by Casey N. Blake

I hope I'm not the only contributor who finds it hard to keep up with the pace of the blogosphere. To respond to Eric Rauchway's second post on progressivism and liberalism of a couple of days ago, I would say that the differences between our respective readings of Walter Lippmann are more significant than they might immediately appear. As much I hate to disagree with my friend James Kloppenberg, I think Herbert Croly's later writings from the 1910s and 1920s represent an important departure from his early work and are of far greater value than anything Lippmann wrote for whatever "usable past" we might seek to retrieve from the Progressive era. Croly's later position was close to that of figures on the left and populist fringes of the Progressive movement--Jane Addams, Randolph Bourne, John Dewey, Mary Parker Follett, and Walter Rauschenbusch--in its concern for the fate of social solidarity and civic culture in modern America and its critique of the industrial degradation of work. In this regard, Croly and the other figures I have mentioned were the bearers of the late-Victorian, liberal-Protestant mutualism Michael McGerr describes in his important book, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. I discussed McGerr's book and two excellent recent biographies of Addams and Rauschenbusch in an essay on "The Lost World of American Progressive Reform" in the fall 2005 issue of Raritan. Among the many advantages of this dissenting current within progressivism, as an alternative to both Lippmann's politics and New Deal liberalism, is its refusal to sever moral issues from public policy, its receptivity to religious traditions as resources for political commitment, and its skepticism about the regulatory state as the primary instrument of reform. Too much has changed since the turn of the last century to recuperate this tradition in its entirety, but I still contend that it has more to offer at this moment than the technocratic politics of Drift and Mastery.