What Does John Roberts's Harvard History Thesis Tell Us About Him?

When Supreme Court nominee John Roberts wrote his senior history thesis at Harvard in 1976, he revisited the Edwardian Liberal revival of early twentieth-century British politics. His “Old and New Liberalism: The British Liberal Party’s Approach to the Social Problem, 1906-1914,” submitted "in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Honors," asks two central questions: First, did the Liberals “confront or neglect” issues concerning the working class—the so-called “social problem?” (p.163). Second, what were the implications of the Liberal approach to reform for the viability of the party on the brink of World War I? (The Liberal Party was one of two major political parties in Great Britain from 1832 to 1931. Its rather sudden collapse has sparked generations of debate, many attributing its downfall to an alleged refusal to abandon laissez-faire capitalism even as it embraced progressive reforms such as Home Rule for Ireland, old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.)

His thesis, 166 pages of terse prose and measured arguments, traces the rise and decline of the Liberal Party. His analysis is decidedly ambiguous. He concludes that on the eve of World War I the Liberal Party was “neither doomed nor saved. Its response to the rise of political labor had been neither complete neglect nor total confrontation of the social problem. Rather, the response involved the subtler interactions between the Party as a whole and its most dynamic leaders, who were at first compelled to reform and then directed the sources of their reformism to other ends.” (p.165)

Much of the thesis focuses on the Liberal response to a new factor in modern Britain: the growing political clout of the working class. “Could the party of Gladstone adapt to meet the political threat of labor?” Roberts asks. “Would the working classes find shelter under the Liberal umbrella, or would they gravitate to independent labor organizations?” (p. 8) He pursues this labor angle throughout the thesis in an attempt to shed new light on the “mystery” of the Liberal Party’s death. (p.9) His seven chapters begin with an examination of the issues competing for the attention of Liberals including social reform, then describes the nature of social reform in the Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman era in relation to later reforms pursued under Herbert Asquith. Lloyd George, a Liberal, and Winston Churchill, the erstwhile Tory turned Liberal, are described as champions of reform. Much of the thesis covers the effect of reform on multiple constituencies.

The thesis attempts to break new ground on several fronts. Roberts criticizes several previous interpretations of the Liberal Party's rise and decline, noting that the history of interpretation had often been warped by partisanship. Those sympathetic to the Liberal Party blamed the Party's decline on vague historical contingencies. Labour historians argued that the Liberal Party inevitably would be replaced by one focused on the working man. Roberts has little patience with such partisan approaches. He prefers, he says, the interpretations offered by historians who pursued a “more detached view than the partisans had.” (p. 10) Questioning both classical and revisionist accounts of the Liberal Party's downfall, he insists that attributing the Party's decline to "a rising proletariat" is an inadequate explanation. He adds that non-labor factors need to be taken into consideration, including the Party's support for Home Rule for Ireland. (p. 17) He explains how various reforms supported by the Liberal Party leadership alienated various constituencies.

Roberts accords particular weight to the role of two personalities in the Party’s success and eventual failure: “If the Liberals did not die before World War I, this was due in large extent to the doctoring of Lloyd George and Churchill. But when these physicians decided they had more important tasks than tending to the Liberal Party, the patient’s condition perceptibly declined.” (p. 22) Roberts deems it “very significant that the two ministers could swing the Party to reform, for this indicated that the Party, though not on the whole committed to reform, could become a vehicle of reform regardless of what its members thought.” (p. 163) Or, as Roberts writes in one of the few passages that sparkle, “Lloyd George and Churchill gave the commitment, and they took it away. They were the gods of Liberal reform.” (p. 161)

We showed long excerpts of Roberts's thesis to Boston College Professor of History James Cronin, also an affiliate of the Center for European Studies at Harvard where he co-chairs the British Study Group. “For a B.A. thesis," he told us, "this is an impressive piece of work—it is well-written and quite thoughtfully argued and it appears that Roberts has done a good deal of research and has read the most recent literature. Roberts does not appear to be in any serious way an ideologue in this piece of work. He's fairly cynical and hard-headed, but not overtly ideological. In fact, he accepts the fact that the ‘social question’ was real, not imaginary, and that it needed to be addressed by programs of the sort that today constitute in their combination the welfare state.” Significantly, Cronin remarked, in the thesis’s conclusion, “Roberts does not here bother to praise the Liberal Party for its previous embrace of laissez-faire, nor does he lament its drift away from it and towards a more interventionist conception of the role of the state. All in all, this would seem to indicate that Roberts is not someone who regrets the passing of the 19th-century liberal state and who might therefore be inclined to reject the legislative legacy of the New Deal.” Without having read the thesis in its entirety, and leaving room for changes in Roberts’s views in the intervening three decades, Cronin added, “[W]hat I've read provides little cause to regard Roberts as especially right-wing or ideological.”

While a student at Harvard Roberts won awards for two other pieces of work, as earlier reported on HNN : “Marxism and Bolshevism: Theory and Practice,” which won the William Scott Ferguson Award, and "The Utopian Conservative: A study of Continuity and Change in the Thought of Daniel Webster," which earned him the Bowdoin Prizes for Undergraduates. In this thirty-page examination of Daniel Webster’s career and philosophy, Roberts argues that despite the fact that Webster changed his political positions over time on various subjects, his “thought was essentially consistent, founded on the solid bed-rock of a world view which remained consistent despite the vicissitudes of politics.” (pp.1-2) The essay is perhaps most interesting for the insight it provides into Judge Roberts's own decision to pursue a career as a lawyer rather than as a professor of history, as he originally intended. In the paper on Webster he dwells on Webster's dazzling legal profile. He takes particular note of Webster's celebrated appearance before the Supreme Court in the famous Dartmouth case. Webster's arguments, Roberts writes admiringly, "struck a responsive chord in Chief Justice Marshall, whose decision closely followed the lawyer’s reasoning. Bar and bench cooperated in securing the rights of property and vested interests.” (p. 9). Furthermore, “Through his appeals to national authority as a recourse from the meddling of states, Webster came to recognize that the security he sought for property could only be sanctioned by a strong national government. These appeals led him not only to elevate the position of the Supreme Court, and contribute to the expansion of its powers, but also to enhance the prerogatives of the Congress.” (pp. 11-12)

Revealingly, perhaps, the essay describes at length a particular type of “Websterian man,” whom Roberts characterizes as “not bound by the sectional and divisive influences of party politics….a disinterested, self-sacrificing man of wisdom who continually worked with others of his sort to resolve any controversy which threatened national harmony. The man of character did not fight in the think [sic] of political battles, but rather raised himself above the conflict and stilled it through dispassionate compromise.” (pp.18-19)