Progressive

PROGRESSIVE. A term employed by the Left among others with widely varied meanings, “progressive” has mainly signified, since the mid-1940s, those left-of-center and vigorously opposed to the agenda of Cold War liberalism. The ambiguity of meaning traces to the early 1910s and the rise of the Progressive or municipal reform movement into a national force of consequence. The Progressive Party, mostly the creation of a reform-minded White Anglo-Saxon Protestant middle-class, chose as presidential nominee the imperialist bully Theodore Roosevelt rather than Wisconsin’s progressive Republican leader, Robert M. La Follette. The Progressive Party failed nationally, and at the state level broke apart in wartime. La Follette heroically opposed US intervention while Roosevelt, in his last years, continued to advocate military action. La Follette transformed Progressivism when he rallied an ethnic, worker, and farmer constituency in place of the middle class that had deserted him. A section of Roosevelt supporters including some former socialists moved in the other direction after the creation of the New Republic in 1914, advocating US war participation as a bridge to greater national control of economic and social resources.

The resurrection of the Progressive Party in 1924, mainly as a vehicle for Robert La Follette’s campaign for the presidency, underlined the most radical definition given the term “progressive.” Although La Follette himself insisted that describing him as socialist was a case of confusing “a chestnut horse and a horse chestnut,” the Socialist Party hurled itself into the campaign, while Communists later regretted their sectarian non-participation. During the same years, the Committee for Progressive Political Action also sought to create a sustained farmer-labor movement on principles, such as opposition to monopoly, that most socialists could endorse as a transition toward a cooperative society. The Committee for Progressive Labor Action, led by A. J. Muste, evolved into a socialist movement, the American Workers Party, during the Great Depression. Meanwhile, the Progressive Party in Wisconsin, formed in 1934 as merger of progressive Republicans and farmer-labor activists, took many offices including the governorship, ceding control of Milwaukee to a still-vital Socialist Party. Its sister movement in Minnesota, the Farmer-Labor Party, pioneered key social legislation adopted by Congress and the New Deal administration in Washington.

Failure of attempts during the 1930s to create a national third party left the term “progressive” ambiguous, without resolving many basic ambiguities such as the xenophobia and even racism of some self-avowed “progressive” political leaders in the West, especially California. Liberal Republicans in particular, fiscally conservative in many ways but personally libertarian and firmly opposed to Eastern-based corporations’ monopoly powers, could distinguish themselves as “progressive” rather than Democratic Party-style “liberal.” From a Left standpoint, that differentiation grew sharper when articulate progressives, including the La Follettes, took an isolationist position in the later 1930s against the impending threat of US involvement in a world war. The effect of the war staggered the Wisconsin’s Progressive Party, which dissolved in 1945. Within the parallel world of scholarship and history popularized for public consumption, “Progressive History,” most closely associated with Charles Beard, suffered greatly from Beard’s suspicion of Roosevelt’s intentions toward the prospect of war, and Beard’s opposition to the growth of a behemoth national state.

The use of the term “progressive” revived in the early years of the Cold War for two related reasons. Cold War liberals, determined to jettison suspected Communists from their organizations, had begun to consolidate their ranks during World War II, excluding and excoriating supporters of a continued US alliance with the Soviet Union. Former vice president and secretary of agriculture Henry Wallace, widely known as a charismatic “progressive,” took up the cudgels against the Cold War camp. Responding to his own departure from the Truman cabinet over opposition to the new president’s aggressive foreign policy, Wallace addressed an October 1946, meeting in Los Angeles sponsored by, among others, the Progressive American Federation of Labor Committee for Political and Legislative Action. Wallace declared that “more than ever before I am a progressive,” a true inheritor of the New Deal mantle.

Commentators widely blamed voter apathy in the 1946 elections on President Truman’s sharp turn to the right on domestic issues as well as his hawkish foreign policy. In November 1946, Henry Wallace became editor of the New Republic in order urge “progressive” policies upon the Democratic Party or perhaps, as many in the CIO urged, to prepare for a third party. A call for a national organization of progressives had already brought three hundred participants together in September, urging a broad platform of reforms. Although this led to no organization, the event and associated publicity offered advance notice of the merger of the New Deal-oriented Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts and the Sciences and Professions with the National Citizens Political Action Committee. Henry Wallace and Fiorello La Guardia addressed the founding convention of the Progressive Citizens of America, late in 1946.

The ranks of liberals had already split into two warring camps. For hawkish liberals, “Progressive” became synonymous with “Communist sympathizer.” For those on Left of the mainstream, “progressive” translated to “unreserved New Dealer.” The Progressive Citizens of America established three divisions, each with its prominent intellectual figures: Youth; Women; and Arts, Science, and Professions. Of these, the Arts, Science, and Professions attracted the most interest, no doubt because of its entertainment celebrities, José Ferrer and Lillian Hellman among many others. Its public events, with such figures as Frank Sinatra participating, proved that “progressivism” had wide support despite the virulent campaign against both Wallace and détente by the commercial press and most Democratic and Republican Party regulars.

Henry Wallace’s worldwide tours and the publicity leading up to the 1948 presidential campaign further underlined the distinction between “liberal” and “progressive,” even though neither Left, Center, nor near-Right would concede either term to opponents. Glen Taylor, former factory worker and a “cowboy congressman” from Idaho, joining Wallace’s fight against Trumanism, symbolizing the Plains States connection, playing his banjo and singing with his sons on the lecture trail.

The down-home image did little, however, to bring votes to the overwhelmingly red-baited Wallace and Taylor. More than half their national vote of 1,157,140 came from New York State, under the American Labor Party standard. A follow up 1952 Progressive Party campaign boasting a presidential and vice-presidential ticket failed to receive any notable recognition. Outside the East especially, “progressivism” had been quashed. Some erstwhile outspoken progressives such as young George McGovern abandoned the Progressive Party after attending its first convention and used the term “progressive” more cautiously. The Progressive magazine, formerly La Follette’s, managed to survive, thanks largely to the editorship of Morris Rubin, who managed to create a Wisconsin but also nationwide audience for the now-monthly magazine.

In the East, “progressivism” also faced difficult times. The New Republic, abandoning Wallace in the last months of the 1948 presidential campaign, had made a choice similar to that made in World War I, for military-linked nationalism as gatekeeper for domestic reform. The Nation, which did not support Wallace, under the editorship of Freda Kirchwey opposed the Cold War, sought to redefine “liberal” in ways similar to progressivism. The National Guardian, which emerged out of the Wallace campaign, became de facto the standard-bearer of a “progressivism” newborn with 40,000 readers, a number cut badly when the weekly paper opposed the Korean War.

This newer “progressivism” could be seen in Popular Front veterans who had never been comfortable with open Communist identification but who largely shared Popular Front perspectives. Many erstwhile readers of the Daily Worker indeed went over to the Guardian for their own self-protection from potential harassment. But as the Communist leadership inclined toward a badly mistaken prediction of imminent fascism, “progressive” came to indicate an alternative identity to either Cold War liberal or Communist.

For those in that identity, ending the Cold War remained the major priority. But Marxism was no longer viewed as the single key to a scientific solution to poverty and exploitation. Nor was climactic class-struggle anticipated in America, even though unions, and especially independent Left unions such as the United Electrical Workers, received enthusiastic support. A vague, if no less heartfelt, emphasis on New Dealish measures, and a hope for the evolution of post-capitalist societies, merged into a vision of “progress” in the atomic age. Support for Third World revolutions that encompassed support for the non-aligned movement and for the People’s Republic of China again set progressives off somewhat from an orthodox Soviet-style perspective. In some ways, although without saying so explicitly, progressives had, far more than the Communist Party, recapitulated the religious-based anti-imperialism of the 1920s–1940s, substituting a concept of morality for specific theism.

Tactically, such “progressives” sought to maintain a third-party presence, despite general Communist inclinations toward a submergence in the Democratic Party. Radical New York City congressman Vito Marcantonio, running his last campaign in 1950, without Communist support, became the hero of independent progressives until his sudden death. In 1958, New York progressives sought to reestablish a radical third party through cooperation with Trotskyists, something almost unthinkable for Communist regulars, running W.E.B. Du Bois for state office. In general, the National Guardian maintained a sort of milieu, largely but not entirely limited to eastern cities, Chicago, and a few California sites, for such like-minded people. The Guardian’s relationship with the Communist Party proper remained ambiguous, in no small measure because individual Communists shared the progressive perspective while remaining within Party ranks. Had the intense struggle within the Communist Party following the Hungarian Revolution and the Khruschev Revelations resulted in a turn toward internal democracy and away from absolute Russian influence, the Communist Party would have itself likely been transformed into the “progressive” image. The new Communist leadership turned in sectarian directions.

By the middle 1960s, the surfacing of the term “radical,” long thought to be politically ambiguous, as well as a dangerous identification, submerged “progressive” nomenclature. The Guardian itself shortly became “an independent radical newsweekly.” Only The Progressive magazine, and the remnants of an older generation, held onto the familiar title. Despite or perhaps because of the similarity of campaign rhetoric and even personalities, the Democratic Party reformers of 1972 avoided the title chosen in 1948.

The Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC) emerged in 1991 by a mixture of left-leaning Democrats, Ron Dellums and Maxine Waters prominent among them, and the independent Bernie Sanders. The Caucus responded to recession and the sense of unfairness in the widening of income differences in the country, seeking to answer New Gingrich’s “Contract with America” with a comprehensive doctrine of “fairness.” The CPC set itself against the larger and more pro-business, hawkish New Democratic Coalition around Bill Clinton. Increasingly, the Progressive Caucus urged positions well to the Left of the NDC, advocating measures against mass incarceration and the expanding military budget. By the later 2010s, its ranks had reached more than 90 in the House of Representatives, and in sharp contrast to the mainstream of Democratic leadership, urged both steep tax hikes for the rich and the return of American soldiers from abroad. Striving for Democratic Party enthusiasm after a grinding nomination victory, candidate Hillary Clinton defensively described herself as “progressive.” Following the 2016 campaign, “progressive” had seemed once again to belong to the near Left.

The collapse of the New Left taken together with the lurch of American politics rightward not only restored “progressive” terminology but gave it new meaning. In the most obvious and important example, the environmental movement placed itself within the oldest of progressive traditions, Theodore Roosevelt’s conservationism. On the intellectual front, the Nation became the de facto national organ for progressive thought. Union activists had recast themselves, toward the end of the century, in the generally forgotten cognomen of “labor progressives.” Generally speaking, what “progressivism” in foreign policy meant was a return to the anti-imperial standard of Robert M. La Follette.

The twenty-first century brought the consolidation of a further rightward Republican Party together with an apparently exhausted neoliberalism, giving “progressive” a heightened status among mainstream Democratic ranks. ”Radical,” meanwhile had seemed more and more to signify “extreme,” as in “Radical Islamists” or “Radical Democrats,” with Donald Trump the avatar of the “Radical Right.”

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