Progressive History 101 (Minus All that Uncomfortable Racism, Sexism, and Support for Eugenics)

[What Democracy Means To Liberals]

Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president, I wrote an
article criticizing many of his left-leaning supporters for
labeling themselves as progressives, arguing that “what the
current vogue for the term progressive fails to acknowledge is
that the original progressives embraced the worst abuses of
state power in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.”

In response, I received a number of angry emails stating that
today’s progressives had nothing to do with the sins of the
first progressives, and that to conflate the two was
intellectually dishonest and just plain mean. Perhaps some of my
correspondents will now direct their outrage to the left-wing
Center for American Progress, which just released a new
monograph entitled “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in
America.” This paper argues that today’s progressives are the
direct inheritors of an unbroken progressive tradition, one that
brought glorious benefits to all Americans by doing away with
the evils of limited government. Here’s a sample paragraph:

Progressives sought above all to give real meaning to the
promise of the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution—“We the people”
working together to build a more perfect union, promote the
general welfare, and expand prosperity to all citizens. Drawing
on the American nationalist tradition of Alexander Hamilton and
Abraham Lincoln, progressives posited that stronger government
action was necessary to advance the common good, regulate
business interests, promote national economic growth, protect
workers and families displaced by modern capitalism, and promote
true economic and social opportunity for all people.

As far as history lessons go, this is laughably biased and
incomplete. For starters, the original progressives most
certainly did not “promote true economic and social opportunity
for all people.” In the Jim Crow South, as historian David
Southern has documented, disfranchisement, segregation, race
baiting, and lynching all "went hand-in-hand with the most
advanced forms of southern progressivism." Economist John R.
Commons, a leading progressive academic and close adviser to
high-profile progressive politicians—including “Fighting” Bob
Lafollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson—authored a
1907 book entitled Races and Immigrants in America, where he
called African Americans “indolent and fickle” and endorsed
protectionist labor laws since "competition has no respect for
the superior races."

There’s also the matter of sexism. Exhibit A is future Supreme
Court Justice Louis Brandeis’ famous “Brandeis Brief,” submitted
to the Supreme Court in the case of Muller v. Oregon (1908). At
issue was a state law limiting the working hours of female
laundry employees. In his brief, Brandeis collected a parade of
statistics, arguments, and journalistic accounts, all “proving”
that women required special protection from the state. In fact,
Brandeis argued, since women were responsible for bearing future
generations, their bodies were in some sense collective
property. "The overwork of future mothers," he wrote, "directly
attacks the welfare of the nation." The Supreme Court agreed,
declaring that, "As healthy mothers are essential to vigorous
offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of
public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and
vigor of the race." Feminist legal scholars have long criticized
Brandeis for introducing that bit of sexist paternalism into the
law, though you wouldn’t learn anything about it by reading this
monograph.

Finally, “The Progressive Intellectual Tradition in America” is
totally silent about the progressives’ widespread support for
the theory and practice of eugenics. As Princeton University
economist Tim Leonard has chronicled, "eugenic thought deeply
influenced the Progressive Era transformation of the state's
relationship to the American economy." Despite the fact that
this monograph favorably cites progressive hero Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes for his famous dissent in the economic liberty
case Lochner v. New York (1905), the authors make no mention of
Holmes’ notorious majority decision in Buck v. Bell, where
Holmes and his colleagues (including Louis Brandeis) upheld the
forced sterilization of those who “sap the strength of the
State.”

In sum, the Center for American Progress has produced a fairy
tale version of history, one that highlights what the authors
see as the accomplishments of progressivism while totally
ignoring anything that might detract from their lopsided
narrative. Anyone interested in actually learning about the
origins and history of the progressive movement should look
elsewhere.

http://reason.com/blog/2010/04/19/progressive-history-101-minus