Research

A few months ago, while writing at my usual Staunton coffee shop, I had the good fortune to encounter the board of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library and Museum.  As a result this happy accident, and the brief conversation that ensued, I realized that - in the company of these avid Wilsonians - I had come dangerously close to exhausting my knowledge of our 28^th President. 

It’s humbling, at my age – after a substantial career teaching US History - to realize that such a gap exists in one's knowledge.  I've always loved the Progressive Era, yet somehow, I had never paid sufficient attention to Wilson.

Looking back, I can attribute my relative ignorance to having studied the Progressive Era under a professor who – while an exceptional teacher – was also a prominent biographer of Wilson’s great rival, Teddy Roosevelt.  Still, the intervening forty years have been mine.  I've had ample opportunity to redress the imbalance in my undergraduate education.

My ignorance of Wilson’s life and presidency could be laid to no one but myself. 

Taking my encounter with the Wilson board as a sort of nudge, I did some quick research and quickly identified John Milton Cooper’s 2009 biography as a promising way to begin my atonement.  I downloaded the book to my Kindle. 

And I’m very glad I did.

Despite its length, Cooper’s biography proved a fine read.  It flew by like a well-written novel, leaving me with the indelible impression of a complex, brilliant statesman whose career ended in frustration and failure – but whose administration proved the nursery to a generation of young leaders.

It was Wilson who first brought to Washington such young talents as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Felix Frankfurter - to say nothing of the sage Louis Brandeis.  The New Deal would be largely populated by Wilson's bright young men.

Reading Cooper's book with such satisfaction induced me to dig deeper.  I dusted off long-neglected copies of James Chace’s 1912: Wilson, Roosevelt, Taft and Debs, The Election that Changed the Country and Noah Feldman's Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices,  a quadruple biography of FDR's four greatest judicial appointees.  Both of these excellent books have given me additional insights into the Wilson's legacy.

So it’s been off to the races for me.  I find myself in the midst of a self-directed, one-man graduate seminar on the Progressive Era - and the more I read, the more I realize how desperately other modern progressives need to do the same.

In grossly over-simplified terms, the early 20th-century Progressives were the forerunners of today's liberals - with this difference.  They were far more serious about understanding the causes of economic imbalances - not just the symptoms.

They also debated, in presidential campaigns, the failings of capitalism, and the possible remedies therefor.  Theirs was no simplistic shouting match over whether they should be more or less regulation.  They weighed the merits of regulation, public ownership, restoring competition by breaking up large combinations - even the miraculous possibilities of informing the public!

In short, they treated their fellow citizens as participants in a national dialogue - not rabid fans in an eternal two-team competition.

The Progressives moved beyond the agrarian Populists of the late 19^th century and the labor-oriented socialists and anarchists of their own times.  Progressive leaders were mostly educated professionals or genteel “old money” aristocrats.  Though they fought for the rights of farmers and laborers, they hoped to do so by modifying capitalism, rather than trying to abolish it.

But they were not shy about criticizing capitalism - or questioning its permanence. 

They simply preferred to see whether it could be fixed.

Thus, while they were disenchanted with the savagery of unrestrained corporate power, the Progressives did their intellectual homework.  They studied social and economic problems at a depth, and with a sophistication, that puts modern liberals to shame. 

This is why they deserve to be studied. 

To be sure, studying the past is no substitute for activism in the present.  But there's no point reinventing the wheel - and the Progressives have already done a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting for us. 

Moreover, perhaps because they lacked the “advantage” of today's social media, the Progressives avoided the modern tendency to expend their energies talking amongst themselves.  Theirs was a generation of activists – and therein lies their greatest lesson for their modern descendants.

In this space, I will continue to think and write about the need to organize a third party as an option to the existing duopoly.  But if I could do no more than to convince a fraction of my readers to take up the study of the men and women who fought our battle a century ago, I would be satisfied.

By a curious coincidence, I was thinking of the Progressives the other night, when I took a few hours off to re-watch the first part of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

For the first time, I was struck by the power of Jackson’s flashback to the great final battle of the Second Age, during which Isildur cuts the One Ring from the hand of Sauron – then fails to throw it into the fires of Mount Doom, ending the Dark Lord's malignant power for good.

Today's liberals and progressives are somewhat like Tolkien’s heroes of the Third Age.  Once more, we find ourselves embattled by the same dark forces which our ancestors failed to finish off in another time.

We can learn from their mistakes – but there is also much to be learned from their genius, their courage, and their example.

We must study the Progressives.  They have so much to teach us!