If there was a good example of what an “unreformed” society looked like in Hegel’s estimation, it was the United States. He saw America in the 1820s and 1830s as a wild and open nation, a vast unsettled frontier land with a primitive government. There was nothing progressive about it. It was a land with too much individual liberty, too much protection for private property, and too many greedy, ambitious people trying to build their individual fortunes. America, Hegel thought, was in dire need of progressive reform.
Hegel became Germany’s most renowned academic, eventually attracting followers around the world, even in America. But one follower in particular was far more consequential than the others. This disciple was a fellow Prussian philosopher, a university student who was a generation younger but just as ambitious and intent on making his mark on the world by proving that mankind could establish a progressive utopia here on earth.
His name was Karl Marx.
MARX: NO COMPASSION, NO EXCUSES
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Europe was on fire.
The previous year had brought turmoil and upheaval to the continent, punctuated by uprisings against its faltering ancient monarchies, particularly in Germany. That was why, in April 1848, Karl Marx and his comrade Friedrich Engels took the great risk of returning to their native land to publish the Neue Rheinische Zeitung—the “New Rheinish Newspaper”—in the city of Cologne.
The paper was going to be their contribution to this great struggle, their way of fanning the flames of change, not just in Germany but in France, Hungary, Poland, and Italy and across the continent. And in large measure, they were already succeeding. Across central Europe, the masses demanded reform and social justice. Finally, thought Marx, revolution was in the air—and in the streets.
Of course, the revolution was not as “pure” as Marx and Engels would have liked. The proletariat working class had not yet emerged as the driving force, but there was time yet. First, thrones and crowns had to go. Then, even if the selfish bourgeoisie took over from the kings, the working classes could, soon enough, be roused in turn to dislodge the new bourgeois oppressors—and Marx’s ideal society could be born.
Although riots and protests had broken out in most capital cities, the Cologne offices of the paper were eerily quiet. There were no shouts of celebration. The presses weren’t running. There was no frantic pounding of feet as copy boys with rolled-up sleeves darted to and fro carrying last-second edits. The proudly inflammatory NRZ proclaimed itself on its masthead to be “The Organ of Democracy,” but in May 1849, that organ had seemingly gone silent.
Standing over his desk, one fist turning slowly, grinding into the battered wood of its surface, Marx, the paper’s editor in chief, was seething. This was it. The reactionaries had him cornered—again. With anger boiling inside him, the newspaperman-revolutionary reread the note from the Royal Police:
The tendency of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung to provoke in its readers contempt for the present government, and incite them to violent revolutions and the setting up of a social republic has become stronger in its latest pieces. The right of hospitality, which he so disgracefully abused, is therefore to be withdrawn from its Editor-in-Chief, Dr. Karl Marx, and since he has not obtained permission to prolong his stay in these states he is ordered to leave them within 24 hours. If he should not comply with this demand, he is to be conveyed across the border.
The authorities had struck once again. Marx was being forced to leave Cologne, just as he’d been ousted from Prussia, Paris, and Brussels. His revolutionary ideas had landed him in trouble everywhere he went. The pressure had only become more intense since he and Engels had published The Communist Manifesto two years earlier from the relative safety of London.
Marx, however, was a fighter. When he was a student, his philosophical scuffling with classmates was equaled only by (and often intertwined with) his drunken carousing. He’d even fought in a duel and been wounded above the eye by an arrogant Prussian blue blood. But the more important struggles at that time had been raging within his mind, and much of his sparring had been over the ideas of his favorite intellectual: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Marx plunged deeply into Hegel’s ideas while at university in Berlin. He’d even fallen in with a group of like-minded philosophers who called themselves the Young Hegelians. They debated the views and legacy of the recently deceased thinker, speculating how Hegel’s ideas about man’s increased consciousness would influence the course of history. Marx later rejected much of Hegelian philosophy, but one principle lodged itself firmly in young Marx’s mind and never left: the dialectic.
Hegel saw history as a constant clash of ideas, and Marx agreed. Ideas had to be tested by constantly pitting them against one another. Only through this grueling, perhaps even bloody, struggle could society advance. Survival of the fittest ideas—it was the only way. And survival usually required fighting.
The meek didn’t inherit the earth, Marx thought, they were swept from it.
From his newspaper office in Cologne, Marx knew that Hegel had been right: 1848’s round of revolutions was the very manifestation of this struggle of ideas, old feudalism against new socialism. Although he was forced to shutter his newspaper and leave the city, Marx wasn’t out of the fight. He had to make sure his ideas triumphed in the struggle to come.
He sat down at his desk, which was strewn with books, papers, pens, and inkwells. He cleared a space and began to sketch out the final edition of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He decided not only to print the note from the Cologne police forcing him to leave town but to add a scathing commentary. He ended with an ominous threat that would ring through the decades: “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror.”
The socialism Marx outlined in his Communist Manifesto was not identical to progressivism, but it shared ideological roots in Hegel and the idea that mankind would evolve—or “progress”—toward a more scientific and better-administered future where governments would drive and implement change. Not until the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 would the world see a truly socialist government, but Marx and Hegel fueled social movements around the world that demanded reform.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Hegel’s ideas found a powerful—and unlikely—adherent in Germany’s first chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck. “The Iron Chancellor,” through war and diplomacy, forged Germany’s patchwork of decentralized, independent states together into a single nation under Prussian control. Armed with administrators churned out by Hegel’s Prussian academy, Bismarck built the world’s first welfare state, a series of paternalistic government programs that sought to gain the support of the working class.
Although Bismarck fashioned himself a conservative fighting against radical firebrands like Marx, he thought the only way to defeat socialism was to adopt some of it. “My idea was to bribe the working class, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare,” he confided to a fellow progressive. Bismarck’s government, with the blessing of Germany’s first kaiser, would become the most enlightened in the entire world.
Frederic Howe, an American evangelist of this German system, explained in 1915 how this worked. From the “cradle to the grave,” the German worker’s “education, his health, and his working efficiency are matters of constant concern” to the government. The individual would be taken care of in return for his unswerving loyalty to the state.
This was reform. This was progress.
And it was only the beginning.
SOCIALISM COMES TO AMERICA
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Progressivism was not a natural fit for America. The idea that mankind was evolving to a higher consciousness, or a more moral, perfect state, seemed incompatible with the sinful view of man and the “hellfire and brimstone” sermons taught from pulpits across colonial America.
By and large, Americans venerated the Founders as w
ise students of human nature who’d been inspired by the classical Greek notion of permanent principles and truths. One of those ancient truths is that human beings have dark impulses. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.” No amount of Hegelian mumbo jumbo or advanced degrees from German universities could change that.
Early Americans were also deeply suspicious of federal power. They had resisted it at every turn, whether from London or from a newly formed federal government in Philadelphia (and later in Washington, D.C.). Skepticism of government and of politicians who promised big things ran deep in the national DNA. People firmly believed in self-reliance, local control, and a strong civil society where neighbors volunteered to help one another when things got bad. The federal government was a remote, abstract idea that never impinged on daily lives.
Americans had also never been as class-conscious as their European ancestors. The idea that bankers and moneyed interests were manipulating and exploiting them just didn’t add up. They raised families. They went to church. They tilled the soil with their plows, mined the coal from deep within the earth, worked on the factory floor, or ran a general store in town. And if they happened to falter or fail, a frontier rich in opportunity let them start again.
But that frontier was changing by the late nineteenth century. Some argued that it had even been closed altogether. Americans had spread west to the Pacific Coast of California. The Industrial Revolution was changing cities. If all of this was changing, many thought, so, too, must America’s politics, along with its very identity.
In the three decades following the Civil War, a nation of mostly wilderness and backwaters had been transformed into an economic superpower. Railroad tracks crisscrossed the vast American continent. Booming industrial centers with billowing smokestacks sprang up in nearly every state. By 1883, commerce had grown at such a clip that a national standardized time system replaced hundreds of local clock conventions.
Between 1865 and 1900, the American economy quadrupled. And in this tumult, a rebellion against the American idea was brewing in the academy—a rebellion that would soon spread to the churches.
THE INFECTION OF CHURCH AND STATE
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Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University was founded in 1876 as a new kind of research university. Johns Hopkins prided itself on being the first American institution to replicate the Prussian academic tradition of Heidelberg, Freiberg, Göttingen, and Berlin. It was animated by Hegel’s view of progress and the need for a powerful administrative state guided by disinterested, expert social scientists.
German immigrants had come to America by the millions during the fifty years since Hegel’s death, carrying with them ideas about progress and efficiency. Some even brought the more radical contentions of Marx’s socialism and the notion that government could be an organizing mechanism for social, economic, and moral reform. American graduate students had also gone to Germany to study in its legendary universities, bringing back the Hegelian appreciation for expertise and the idea that properly trained experts could be social engineers of the future.
This new generation of German-trained academics also brought back a disdain for “English” economics and natural law, the classically liberal thinking of philosophers such as John Locke and Adam Smith that had influenced the American Founders. The tradition of natural rights and the Anglo-American belief in the dignity of the individual were being replaced by a new kind of thinking that prioritized society as a whole.
The most prominent of the first American progressives was Richard T. Ely, a professor of economics who came to Johns Hopkins in 1881, two years after receiving his doctorate at Heidelberg. Ely, who once wrote that “God works through the State in carrying out his purposes more universally than through any other institution,” helped found the American Economic Association, which is dedicated to social science and social justice (and which still holds an annual lecture named for him).
Ely had grown up on a ninety-acre farm in upstate New York, where he worked with his father raising crops through young adulthood. He loved the sense of community in his small agrarian village, of working to trade milk for tools and cheese for grain in the local market. His mother was a member of a local women’s club that took donations of wool and made clothing for orphans in nearby cities and towns.
When he went off to college at Columbia in Manhattan, he felt alienated in the big city and missed the community he had loved. He wrote to his family that New Yorkers seemed to lack the principal Christian virtue he had found so comforting in his small farming community: charity. It seemed to him that this virtue was absent from big-city morals, which were focused on personal achievement and wealth seeking, all of which Ely viewed as “sinful.”
While in college, and later in graduate school at Johns Hopkins, he blended his study of economics with the study of “Christian morals.” In order to help man reach a new level of happiness, he determined that the cold science and hard numbers of economics must be blended with the Christian principles of charity and giving. The goal was to “end the suffering and loneliness that so often impacts the lives” of our fellow human beings.
To succeed, all that was needed was organizing resources to ensure that there were enough for everyone. In his small township, that had seemingly occurred out of the goodness of the hearts of his family, friends, and neighbors. But in cities, more powerful organizing forces were clearly needed. Ely’s overt mission was to “save mankind from himself.”
In an 1894 text on socialism, Ely wrote:
Looking into the future we can contemplate a society . . . in which men shall work together for a common purpose, and in which the wholesale cooperation shall take place largely through government. . . . We have reason to believe that we shall yet see great national undertakings with the property of the nation, and managed by the nation, through agents who appreciate the glory of true public service, and feel that it is God’s work which they are doing, because church and state are as one. . . . We may anticipate an approximation of state and society as men improve and we may hope that men outside of government will freely and voluntarily act with trained officers and experts in the service of the government for the advancement of common interests.
“The property of the nation” is the thesis at the very heart of the progressive movement: nothing belongs to the individual; it’s all owned by the state. The arbitrary powers of government can seize and do what they see fit with our property as long as government deems it good, right, and just for the broader society.
Ely rejected the socialist dictum of shared, collective property ownership. His family farm wasn’t collectively owned, so depriving families of land ownership was a bridge too far. He did, however, believe that the production of that property, the goods and crops, could be proportionally shared with those less fortunate. A balanced, hunger-free society was within reach.
And thus, charity by force was born.
Like Hegel and other progressives seeking the “perfect” society, Ely also held an unsavory view of minorities, especially African-Americans. He complained that “the negro race, while endowed with a splendid physique and with great power for work, is neither progressive nor inclined to submit to regularity of toil, such as an industrial civilization demands.” He campaigned to bar immigrants into the United States who were judged by elites to be “hereditary inferiors.”
From the movement’s earliest days, some progressives wavered between fully embracing socialism and keeping their distance. But for most, the two ideologies routinely intermingled—and for good reason: they shared a common ideological root. The marriage of progressivism and socialism was born of convenience as much as it was about shared goals. Progressives embraced the socialist movement because socialist theory enabled the use of government to further their reform agenda. Socialists embraced progressivism because it carried with it seemingly uncontroversial and popul
ar causes such as protecting children, improving food quality and health standards, improving living standards, and protecting workers.
Ely believed that Marx’s socialist theology and themes of class warfare—things he had studied in Germany—would be too alien and radical for Americans if unleashed to be absorbed all at once. Instead, he preferred “a socialism of spirit that would replace laissez-faire from within men’s hearts.” Americans had grown too selfish, Ely maintained. His job was to instill a sense of communal goals and to do so through training a new generation of social scientists. He believed that these disinterested, nonpartisan, scientific, and civic-minded people could regulate and manage the world’s fastest-growing economy and compensate for those being left behind. This was the administrative state. Everything could be improved, as the prominent social reformer Jane Addams said.
Over time, Ely trained hundreds of social scientists in progressivism and his views about the “perfectibility” of society and man, but two of his disciples stood out: Woodrow Wilson and John Dewey.
When they first became attracted to Ely’s ideas, Dewey was teaching high school and Wilson was working as a lawyer. Later, as students together at Johns Hopkins, where Ely was a professor, the two men even squared off against each other in a debate over a rather telling topic: “Whether the U.S. government ought to pay to educate the Negro.” Dewey argued in favor, Wilson against.