Just who were the original progressives of a century ago? They reached all the way from Social Gospelers to middle-class businessmen, urban reformers to clean-government types, efficiency experts to settlement-house dwellers. Or were they also former populists? Muckraking journalists? Suffragists/feminists? Were they simply somewhere under the tent of Teddy Rooseveltian Bull Moosers, or somewhere within the circle of Woodrow Wilsonian intellectuals?
James C. S. Watson argues that despite this profusion of “progressives,” there was a recognizable progressivism. All of his—and this movement’s—types ultimately belong in the same corral. No matter their specific concern, interest, or obsession, his subjects had something important in common. At first glance the something he has in mind might seem to have little to do with this or that progressive reform proposal or measure. And yet that same something ultimately had a great deal to do with the entire thrust of modern progressivism.
The something that defines Watson’s corral brings us directly to the subtitle of his book: “the strange history of a radical idea.” Actually, this history is more hidden than it is strange. Or, if not hidden, it has at least been ignored. More on that in a minute. Let’s first consider the radical idea. The idea Watson has in mind was one the progressives put forth, intent upon subverting another radical idea—or at least an idea that was radical at the time of the American founding. That idea was that citizens had God-given natural rights that precede government, rights that a government is then instituted to preserve rather than create.
The original progressives of the early twentieth century had a different idea. More than that (or should that be “worse than that”?), they had what they thought was a better idea: government could—and should—create new rights of both an individual and collective nature. God was at the sidelines, or out of the picture entirely. But what Watson has given us in this book is less a history of this progressive idea than a history of its history. It is in that sense more a valuable historiography rather than a history.
Watson needs to set the historical stage before setting out to explore the thought and writings of progressive-minded historians on the subject of progressivism. He might have begun with the Founders themselves. Instead, his starting point is Abraham Lincoln. Watson positions his Lincoln as the president who looked back to the Founders, rather than a Lincoln who links the Founders and progressivism.
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