freedom realizing itself in the modern State. The overwhelming improbability and impracticability of the Republic was calculated to teach a profound moderation concerning a serious person’s expectations of politics. Wilson’s expectations of politics could hardly have been more extravagant. And promising or guaranteeing “complete self-development” as the common, harmonious goal of the individual, society, and the State—as the goal of the living constitution—was extravagance squared.67

Wilson tried his best to deny or at least postpone the utopianism implicit in this proposal. He sketched the paradoxical position that liberalism would cling to for the rest of the century: a seemingly libertarian indifference to the ends or purposes of human development, combined with a firm, moralistic insistence on government intervention in the economy. He couldn’t specify what “complete self-development” would mean for every citizen or any citizen, or what the duty to protect and sponsor it would demand from government, except that no government regulation of “thought” or “conscience” or “private morals” would be permitted. Such interventions would violate freedom, and the whole point was to foster “the freest possible play of individual forces,” an “infinite individual variety” of personal ends, to “aid the individual to the fullest and best possible realization of his individuality.” He insisted, though, that “there must be constant adjustments of governmental assistance to the needs of a changing social and industrial organization.” Though it is no longer master of the individual, government must reduce “the antagonism between self-development and social development to a minimum” and guard freedom “against the competition that kills,” the unfair competition that creates “monopoly.” He used that term loosely to mean a concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few “selected by arbitrary fortune” rather than “by society itself.” To those ends, he wrote in his own italics, ministrant government “does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.” One could without unfairness to him call this position individualism regarding the ends and socialism regarding the means, because he raised the issue of socialism himself.

If the name had not been restricted to a single, narrow, extreme, and radically mistaken class of thinkers, we ought all to regard ourselves and to act as socialists, believers in the wholesomeness and beneficence of the body politic. . . . Every means, therefore, by which society may be perfected through the instrumentality of government, every means by which individual rights can be fitly adjusted and harmonized with public duties, by which individual self-development may be made at once to serve and to supplement social development, ought certainly to be diligently sought, and, when found, sedulously fostered by every friend of society. Such is the socialism to which every true lover of his kind ought to adhere with the full grip of every noble affection that is in him.

He accompanied this confession with his usual disclaimer, what he called “the rule of historical continuity.” “In politics nothing radically novel may safely be attempted. No result of value can ever be reached in politics except through slow and gradual development, the careful adaptations and nice modifications of growth.” He believed that; but he also believed that something might appear to almost everyone as “radically novel” until suddenly it didn’t, that is, until its success made clear it had been in preparation all along. So it was with socialism, in the sense in which he used the term. Socialism in the means gradually effects a socialism in the ends. Self-development must in the end “serve” and “supplement” social development.68

In The New Freedom he pictured the systematic renovation of an old house, the republic under the Constitution, in which for a generation or two we must continue to live until the day when “the scaffolding will be taken away, and there will be the family in a great building whose noble architecture will at last be disclosed, where men can live as a single community, cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive. . . .” The hive will not be new; in fact by then it will be exceedingly familiar, for we will have built it ourselves without ever quite realizing it: the living Constitution is the hive a-building. Only the kind of self-development that eventuates in a political community “cooperative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive” will be sustained in the end, in other words. It may be that this end will never quite be attained, if progress toward it remains asymptotic; but the beehive is the goal. The perfection of individuality must go hand-in-hand with the perfection of sociality, because by “complete” self-development Wilson means not so much going as far as an individual’s talents or desires will take him, but the sort of growth that rounds out all sides of the individual until his “public duties” and “individual rights” become one. This is the “new freedom,” the right of perfect adjustment to the completely fulfilling State.

Follow the Leader

But who gets to be queen bee? It’s easy to forget that as a practical proposal the living constitution does not imply allowing American government to adjust automatically to new social conditions or problems. That kind of unplanned, natural response to new challenges would suggest something like natural selection, and would recall something like the virtues of the marketplace understood as an evolutionary testing ground. The Darwinism latent in the idea of the living constitution, however, is quite different. It’s the Social Darwinism of artificial selection, of expert planning and experimentation. Someone must continually make decisions—launching studies, setting up new programs, expanding the Commerce Clause—to keep the living constitution alive, to adjust it to new circumstances. The term itself sounds almost green, like an environmental program the Republicans are always trying to kill. In reality, the living constitution is the liberals’ constitution, even though they rule it not in their own name but in the name of their favorite experts, whose supposed expertise justifies their supposed authority to prescribe this and not that cure for our problems. Lester Ward, with his penchant for neologism, called the new form of government that would result from society consciously controlling its own evolution “sociocracy,” the rule of society by society, but as usual he ignored the obvious point, which is that the effectual truth of the new regime would be the rule of society by sociologists.

Sociology bid fair to be the queen of the new social sciences. Influenced by the materialism and determinism of Social Darwinism, but also by sociology’s own imperial claim, descending from its founder Auguste Comte, to have replaced philosophy as the highest and final form of human wisdom, the Progressives thought socioeconomic evolution to be the pacesetter of modern problems. Without supervision, society and the economy had developed rapidly but unhealthily in the nineteenth century. By putting aside laissez-faire and inaugurating rule by sociologists, the problems of modern life could be tamed, which meant forever managed by science. The problem of the age, after all, was that politics had systematically lagged behind economic and social evolution. So shouldn’t the solution be to put the science of social evolution in charge?

Wilson went along with the diagnosis but not the prescription. He agreed that politics was part of the social organism, and that society had its own law of evolution. At times he sounded as though the only function left for politicians and political scientists was to play catch-up, to harmonize the political world with the social. He agreed that politics could not be (and never really had been) “architectonic” in Aristotle’s sense, free to shape cities and souls according to the Legislator’s or founder’s view of justice. Politics had always been harnessed to the Spirit of the Age, though it had discovered it only recently. Although he conceded that politics could not rule society, he resisted the conclusion that it should merely reflect it. He rebelled against the notion that a cool process of scientific management would handle all social problems, that there was nothing great left to be done by citizens and statesmen. Human freedom and idealism must still count and count greatly, he insisted. And so in opposition to the spirit of scientism and to the exhaustion of noble striving implicit, as we have seen, in the end of history, he struck out in another direction. Politics could not rule society, but neither was it condemned meekly to follow it. Politics could lead society into the future.

Wilson was the first to celebrate “leadership” as an essential part of American democracy. Alongside the living constitution, leadership was the second element he contributed to the political definition of America’s new liberalism. It’s had a booming career. No one can run for president now, or even city council, without boasting of his or her leadership credentials. Nor has the idea’s popularity been confined to politics. Modern business management is virtually unimaginable without every year’s bestsellers on how to be an effective leader, how to inspire employees to follow the company’s vision, and so forth. Nonetheless, some of those big-selling handbooks’ titles—invoking everyone from Genghis Khan to Winston Churchill—suggest how much the concept owes to politics.

Leadership as such is neither a new term nor a new idea; it’s been a highly visible part of political life. The ancient Greeks and Romans discussed the leader (hegemon and dux, respectively), and America’s Founders did, too. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary, the best one available to them, caught a certain contemporaneous ambivalence in the word: its first three meanings were straightforward (one who leads, or conducts; captain, commander; one who goes first) but the fourth (“one at the head of any party or faction”) introduced a slight note of disapproval. That note grew louder in Johnson’s addition to the definition, “as the detestable Wharton was the leader of the Whigs,” and in his usage example, from Jonathan Swift: “The understandings of a senate are enslaved by three or four leaders, set to get or to keep employments.” This distrust of factional or party leaders must have struck an American nerve. Unlike Johnson, the Americans were republicans with their own partisan prejudices against monarchical and aristocratic factions, but as far-seeing republicans they distrusted majority factions and popular leaders, too. Of the fourteen mentions of “leader” and “leaders” in The Federalist, for example, Madison and Hamilton use the terms pejoratively a dozen times, associating leaders with factions, vice, assaults on the law, and demagoguery in general. Jefferson and Adams shared this hatred of demagogues, and thus the suspicion of leaders. Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln in their famous debates managed to get through twenty-one hours of oratory without a single discussion of their leadership abilities. The republican prejudice against leaders ran deep in the American political tradition.69

The Federalist did speak favorably of leadership twice, hailing “the leaders of the Revolution” and the people’s “patriotic leaders” during the war. Those exceptions rather proved the informal rule. The revolution was a long war against the British Empire, and in war captaincy or the leadership of armies is necessary and proper, but as the examples of Caesar, Cromwell, and (soon) Napoleon showed, hardly without risk to republican freedom. Leadership as a phenomenon had a military cast, implying the use of force not reason, the imperative of issuing and following orders, not indulging debate, and thus inequality rather than equality of right and authority. A little bit of it went a long way in a free polity. George Washington was chief among the leaders of the revolution (Jefferson twice referred to him, in private letters, as “our great leader”), but for the rest of his life, as retired general and then president, he did everything he could to avoid being, or even being seen as, a party or factional leader. However much leadership may have been necessary to win wars and defend the Constitution against its enemies, before Wilson the concept seemed at odds with the rule of law, the priority of civilian to military habits and authority, and the equality of self-governing citizens that Americans associated with republicanism and democracy.

Most of these negative connotations have been forgotten. Leadership now seems a virtually unqualified good. It may be used for better or worse causes, to be sure, but in itself it suffers no disrepute or suspicion, despite the fact that one cannot be a leader without wishing to gain, and keep, followers. The mystery is why would a republic of self-governing citizens want to have leaders, which perforce would make them followers? It’s not beyond the human capacity for self-delusion to imagine that in lusting after a leader the people are participating in leadership, or even taking turns at it. But there is something peculiarly democratic about imagining that we could all simultaneously and equally be leaders. In any event, how did democracy come to understand itself as relying on a steady supply of such men?

Wilson avoided the traditional objections by redefining leadership’s purpose as something peaceful, rational, and beneficent: leading the people into the future. From a certain point of view, nothing could be more anodyne or self-evident. It was impossible to lead them anywhere else. By “the future,” however, Wilson meant something grand, imminent, and if not quite knowable then at least vaguely imaginable: a world much better than the present, even as the present was much better than the past. Democratic leadership of this sort depended, in turn, on the presumptive truth of the Progressive philosophy of history, together with the Progressive refusal to declare history over quite yet. Because of the requisite gap between the present and the end of history, progress was still possible. But for the same reason, absolute knowledge wasn’t yet in hand, though everyone was assured it was at hand. Political leadership rushed into the gap to help move society closer to its finale, but leaders couldn’t offer absolute or scientific certainty about history’s happy ending. They had to appeal to their followers not so much with arguments as with extrapolations or, since extrapolations didn’t always inspire enthusiasm, with imaginative appeals concerning future marvels. Poetry had to come to the rescue of historical science. A new kind of idealistic or progressive political rhetoric was needed.

Wilson supplied that rhetoric in his own political speeches, which furnished the template for those of liberalism’s other great presidential leaders, FDR, LBJ, and Obama, not to mention many lesser imitators. Wilson explained the model rhetoric in only one place, his speech-turned-essay “Leaders of Men.” There he recounted the two new concepts that, as part of “leadership,” would become the warp and woof of liberal political appeals ever since: vision and compassion. (He preferred to call the latter “sympathy,” but these are synonyms divided only by their language of origin, Latin and Greek respectively.) With these three words he altered the American political vocabulary in fundamental and, so far at least, lasting ways.

He began by distinguishing the leader from the “literary man,” for each is skilled at a form of “interpretation.” The latter is a “sensitive seer” whose imagination can bring to life a thousand believable characters with motives not his own; his “subtle power of sympathy” affords him a “Shakespearean insight” into the hearts of individual men and women. The leader of men prefers to think in the plural, actually, in the mass. His sympathy is with what “lies waiting to be stirred” in the minds of “groups and masses,” with a view to commanding them. He doesn’t look up but ahead; he’s guided not by the stars, by fixed reference points or principles of nature, but by the windings of the channel, by the great stream of time that has a flow and a direction that must be accommodated. Most leaders appear most of the time as compromisers, therefore, adjusting their measures to the prevailing circumstances, even as biological “growth is a process of compromise” between the organism and the environment. The leader must accommodate himself to the people he would lead, must interpret “the common thought” in order to determine “very circumspectly the preparation of the nation for the next move in the progress of politics.” Society is an organism, and cannot safely be rushed; “slow modification and nice all-around adjustment” is the usual law of progress. Particularly in a democratic age, this law implies “that no reform may succeed for which the major thought of the nation is not prepared. . . .” Although “the ear of the leader must ring with the voices of the people,” he’s not a mere echo chamber. He has room for “initiative” but not “novelty,” for “interpretation” but not “origination,” all for the sake of encouraging “the tendencies that make for development.”70

Yet progress doesn’t always wear “the harness of compromise.” “Once and again,” Wilson wrote, “one of those great influences which we call a Cause arises in the midst of a nation.” At that moment, history demands a more radical hope and change. Unharnessed, the leader is moved to stand for a “political or moral principle” that seems untimely, unpopular, almost unknown. The rallying cry of reform must then be presented as the leader’s vision of the future—a vision of the turn history is about to take, his prophecy of the country’s secular transformation. In this moment of radical freedom, of seeming liberation from the past, Progressive idealism swells to its full moral dimensions. The leader seems poised to remake the people after his own vision of them. Persuasion then functions as a kind of force. “There are men to be moved: how shall he move them?” Wilson asked. “He supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which that power operates. . . . It is the power which dictates, dominates; the materials yield. Men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader.”71

It cannot be said that Wilson was innocent of the more ominous dimensions of leadership. This statement could serve as an eerie premonition (he gave the lecture in 1889 and 1890) of the leadership doctrines that emerged in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s, the ruthless, tyrannical, even nihilistic creeds of the communists and fascists. The fascination with leaders was not confined to America. As universal suffrage became the norm in more and more Western countries and mass democracy created mass political parties that needed to be coordinated and led, and as the old elites increasingly disqualified themselves for the job, the cry for leaders went up. Lenin responded, elaborating in What Is To Be Done? and other writings the “vanguard theory” that became Marxist-Leninist gospel. The workers could not be trusted to make a workers’ revolution, he argued, because they were trapped in “trade union consciousness”—interested in better wages, shorter hours, more benefits, in everything except revolution. So the intellectuals and party bosses had to lead the revolution for them, acting as the proletariat’s vanguard. By definition, elections would be futile to legitimate this vanguard, because the proletariat lacked sufficient proletarian consciousness. But the party apparatus could concentrate and project that consciousness, and under the leadership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party could force the people to make a revolution in the name of their future selves. Mussolini studied Lenin and the Bolshevik example. He switched from international to national socialism, downplayed class in favor of the national party, and the Central Committee in favor of the singular leader (il Duce)—and Stalin learned from Mussolini’s example. Hitler streamlined the theory further, elevating race to the central fixation, and proclaiming ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer. Through the Nazi party, the racial consciousness of the whole nation would be drawn upward and concentrated in the person of the supreme leader. The Twenties and Thirties were terrible decades in which the dictators learned how to outdo each other in inhuman crimes and brazen tyranny, all in the name of leadership.

Fortunately for America, Wilson was a genuine democrat who kept his leadership theory firmly grounded in Progressive democracy. Although “men are as clay in the hands of the consummate leader,” he isn’t much of a potter, it turns out; he isn’t concerned to mold them into anything radically new. The leader of men wields a “power which dictates, dominates”; for him the question concerns “the application of force.” What he seeks, at least from one point of view, is merely to get the country moving again, moving toward the future, moving in line with its own innate, but temporarily stalled, law of historical development. A progressive people is not mere “materials,” but matter with a certain inherent law of evolution or motion, which leadership can tap into.72

Individuals, though, are conscious primarily of their own attempts to move forward, which are mainly, though not exclusively, self-interested. Since the “forces of public thought” tend to be blind to so much, it’s up to the leader to give them vision, in two senses: he has to improve their ability to see, to notice their fellows or the “community” moving alongside them; and he has to offer them a new object to be seen, a vision of the better future that is closer than they realize. To keep this vision democratic, Wilson insisted it had to remain intimately connected to the people. Sympathy or compassion, the leader’s second new virtue, fits that bill. Leadership involves “sympathetic insight,” or “a sympathy which is insight,” into the nation’s heart. As a part of the Volk, the leader must move with the common impulse and feel the common feeling. He must have “his rootage deep in the experiences and the consciousness of the ordinary mass of his fellow-men.” But “drawing his sap from such sources,” he can rise “above the level of the rest of mankind” and get “an outlook over their heads, seeing horizons which they are too submerged to see. . . .” Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” (first said, even more unctuously, by Jimmy Carter) was the perfect expression of fellow-feeling advertising itself as a token of leadership. Compassion of this sort helps to keep the Wilsonian leader in touch with the led, with the community whose evolution he wishes simply to lead, not to dictate or overrule; it excludes Leninism, therefore; and it ensures the timeliness of reforms by binding the leader to his generation and its felt necessities. “No man thinking thoughts born out of time can succeed in leading his generation,” Wilson wrote. Democratic leaders are merely “the more sensitive organs of society,” whose keen vision lets them see on the horizon “some principle of equity or morality already accepted well-nigh universally” but not yet visible to the people themselves. Here is a thematic statement, taken from a description of Lincoln:

A great nation is not led by a man who simply repeats the talk of the street-corners or the opinions of the newspapers. A nation is led by a man who hears more than those things; or who, rather, hearing those things, understands them better, unites them, puts them into a common meaning; speaks, not the rumors of the street, but a new principle for a new age; a man in whose ears the voices of the nation do not sound like accidental and discordant notes that come from the voice of a mob, but concurrent and concordant like the united voices of a chorus, whose many meanings, spoken by melodious tongues, unite in his understanding in a single meaning and reveal to him a single vision, so that he can speak what no man else knows, the common meaning of the common voice. Such is the man who leads a great, free, democratic nation.73

Leaders of a Cause, therefore, only seem out of touch with their times. They struggle to formulate and make explicit what lies “inchoate and vague” in the general sense of the community. At first society may resent them, refusing to answer their “rude and sudden summons from sleep.” But once awakened, society will rise to the occasion and meet the “necessities of conduct” revealed to it. Accordingly, “no cause is born out of its time,” he declared, and every reform—from the Protestant Reformation to the abolition of slavery—is “the destruction of an anomaly, the wiping out of an anachronism.” This wasn’t the way things looked to Lincoln or Luther, of course. And Wilson admitted that the timeliness of reform and the inevitability of victory in each case were obvious to “the judgment of history” or later historians, but not to the contemporaries themselves.

Great reformers do not, indeed, observe times and circumstances. Theirs is not a service of opportunity. They have no thought for occasion, no capacity for compromise. But they are nonetheless produced by occasions. They are early vehicles of the Spirit of the Age. They are born of the very times that oppose them; their success is the acknowledgment of their legitimacy. . . . Is it not the judgment of history that [these reforms] were the products of a period, that there was laid upon their originators, not the gift of creation, but in a superior degree the gift of insight, the spirit of their age? It was theirs to hear the inarticulate voices that stir in the night-watches, apprising the lonely sentinel of what the day will bring forth.74

All statesmanship is a product of its age, but previous statesmen didn’t understand this. They couldn’t see the timeliness of their own reforms, the call of historical necessity that they answered. But “great reformers” all had an unconscious insight into the spirit of their age, a sense of what lay waiting to be developed, and a dominating passion to achieve something great. This led them to do history’s bidding, all the while thinking they were doing their own bidding. Lincoln didn’t realize he was destined to win, for example, or for that matter that winning would prove his legitimacy. But Wilson did—in his own case as well as in Lincoln’s.

Without saying so, Wilson based his description of great reformers on Hegel’s famous account in the Philosophy of History of “world-historical individuals.” These were the men of great ambition and passion who swung history’s gates, bringing one era to an end and commencing the next. Hegel’s favorite examples were Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon—great slaughterers of men and destroyers of republics all, but whose actions answered not to ordinary morality but to the higher morality of history. “Many a gentle flower,” remarked Hegel, had to be crushed by these monumental men and their destinies. They too acted on powerful instincts and insights into the needs of the age, and their motive was personal glory, not progress. Wilson’s versions were more decent, democratic, and even religious, but served the same purpose on a smaller stage. History used their prodigious passions and unconscious instincts to bring about a more rational and moral world. But now that “the cunning of reason,” as Hegel called it, had been exposed—now that great reformers knew they were tools of history, early vehicles of the Zeitgeist—what would democratic leadership amount to? What role could progressive leaders consciously play henceforth in American liberalism?

The succeeding princes of liberalism would provide the answer, but Wilson’s own example was important. In the first place, leadership began to redefine the standards of American statesmanship, recasting them in a much more democratic mold. The Federalist, George Washington, and Lincoln had emphasized that one of the most vital if occasional tasks of the president would be to defend the Constitution and sound laws and policies against the temporary delusions and passions of the people. The populist nature of Wilsonian leadership began almost immediately to marginalize that duty and indeed that whole conception of fidelity to constitutional forms and their foundation principles. Into their place stepped the leader’s sympathy with the people, his reliance on them as his indispensable connection to the Spirit of the Age. “I have often thought,” Wilson said while campaigning in 1912, “that the only strength of a public man consisted in the number of persons who agreed with him; and that the only strength that any man can boast of and be proud of is that great bodies of his fellow citizens trust him and are ready to follow him.” If anything, the second clause is more cringe-worthy than the first, a complete abdication of all standards of internal probity and external principle in public life. “For the business of every leader of government,” Wilson said elsewhere the same year, “is to hear what the nation is saying and to know what the nation is enduring. It is not his business to judge for the nation, but to judge through the nation as its spokesman and voice.” The descent from magnanimity to pusillanimity as the standard of high public officials was predicted in that formula. No longer would a statesman conceive of himself as offering the public his best judgment of their interests, and his service to their opinions so long as it was honorable to do so (that had been Burke’s standard). No longer, even, would leading the nation be thought to require from the leader a certain commanding or world-historical height, “a new place of outlook and of insight.” In the modern State as it developed to maturity, it would be enough for the leader to judge “through the people” and to act as their “spokesman and voice.” The statesman as ventriloquist—that was where the doctrine of leadership was headed. To be a leader, it eventually would suffice to be merely in the lead, a little out in front of the people, an early-adopter, the kind of visionary for whom it is vital to stay a few steps ahead of the people, the kind of visionary who has a very good pollster. The secret of leadership would be revealed to be good followership.75

Or perhaps these worries would prove superficial, because the leader would mollify the people with pleasant words but reserve a private sanctum for the vision that speaks to him personally. That could produce a danger of a more sinister, more acute kind: the leader with his own vision of what President Obama calls “absolute truth.” Vision is a term, and a phenomenon, with a long religious history, and Wilson surely had its biblical usage in mind. As God sent a vision to his prophets, so history sends a vision to the leader of men. But Wilson tried to keep the people in the divine loop, and the leader closely bound to them. But what kind of a leader is always in leading-strings? Doesn’t he ever want to stand on his own? Anticipating the problem, the authors of The Federalist condemned “visionary” politicians or schemes as disasters waiting to happen.76 To his credit, Wilson recognized the theoretical danger, as it were; but he didn’t fear it as a practical danger in an Aryan country with a centuries-old tradition of self-government. He assumed that both the people and their leaders had inherited the acquired characteristics of Anglo-Saxon self-rule. All of those vices of human nature that had doomed democratic governments and peoples in the past, and that the Framers had tried to guard against in the Constitution, had been overcome, Wilson concluded.

At the beginning of the great crisis of his time, Lincoln warned in 1854:

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man’s nature—opposition to it in his love of justice. These principles are in eternal antagonism; and when brought into collision so fiercely as slavery extension brings them, shocks, and throes, and convulsions must ceaselessly follow. Repeal the Missouri Compromise—repeal all compromises—repeal the Declaration of Independence—repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. [Emphasis added.]

Lincoln thought, in the words of his great interpreter Harry V. Jaffa, “that the principles of political freedom were grounded in nature and eternity, not in history.” Although Wilson lived to see the opening horrors of the twentieth century—the World War and the Bolshevik Revolution—he clung to his faith that the antagonisms in human nature were being overcome, that selfishness would eventually, inevitably yield to the love of justice. It was therefore safe to indulge a politics of vision, and alongside it a politics of the living constitution, that took their guidance from history, even though history was not over yet. Great reformers are “born of the very times that oppose them; their success is the acknowledgment of their legitimacy,” Wilson wrote. If you win, he taught in effect, you must be right; or at best, if you are right, you must eventually win. In practice, the moral lesson was the same: justice equals success, the right of the stronger. He didn’t shy away from that moral. “I would a great deal rather lose in a cause that I know someday will triumph,” he told the voters in 1912, “than triumph in a cause that I know someday will lose.”77 It was not even necessary to add that the cause which “someday will triumph” would be a just one. Here was the perfect fusion of secularized Christianity and Social Darwinism; and the perfect confusion of the triumph of justice with the triumph of the will. Deeply wrought in Progressivism, this confusion of morality with history and this blindness to human nature and natural right would haunt the subsequent waves of American liberalism.