This year marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence. Justice Clarence Thomas, the senior-most member of the Supreme Court, sought to honor that historic milestone this week by denouncing millions of his fellow Americans and claiming that their views were incompatible with the Declaration of Independence’s ideals. In doing so, he only demonstrated his profound ignorance of this nation’s history, as well as his own personal flaws.
Thomas’s roughly hour-long speech on Wednesday at the University of Texas at Austin Law School began with a lengthy reflection on the Declaration of Independence and its importance in American history. The Declaration is not a legal text per se, Thomas argued, but it is an important testament to the nation’s founding ideals. “It did not establish a form of government; that was the work of the Constitution that followed,” he explained. “But it stated the purpose of government.”
That purpose, Thomas explained, is to “protect our God-given inalienable rights, rights that all individuals equally possess.” He argued that the most important part of the Declaration comes at the end, when the signers “mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
“Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence,” he wrote. “Without that sentence, the rest of the declaration is but mere words on parchment paper—nice words, but nonetheless just words. What changed the world was not the words, but the commitment and spirit of the people who were willing to labor, sacrifice, and even give their lives—what Lincoln at Gettysburg called ‘the last full measure of devotion’—for the Declaration’s principles.”
So far, so good. This is fairly standard civic fare for justices when they speak in public. Thomas is one of many prominent Americans who has defined the nation’s conception of itself in the Declaration. Lincoln referred to it as the “sheet anchor of our republic,” a phrase that Thomas approvingly cited. The justice even linked the promise made by the Founders to the one made by his grandparents when they took him and his brother in as a child in impoverished rural Georgia.
“They told us, ‘We don’t have no education and no chance, but you boys are going to have a chance, [and] we going to devote the rest of our lives to you boys,’” he recalled. “It was their devotion, their love, their dedication to raising us right that has made the difference, not the words, though the words expressed as best they could what they intended to do, their devotion is what mattered.”
After this inspiring and touching recollection, however, Thomas’s oratory began to go downhill. He recounted how he had moved to Washington, D.C., nearly fifty years ago and found that there was “never a shortage of people espousing noble purposes” and “saying the right things” in the nation’s capital. “These people can be just as high-minded as the men who signed the Declaration,” he warned. “They can mouth the words of the Declaration and parrot its principles. They can write essays and talk at conferences about the Declaration with the best of them all too often. However, this was lip service, camouflaged by grand theories in the tall grass of big words and eloquent phrases. What seemed to be lacking was that devotion.”
Without that devotion, Thomas claimed, these people “become petrified by criticisms” and “fearful of negative attention,” or they “fall prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery,” or “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them.” The result is a personal shift away from their principles. “They recast themselves as institutionalists, pragmatists, or thoughtful moderates, all as a way of justifying their failures to themselves, their consciences and their country,” Thomas claimed. It is hard not to read this line as a jab at some of his Supreme Court colleagues over the years, as well as a strong dose of self-promotion.
Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration’s principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. “As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure,” the justice warned. “At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.
“Since Wilson’s presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life,” Thomas continued. “It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.”
Thomas is correct that progressivism was introduced around the turn of the twentieth century, that Woodrow Wilson was the twenty-eighth president, and that Wilson was a progressive. The historical accuracy ends there. Presenting Wilson as the inventor of progressivism is historically illiterate, akin to saying that Joseph Stalin invented communism or that Ronald Reagan invented conservatism.
In reality, the Progressive era emerged in the 1890s from the corruption and excesses of the Gilded Age. A broad range of activists, journalists, legislators, and judges challenged the societal ills that had emerged from the nation’s rapid industrialization. Arrayed against them were corrupt party machines in the big cities and corporate tycoons that had concentrated wealth in the form of trusts and monopolies. Progressivism consisted of multiple movements, some overlapping and some not. To say that progressives in general sought to lay out a “new set of first principles” that would replace the Declaration’s principles is baseless.
I’m sure that Wilson would have liked to claim credit for inventing the Progressive movement, but he was one figure in a much larger social and political ecosystem. Republicans and Democrats alike both supported the movement and its reforms, and the first president to embrace it was actually Theodore Roosevelt. When Roosevelt ran against Wilson in 1912 and split from William Howard Taft’s Republicans, he created the Progressive Party instead. (It became better known as the Bull Moose Party.) Nobody can accuse Teddy of seeking to overthrow the Founders’ vision or Lincoln’s; he welcomed the carving of their heads alongside his on Mount Rushmore.
So why is Thomas so fixated on Wilson? The early-twentieth-century president is an omnipresent target for criticism by modern conservatives. An elitist academic from the Northeast, he oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system and the Federal Trade Commission, as well as the passage of stronger antitrust laws and the first federal ban on child labor. His progressive platform played a major role in developing the administrative and regulatory structures that many conservatives despise.
He is also much easier to criticize than Roosevelt, who is one of the nation’s most popular presidents, or Taft, who turned out to be more conservative later in life—let alone any of the other progressive activists and officials who defined the era. For conservatives, it is rhetorically advantageous to make him the standard-bearer of progressivism: Wilson was perhaps the most racist person to hold the presidency between Andrew Johnson and Donald Trump, and helped worsen Black civil rights throughout his term in office. It allows certain conservative intellectuals to adopt the guise of anti-racism while simultaneously opposing the civil rights laws passed decades after Wilson died.
I bring all of this up not to defend Wilson himself, but to point out the importance of getting history correct. From Thomas’s flawed Wilsonian premise, his errors only compound upon themselves. Here, for example, is how the justice describes the origins of progressivism:
Progressivism was not native to America. Wilson and the progressives candidly admitted that they took it from Otto von Bismarck’s Germany, whose state-centric society they admired. Progressives like Wilson argued that America needed to leave behind the principles of the Founding and catch up with the more advanced and sophisticated people of Europe. Wilson called Germany’s system of relatively unimpeded state power “nearly perfected.” He acknowledged that it was “a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle,” which “offers none but what are to our minds alien ideas.” He thus described America, still stuck with its original system of government, as “slow to see” the superiority of the European system.
This is pure nonsense in multiple ways. American progressivism emerged organically from social movements that targeted the ills of late-nineteenth-century American life. Good-government activists like Robert LaFollette and Lincoln Steffens exposed local corruption and promoted the secret ballot and primary elections. Ida Tarbell, William Hard, and other muckrakers exposed the oligarchical abuses of monopolies like Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. Trustbusters ranged from Louis Brandeis and William Jennings Bryan to William Howard Taft.
Thomas’s fake history is drawn from Wilson’s famous 1887 article “The Study of Administration,” which is credited with helping found the discipline of public administration in the United States, which is distinct from progressivism. Wilson, at the time, was a professor at Bryn Mawr College. He and some of his contemporaries sought to apply scientific principles to basic methods of government and bureaucracy. In doing so, Wilson argued the exact opposite of what Thomas claimed:
No; American writers have hitherto taken no very important part in the advancement of this science. It has found its doctors in Europe. It is not of our making; it is a foreign science, speaking very little of the language of English or American principle. It employs only foreign tongues; it utters none but what are to our minds alien ideas. Its aims, its examples, its conditions, are almost exclusively grounded in the histories of foreign races, in the precedents of foreign systems, in the lessons of foreign revolutions. It has been developed by French and German professors, and is consequently in all parts adapted to the needs of a compact state, and made to fit highly centralized forms of government; whereas, to answer our purposes, it must be adapted, not to a simple and compact, but to a complex and multiform state, and made to fit highly decentralized forms of government.
Compare and contrast Thomas’s quotes above with their actual usage. Wilson’s point in those highly selective quotations was that the existing “science of administration” was a poor fit for American society, and that it must be adapted and developed to our unique systems of government. This was synthesis, not antithesis. “If we would employ it, we must Americanize it,” Wilson explained, “and that not formally, in language merely, but radically, in thought, principle, and aim as well. It must learn our constitutions by heart; must get the bureaucratic fever out of its veins; must inhale much free American air.”
I point this out to defend neither Wilson’s elitism nor his overall character. I do so because textual accuracy and historical fidelity are important qualities in any public official. They are especially important for a Supreme Court justice who claims to be able to infer the original public meaning of the Constitution from a broad range of historical sources. If this is Thomas’s attempt at historical analysis, it is woefully lacking.
From there, Thomas then veered into more Glenn Beck–ish pop history. He went on to attribute the worst offenses of the twentieth century to progressives. “The century of progressivism did not go well,” the justice claimed. “The European system that Wilson and the progressives scolded Americans for not adopting, which he called ‘nearly perfect,’ led to the governments that caused the most awful century that the world has ever seen.”
It must also be emphasized that people’s views change over time. (The justice is well aware of this phenomenon, since he was a leftist in college.) Thomas chided Wilson for describing the Prussian system of administration as “nearly perfect,” using that comment to link progressivism to the European world wars. What he conveniently omitted is that Wilson went to war with that Prussian system in 1917 and ultimately sought to overthrow it. In his joint address to Congress on the eve of war, Wilson declared that “Prussian autocracy was not and could never be our friend.” Wilson instead called, somewhat aspirationally, “for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included.”
These small details are no match for Thomas’s broad strokes. “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism, and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration was based,” he continued. “Many progressives expressed admiration for each of them shortly before their governments killed tens of millions of people.” Here he collapses nearly a half-century span of historical figures in one stroke: Mao would not lead China, for example, until 1949—when nearly every major figure from the Progressive era was already dead. Hitler’s regime drew some inspiration from American eugenics and Jim Crow laws, but he also sought to emulate the nineteenth-century removals of Native Americans from Western North America, which almost entirely predated the rise of progressivism.
These linkages are achieved by conflating any European-based political movement as “progressivism,” no matter its intellectual origins, ideological stances, or practical workings. I suspect that he may have wanted to use socialism as the buzzword, but even he could not reconcile Wilson’s worldview with Marxism. “Fascism—which, after all, was a national socialism—triggered wars in Europe and Asia that killed tens of millions,” Thomas nonetheless claimed. In reality, fascism was avowedly anti-Marxist and anti-socialist, and the Nazi Party’s claims to “national socialism” were a branding strategy, not one of its bona fide ideological tenet. (To attribute “socialism” to the Nazis in this fashion is the hallmark of the uninformed or the mendacious.)
Surely Thomas must have wondered why so many neo-Nazis and fascists now support Donald Trump and not the Democratic Party if they are actually socialists in nature. That would require a level of historical analysis, however, that Thomas seems uninterested in attempting. His speech is a 50-ish-minute exercise in leveling the complexity and nuance of our nation’s history in favor of attacking one’s perceived enemies. Thomas approvingly quoted James Madison, an unabashed slaveowner who opposed the expansion of the franchise even to unlanded white men, even while citing Wilson’s segregationist policies as a stain on progressivism as a whole. Blame for the nation’s historical sins only flows in one direction for Thomas.
In the real world, people are capable of drawing upon the Declaration for inspiration without veering into reductive hagiography. One can embrace the notion that “all men are created equal” and draw upon some of the Declaration’s ideals while disagreeing with some of its complaints—for example, that King George III was trying to incite slave revolts. Even the Framers did not claim to get everything right from the start. When they scrapped the Articles of Confederation in favor of the Constitution, they explained in the preamble that it was to bring about a “more perfect union,” not a “perfect one.” By forbidding slavery’s expansion in the Northwest Territories and setting an expiration date for the slave trade, they originally intended for the institution to fade away. They had faith, in other words, in future generations’ ability to grow and improve—or, one might say, to progress.
If one wants to be truly cynical, there is something awfully convenient for Thomas about marking the turn of the twentieth century as the point where things went awry. As I’ve noted before, the Gilded Age was an era of widespread public corruption, extraordinary wealth disparities, and excessive concentrations of corporate power. “The century of progressivism,” Thomas claims, “did not go well.” For whom? By the mid-twentieth century, progressive reforms (and, later, the New Deal laws that built upon them) helped Americans reach higher standards of living than they could have imagined. Progressivism’s ideological successors helped overthrow Jim Crow laws and expand the Constitution’s protections for millions of Americans.
The only ones who really lost out were America’s wealthiest citizens, who had to give up their plutocratic control over government. In our current revival of the Gilded Age, they now hope to restore it with Thomas’s help. I found it almost amusing when Thomas castigated others for “fall[ing] prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery” and being “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them” when arriving in Washington, D.C.
“My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today,” Thomas had told the audience at the start of his speech, referring to the GOP megadonor who spent the last 20 years gracing Thomas with fancy vacations, personal gifts, and other forms of largesse that went unreported on public-disclosure forms. Among them were luxury yacht trips, more than $100,000 for a portrait of Thomas at Yale Law School, starting funds for Ginni Thomas’s political organization, and much more. No wonder the justice prefers the Gilded Age.
