Eric Rauchway: Just what was Herbert Croly's legacy?
A while back I was fortunate enough to go to a very pleasant conference at a very pleasant place on the centennial of Herbert Croly’s Promise of American Life. It was for me an unusually thought-provoking conference. I’m putting my paper from it here so I don’t lose it.
About a hundred years ago, Herbert Croly told the readers of his Promise of American Life that the titular promise would be fulfilled if the United States could realize democratic ideals by substantially diminishing, “economic and social inequalities.”[1] During the past three or four decades, income inequality in the United States has significantly increased; the real wages of top American earners have risen thirty percent while the real wages of those in the fiftieth percentile or under have risen by between five to ten percent. The rich have got much richer, while the not-so-rich have not.[2] At the same time, social mobility is low: a family with poverty-level income might, with hard work and good luck that lasts for more than a century, within five or six generations approach national average earnings.
Comparative studies suggest that Americans are less likely to move up the social ladder than Canadians or many Western Europeans.[3] For about half the time Croly’s Promise has stood on bookshelves and syllabi, Americans have been moving steadily away from achieving its prescriptions. And even in its own era its reach was short: by the time of Croly’s death in 1930 — more than two decades since its publication — the book had sold around 7,500 copies to an American population of about 100 million; the population now being three times that size, we might suggest this is the approximate equivalent of selling 22,500 copies today. Which would be a wonderful sale — for a single year — for an academic author, a class of whose influence I believe we are not now much convinced.
Under such circumstances, one would imagine that it would be difficult to describe the book as influential. Yet that is precisely how historians generally describe it. “Four generations of admirers and critics have put this book high on all lists of incisive and influential social and political analyses either by an American or about America — in company with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and James Bryce’s, The American Commonwealth. It is, arguably, the finest twentieth-century American work on public affairs,” John Milton Cooper, Jr., claimed in 1986.[4] A few years later, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of The New Republic, John B. Judis wrote that The Promise of American Life was “the ultimate contribution of the Progressive Era to American political thought.”[5]
Yet even such admirers of Croly’s influence almost at once take back at least part of what they have said. Judis admits that “Even within The New Republic, Croly’s name has been virtually absent since he died in 1930.”[6] Cooper confesses he has no taste for the “mistiness and tedium” of Croly’s prose, which remains, he believes, an “obstacle” to many readers deriving much of influence from the work.[7]
Perhaps more importantly, historians normally offer either vague or unconvincing explanations of just what Croly’s influence is supposed to have been. After his roseate introduction putting Croly alongside Tocqueville and Bryce, Cooper hedges: “Articles and essays abound about The Promise of American Life, and every account of the first quarter of the twentieth century, particularly of its reform movements, includes attention to the book and its purported influence on Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Party.”[8] I’ve added the emphasis on “purported,” but it’s important. What exactly, was Croly’s influence on Roosevelt and the Progressives supposed to have been? Cooper remains silent.
Judis credits Croly with an influence on progressivism that was, in fact, not Croly’s: the idea that the federal government should chart a middle course when dealing with industrial capitalism and its great corporations, “harnessing their economic power through governmental action” rather than seeking to destroy them through anti-trust prosecution. But this idea was already, routinely, Theodore Roosevelt’s: “You cannot put a stop to or reverse the industrial tendencies of the age, but you can control and regulate them and see that they do no harm,” he said in 1902; and, “Corporations that are handled honestly and fairly, so far from being an evil, are a natural business evolution and make for the general prosperity of our land. We do not wish to destroy corporations, but we do wish to make them subserve the public good,” he said in 1904 (to pick just two examples of what was a Rooseveltian leitmotif).[9] As David Levy notes, “[n]early all the distinctive ideas in The Promise of American Life had found some expression in Roosevelt’s letters, speeches, and messages to Congress….”[10]
David Noble notes that for Croly the promise offered by American institutions and history would not be fulfilled by destiny, unless aided by human action, and particularly by action of the state.[11] And although this idea remains an officially denigrated one in American political discourse, it is hardly original to Croly but rather goes back through the Civil War Republicans to the Whigs. If Croly be thought original for applying Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends, then one need only look at the language and speeches of 1850s Republicans to see that this idea had long been a staple of the party’s promises. Moreover the more influential statement of it, for the progressive period, is surely Walter Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery — published five years later than Promise but mercifully shorter, vastly less misty, and still routinely read by students of American politics.
David Levy notes that we should regard Croly original for two of his historical insights: his critique of the Constitution’s framers as defending their rights in property anticipated Charles Beard’s, and his critique of the frontier American as exalted by Frederick Jackson Turner anticipated new western historians.[12] But again we may say that influence over academic scholarship does not count as influential per se; in the broader discourse, regard for the framers and the frontiersmen remains intact....
Read entire article at Edge of the American West (blog)
About a hundred years ago, Herbert Croly told the readers of his Promise of American Life that the titular promise would be fulfilled if the United States could realize democratic ideals by substantially diminishing, “economic and social inequalities.”[1] During the past three or four decades, income inequality in the United States has significantly increased; the real wages of top American earners have risen thirty percent while the real wages of those in the fiftieth percentile or under have risen by between five to ten percent. The rich have got much richer, while the not-so-rich have not.[2] At the same time, social mobility is low: a family with poverty-level income might, with hard work and good luck that lasts for more than a century, within five or six generations approach national average earnings.
Comparative studies suggest that Americans are less likely to move up the social ladder than Canadians or many Western Europeans.[3] For about half the time Croly’s Promise has stood on bookshelves and syllabi, Americans have been moving steadily away from achieving its prescriptions. And even in its own era its reach was short: by the time of Croly’s death in 1930 — more than two decades since its publication — the book had sold around 7,500 copies to an American population of about 100 million; the population now being three times that size, we might suggest this is the approximate equivalent of selling 22,500 copies today. Which would be a wonderful sale — for a single year — for an academic author, a class of whose influence I believe we are not now much convinced.
Under such circumstances, one would imagine that it would be difficult to describe the book as influential. Yet that is precisely how historians generally describe it. “Four generations of admirers and critics have put this book high on all lists of incisive and influential social and political analyses either by an American or about America — in company with Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, and James Bryce’s, The American Commonwealth. It is, arguably, the finest twentieth-century American work on public affairs,” John Milton Cooper, Jr., claimed in 1986.[4] A few years later, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the founding of The New Republic, John B. Judis wrote that The Promise of American Life was “the ultimate contribution of the Progressive Era to American political thought.”[5]
Yet even such admirers of Croly’s influence almost at once take back at least part of what they have said. Judis admits that “Even within The New Republic, Croly’s name has been virtually absent since he died in 1930.”[6] Cooper confesses he has no taste for the “mistiness and tedium” of Croly’s prose, which remains, he believes, an “obstacle” to many readers deriving much of influence from the work.[7]
Perhaps more importantly, historians normally offer either vague or unconvincing explanations of just what Croly’s influence is supposed to have been. After his roseate introduction putting Croly alongside Tocqueville and Bryce, Cooper hedges: “Articles and essays abound about The Promise of American Life, and every account of the first quarter of the twentieth century, particularly of its reform movements, includes attention to the book and its purported influence on Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Party.”[8] I’ve added the emphasis on “purported,” but it’s important. What exactly, was Croly’s influence on Roosevelt and the Progressives supposed to have been? Cooper remains silent.
Judis credits Croly with an influence on progressivism that was, in fact, not Croly’s: the idea that the federal government should chart a middle course when dealing with industrial capitalism and its great corporations, “harnessing their economic power through governmental action” rather than seeking to destroy them through anti-trust prosecution. But this idea was already, routinely, Theodore Roosevelt’s: “You cannot put a stop to or reverse the industrial tendencies of the age, but you can control and regulate them and see that they do no harm,” he said in 1902; and, “Corporations that are handled honestly and fairly, so far from being an evil, are a natural business evolution and make for the general prosperity of our land. We do not wish to destroy corporations, but we do wish to make them subserve the public good,” he said in 1904 (to pick just two examples of what was a Rooseveltian leitmotif).[9] As David Levy notes, “[n]early all the distinctive ideas in The Promise of American Life had found some expression in Roosevelt’s letters, speeches, and messages to Congress….”[10]
David Noble notes that for Croly the promise offered by American institutions and history would not be fulfilled by destiny, unless aided by human action, and particularly by action of the state.[11] And although this idea remains an officially denigrated one in American political discourse, it is hardly original to Croly but rather goes back through the Civil War Republicans to the Whigs. If Croly be thought original for applying Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends, then one need only look at the language and speeches of 1850s Republicans to see that this idea had long been a staple of the party’s promises. Moreover the more influential statement of it, for the progressive period, is surely Walter Lippmann’s Drift and Mastery — published five years later than Promise but mercifully shorter, vastly less misty, and still routinely read by students of American politics.
David Levy notes that we should regard Croly original for two of his historical insights: his critique of the Constitution’s framers as defending their rights in property anticipated Charles Beard’s, and his critique of the frontier American as exalted by Frederick Jackson Turner anticipated new western historians.[12] But again we may say that influence over academic scholarship does not count as influential per se; in the broader discourse, regard for the framers and the frontiersmen remains intact....