To: swilhelm73
Well I think the progressive - eugenics connection is pretty well established. I know this because a while back I was debating online with someone who claimed that of course progressives weren't liberalsThe progressive held a goodly quantity of religious conservatives with it. Note that William Jennings Bryan was in Wilson's cabinet, and that Wilson drew tremendous support from the Southern Conservatives who's politicall descendents now inhabit the Republican Party.
The Progressive movement in the US split over the First World War, and this is what allowed a return to Republican presidents. Do you really think something like prohibition could get ratified by so many states if it truly represented only just liberals or conservatives? Would you really buy the notion that the old South with it's fierce segragation and racial prejudice found nothing in common with progressive notions of racial purity? Would you really contend that the end of segregation owed it's occurrence to conservatives?
Woodrow was an Ivy League professer and dean, but he was also an avid admirer of the KKK and he was a truly major writer of the southern historical mythology that still haunts our history like yesterday's chile and beeas.
To: Held_to_Ransom
The left, for the most part, only came to the conclusion it hates Christianity within the last thirty years or so. While there have been Christian haters in the Left for as long as there has been a left, the average Leftwinger, as the average American and European, were Christians historically.
So, one should hardly be surprised that there were religious believers amoung the left wing progressives. In fact, the opposite would have been stunning in a fairly popular movement of the time.
How this plays out in regards to the fact that the Progressive platform was patently leftwing is a question I'll have to leave for you to answer. Progressives wanted across the board increases in taxation, regulation, and in some cases outright socialism. They believed in racialism and the positive power of the federal government to solve most social ills. They were what the left was in there time.
So for example, in the 1924 presidential election, one can see, perhaps most graphically, the difference between conservatism and progressivism. Coolidge has become something of an icon to hard core conservatives, and La Follett, the most important Progressive politican of his time has become something of an icon to the left as a whole. To make this even more obvious, the Socialist Party of America endorsed La Follett rather then running their own candidate.
Davis, the Democrat nominee, was fairly close to Coolidge in his politics. The Democrats going hard left was still in the future.
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