The New Deal: The Progressive Tradition

Abstract

OOKING BACK from the beginning of the New Deal in 1933, the radical movements preceding it seem to have been pretty mild, usually-deserving the name radical only by courtesy, certainly not by comparison; for nothing like the revolutionary fervor so familiar in most other lands had ever developed here. The nearest thing to genuine radicalism in the United States was the IWW, which at one time may have had as many as ten thousand members. The philosophy of this organization was revolutionary, borrowed from the syndicalism of France, but that part of its activity was always neglected for more practical efforts. Its casual membership consisted largely of bums and blanket stiffs, characteristic of a phase in the progress of industry toward large-scale operations and relationships of a settled sort, but not of the material out of which a disciplined revolution grows. Its energies were mostly spent in such efforts as getting decent food and clean bunks in lumber camps and in fighting for an eight-hour day on construction jobs or in the harvest fields. Its philosophy gradually merged in other labor organizations whose immediate aims were similar.1 Besides the IWW, only communism is worth mentioning. That imported philosophy, like that of the wobblies, had always sounded strange in American mouths and made little appeal to American hearts. Sometimes communism was useful as a bogey with which to scare Babbitts, but it did not possess any vigorous life of its own to justify the fears exhibited by some of our countrymen. Communists existed mostly by imputation. Atrocity stories concerning them were either worked up de novo or were inflated versions of activities of strike leaders or believers in high income taxes. Our own characteristic radicalism had been something else, more accurately called progressivism, for that was the name, however inappropriate, which its leaders always preferred. There had been little agreement about the kind of progress implied in this name or about how to get it. For most Americans of this era, any kind of progress different from revolution was to be admitted. This did