Posted on 03/04/2009 4:25:49 PM PST by SJackson
My great-aunt Carolyn was for all of my life a living link to Wisconsin's progressive heritage.
That link, like those maintained in so many rural Wisconsin families, was an essential underpinning of my own understanding of the collective experience that has sustained this state's unique political character.
Wisconsin progressivism is not an easy political construct to explain, let alone teach. It cannot be reduced to a sound bite or a political commercial. It cannot be "learned" by listening to a scholarly lecture or reading even so fine a book as Nancy Unger's biography of its progenitor, "Fighting Bob La Follette: Righteous Reformer."
Wisconsin progressivism, with its roots on the front porch and at the country crossroads, is a legacy handed down from generation to generation. It is a consistent worldview communicated not through a series of talking points but via historic and cultural references so deeply rooted that they seem a part of our family lore.
At its heart is a love of education and community, a faith that ideas well communicated in a circle of acquaintance can transform the politics of a nation and the direction of the world. The obstacles to that transformation are not individuals who think differently or even great masses of people who vote differently. Individuals and masses of people can be brought around. The enemy in what La Follette referred to as "the old fight" is as it always was: concentrated power, held by distant presidents and unaccountable corporations. And the cure for what ails American democracy is not bipartisanship or the other compromises of false and misleading collegiality but more democracy.
Aunt Carolyn, who has died at age 95, understood these truths of the progressive movement to which she was introduced by her father, a La Follette progressive of the old school, who campaigned for Fighting Bob and Young Bob, for Phil La Follette, Sol Levitan, John Blaine and the other iconic figures in the definitional days of the movement's youth.
Aunt Carolyn taught me the progressive faith -- not by rote instruction or nostalgic storytelling but with the impish delight she took in dismissing disappointing politicians. She had an unwavering commitment to an ancient yet always refreshed and refreshing vision of the cooperative commonwealth and she passionately rejected unnecessary wars and the tendency of presidents to make America "a policeman of the world."
That anti-imperialism -- with its most American disdain for empires and colonialists and its belief in the right of all peoples to self-determination -- distinguished Wisconsin progressives from the cautious and compromised liberals of the last century. A liberal might find justification for a war in Vietnam or Bosnia or Iraq or Afghanistan. But a progressive never could or would.
This I learned from my great aunt, whose foreign policy critique was formulated not in the classroom but on the porch of the family homestead in Blue River.
Aunt Cary revered her father, my great-grandfather, who lived his entire life in Blue River. The village took its name from the Wisconsin River, which flowed past the tight little assemblage of houses, churches and taverns on the way to the Mississippi. As Blue River's elected village president in the first years of the 20th century, he struck up a friendship with John Blaine, who served as the mayor of the nearby city of Boscobel.
Blaine would go on to serve as Wisconsin's attorney general and then as the nation's most radical governor in the early 1920s. But he never lost touch with his roots in the farm country of southwest Wisconsin, from which a seam of Midwestern progressive populism snaked its way west across Iowa and Minnesota, through the Dakotas and out toward Montana and Idaho.
In 1926, Blaine decided to run for the United States Senate, and my great-grandfather campaigned for him in farm valleys and hamlets of Grant and Vernon counties.
America was not at war, but memories of World War I, which Wisconsin progressives had opposed so mightily, were real and raw. Blaine and his supporters talked a great deal about foreign policy. They argued that, as successive American presidents had drawn the country deeper and deeper into entanglements with the affairs of European kings and kaisers, America's revolutionary spirit was being worn away. They were horrified that U.S. soldiers were garrisoned on islands in the Caribbean and the Pacific, enforcing occupations that were indistinguishable from the colonialism of the British monarchs they had been taught to despise in their American history classes. And they were repelled by the dawning realization that the armies of the United States were being used to advance the international business interests of the same American corporations that had stacked the decks against farmers and factory workers in the Midwest.
Blaine said he was "against every commitment that in any way bound us in the slightest degree to the wars and quarrels of foreign governments." And he raged against "dollar diplomacy," declaring, "We have turned the Monroe Doctrine into an agency of mischief for America, not for her protection or the protection of weaker nations and peoples (but as an instrument that made American intervention) the wet nurse for alien governments, money lenders, adventurers and concession grabbers in the career of expansion, extension and exploitation."
In the Republican primary of that year, John Blaine defeated the incumbent senator, and when he took his seat the following winter, the new senator from Wisconsin began an agitation against U.S. occupations of Haiti, Nicaragua and other Caribbean and Latin American lands. Allied with Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William Borah and a caucus of Republican, Democratic and third-party progressives, Blaine investigated the influence of corporations on U.S. foreign policy, averted a U.S. invasion of Mexico, and forced the United States to begin the withdrawal of troops from Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. "Liberty and independence, justice and equality are the cornerstones on which America was begun," Blaine declared. "They are the only cornerstones upon which we can build an enduring peace."
When he was done in Washington, Blaine came home to southwestern Wisconsin. He and my great-grandfather would sit on the front porch of our family home in Blue River and watch the Fourth of July parade go by. Aunt Carolyn remembered how they would rise and solemnly salute the passing American flag, which they would explain to her should fly only on American soil. The work that consumed them, they told her, was not merely politics, nor even governance, but the redemption of America.
Blaine and my great-grandfather had a name for the political principle that guided their campaigning for a righteous foreign policy. They called themselves anti-imperialists. Their fear was entanglement with the turmoil and troubles of other lands and continents; their enemy was empire and the career of conquest it required. They believed that America could realize her promise as a free and honorable land only if she abandoned the ugly relativism of the powerful and adopted the absolute morality of the good.
This was the foreign policy faith of the progressive movement, a faith handed down in our Wisconsin family as in so many others from my great-grandfather to his daughter, and from that daughter to her great-nephew.
I'm certainly not a Nichols fan, but I thought it was a serious piece.
What I was struck by in comparing my family's experience in the general region, mostly north and west, is that through this period and a few wars before, it's defined by those who served, not those who opposed our nations wars. And what they overcame. That's not meant as a value judgement, certainly not a criticism of Nichols ancestors, just an observation that these differences have always been with us, and are frequently passed on generation to generation.
Would she be proud of the "Progressives" of today who only salute foreign flags and burn ours? I would hope not, but I don't know.
When you read about the old Progressives, there is evidently some attachment to principle there, but somehow they all seem a bit tetched.
The argument is that Robert A. Taft's, and ultimately Ronald Reagan's, Middle American Conservatism was an outgrowth of Lafollette's Progresivism.
Sort of counterintuitive. The author is relying on a Jeffersonian, decentralist, populist strain underlying Lafollette's, Taft's, and Reagan's thinking.
More here.
Great example of how being a “Progressive” or a “Liberal” is a mental disease that can be passed down through our ancestors.
;)
It's people like these that have enabled the abortionists and homosexuals to their current power.
What is it with these Mother Jones types?
As an old John Bircher I have long been familiar with some of the similarities between the old populist/progressive "left" and the later "radical right." For one thing, both socialist populists and anti-socialist far rightists share the same bugbears (Wall Street, bankers, Wall Street, the "money power," "the East," etc.). However there still are (or at least once were) some disagreements among the two. When I was a member the JBS still attacked direct democracy and popular election of US Senators and seemed to regard the old unelected Senate as preferable to the later, directly elected Senate (though the Supreme Court is an excellent example that elitism can be quite as far left as democracy!). Also when I was a member the Society still allowed anti-Communism to override the more civil libertarian tendencies of the Old Right and still considered J. Edgar Hoover (as well as Warren G. Harding) a hero. This may have changed, though. From what little I know about them now they seem no different from the Liberty Lobby.
Of course as an old history buff I learned long ago that once the Constitution was ratified the Founding Fathers themselves split into two factions based on interpretation: loose construction and implied powers (the Federalists, including George Washington), and the "Republicans" (Jefferson and Madison). It was the latter, who were anti-capitalist agrarians, who were the original champions of laissez faire. Capitalists and businessmen, who gravitated towards the Federalist party, were never the advocates of laissez faire. Also somewhat ironic compared to modern positions, the Jeffersonians were "free traders" while the Wall Street/big business Federalists were protectionists (take that, Pat Buchanan!).
However, all this being said, I must marvel at the identification of populism with Jeffersonianism. Thomas Jefferson was an elite slave-owning aristocrat (certainly his blood was much bluer than that of Hamilton and Adams), just as the born-poor Andrew Jackson was at the time of his election to the presidency. How can anyone identify the interventionism of the populists and progressives with Jefferson? Similarly the lumping of Hamiltonian conservatism with European rightism seems a bit dishonest when one considers that most of the self-identifying European style rightwingers (such as the late atheist paleaeoconservative intellectual Samuel Francis) identified with the Jeffersonian tradition rather than the Hamiltonian. Furthermore the charge of "plutocracy" was often hurled about by Benito Mussolini, an avowed opponent of egalitarianism and certainly no populist.
There are, of course, other ironies often remarked on before. It was the "hierarchical" Southern aristocrats who supported the French Revolution while the "damn Yankees" saw a Jacobin under every bush (while simultaneously championing the idea of a "Communist" central bank). And of course while most of America's founders were un-Orthodox in their religious beliefs Jefferson was the most notorious in his free thought, even leading some people to think that on his accession to power Bibles would be confiscated and burned. Yet this same Jefferson bequeathed his political ideology to the "ultra-chr*stian" Confederacy.
Just a couple more thoughts more or less tossed out. I was of the opinion that Henry Cabot Lodge I was opposed to the League of Nations. And while I am no fan of labor unions (especially considering their political alliances), as I understand it (and I may be wrong), one of the provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act (or perhaps it was Landrum-Griffin) authorized the drafting of striking workers into the military where they could then be forced to do their usual jobs in a clear end-run around the Thirteenth Amendment.
Finally, I once again mention Alan Stang's recent attack on the Republican party as "red from the beginning" and wonder if this means that Alexander Hamilton and George Washington represent "Communism."
But Federalism and Republicanism or Hamiltonianism and Jeffersonianism just don't translate easily into today's liberalism and conservatism. Rather than dividing evenly, there's always a clumsy remainder. It didn't look that way a half-century ago, but even then, there was a limit to how far one could take comparisions of the past and the present.
Still less does the old European right fit into today's American conservatism. So I've come to take shorter views. There's a lot to be said for being decentralist and "small j jeffersonian." But I don't feel the need to find villains in our past and drag them out for scourging or hanging.
Washington, Adams, and Hamilton did what they could to put the country on a sensible foundation while Jefferson was running after the latest French fashions. And once his party had vanquished the Federalists, Jefferson and his successors did what they could to imitate them, so what's the point in making Jefferson our hero and Washington one of the villains?
You are right about Henry Cabot Lodge I opposing the League. He did raise objections (14 of them) so Taylor puts him on the side of those who would have accepted the League under other circumstances.
But so far as I've been able to figure out, Borah and Johnson really did oppose the League on nationalist grounds. Lafollette reserved judgement on the League at first and came to oppose it because he thought it would be dominated by British and other imperialists. Source. So he wasn't a national sovereignty at all costs man.
If I'd been around in 1924, I'd happily have voted for Coolidge. But most people who write about politics believe in going whole hog on some ideology or other. I'm more a "half a loaf is better than none" person.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.