On the original meaning of progressive. Progressive is a theological term as well as a religious term, and I am only discussing the political term. The progressive movement grew out of the abolitionist movement. The earliest reference to people calling themselves political progressives was the Society of Progressive Friends, in York, Pennsylvania, in the 1830s. They were for many social reforms, but the foremost among them, in terms of the amount of written space dedicated to each issue, was abolition. In general, progressives did not call themselves such, but they referred to various actions as progressive. A southern town was describe as progressive because it unbegrudgingly accepted the union and the abolition of slavery and set out to heal the wounds of the Civil War. Steinway was called progressive because it paid its employers above normal wages, even for piano makers, and treated them with dignity and respect. The Free Soil Party was clearly the most progressive party of the 1850s, calling not only for abolition, but for ending banking abuse and turning land over to homesteaders instead of giving it to railroads and selling it cheaply to big speculators. After the Civil War, most of the people we now call progressives were Republican, but many left the Republican party when it became captive to the railroads and the bankers. The two main post-war economic proposals were to issue Greenbacks while prohibiting banks from creating monetized credit, and to see that the public lands were widely distributed. It was only in the 1880s that the word progressive came into wide usage. Google used to make it easy to search document archives by year, and also used to tabulate the frequency of a word against the total number of words in its databank. It doesnt do that any more, but it did when I was investigating this. There was a tremendous growth in use of the word in the 1880s, which fell off until the decade of 1910 to 1920, when the word was co-opted by socialists. I will come back to that. I searched the word by individual year, and the big increase came in 1883, just as Henry Georges book, *Progress and Poverty* became a best-seller. It was published in 1879, but languished for four years until, as a correspondent for the *Irish World*, a New York paper for Irish Immigrants, George was arrested by the English government. This, and the book, *The Irish Land Question*, made him a celebrity among the Irish. The concept of progressivism at that time correlated closely to Book 10 of Progress and Poverty, which made the case that freedom and equality are both necessary for the progress of man, and that this progress is cyclical. That is, as old empires collapse, newer, freer, more egalitarian societies grow up on the periphery, prosper, and with their prosperity new empires arise. The new empires become more rigid, hierarchical and stifling until they collapse and the process repeats itself. Henry George arrived with the closing of the frontier, and the progressive approach to land reform changed from homesteading to a tax on the value of land to make the land monopolists let go of it. Although anarchists and socialists made a lot of noise and caused a lot of disruption at this time, they had no real following. Werner Sombart, a leading European socialist of the day, wrote that this is because the American experience was so different from the European experience, Americans enjoying high wages, low rents and solicitous employers, and knew that they could always take up cheap land and become self-employed. it is said there is absolutely no Socialism among the American working class and that those who in America pass as Socialists are a few broken-down Germans without any following.... The doctrine of the inevitable Socialist future is refuted by the facts. - Sombart, Why is there No Socialism in the United States? 1903. The progressive approach, growing out of abolition, was to always identify a privilege and abolish it. This put them squarely at odds with the socialist approach, and socialists bitterly attacked them. This can be seen in various debates between socialists and progressives. The term progressivism was eventually co-opted by socialists, but not before it was first co-opted by Senator John Sherman and presidents Teddy Roosevelt and and Woodrow Wilson. While the leaders of the progressive movement wanted to abolish the privileges that sustained the trusts, Roosevelt enforced Shermans anti-trust legislation that gave the appearance of breaking up the trusts. For example, Standard Oil was broken up into 32 separate oil companies, but the Rockefeller family retained substantial shares in all of them, and controlling interest in most of them. This also led from the redefining of monopoly from anything that interferes with competitiveness to one concern holding an arbitrarily large share of the market. Wilson, I believe, was genuinely supportive of progressive ideals, as he appointed a lot of progressives to his cabinet. However, he wanted to get on the good side of God without angering the Devil. Unable to deliver Georges land value tax, he supported a steeply graduated income tax that George had explicitly opposed, but was begrudgingly accepted by the land monopolists. Also unable to win on the issue of greenback currency, he supported the Federal Reserve, which could have emulated the greenback approach very nicely, if it had wanted to. This splintered both the greenback movement and the land tax movement, leaving a vacuum that socialists quickly filled. The Progressive Party, while giving lip-service to land and money reform, put its energy into socialistic approaches that earlier progressives had rejected.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 20:11:26 +0000
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