In my last post (Onward Progress), I had intended to give an account of the history of progress from its origins in Medieval Europe, especially in England and France, down to today’s twenty-first century political and social movement defined as progressivism. Since to be “progressive” means so many things to so many people, I thought to end my previous post with the ending of chattel slavery and serfdom, as it then persisted in North America and Europe in the mid-nineteenth century. With the abolition of U.S. slavery in 1865, a new era of “free” labor had been forged by conscience, policy, and war that swept away the “peculiar institution.” The rights of workers struggling to find a place in the new industrial, capitalist economy, became the imperative of progress. Besides economic measures, progress was expanded to include visions of society, and the freedom and rights of individuals in shaping their societies—and, indeed, the very notion of what it means to be a person.
REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS
In 1848, Karl Marx had made his clarion call for workers of the world to unite into unions for, initially, rather modest demands such as better pay and factory working conditions. In the immediate aftermath, through 1865, several nations abolished serfdom: Austria; Hungary; the new, unified nation-state of Italy; and Tsarist Russia.* As serfdom and the institution of slavery were going into eclipse, “free” laborers through various craft unions experienced renewed strength in bargaining from a standpoint of unity, to “take on” the capitalist system itself. A determined contingent of revolutionaries thought to internationalize the labor movement, but were hindered in their efforts due to increasing nationalism across the continent and, indeed, around the world. Blood and soil still mattered in the concentration of affections.
*When the American Civil War erupted in 1861, most European states, duchies and other independent statelets maintained a studied neutrality. France and Great Britain, the two principal European powers, were “sympathetic” to the Confederacy. [Note: France’s “sympathy” was a hope that a “distracted” America would not challenge French imperial ambitions in the Americas, stretching from the Rio Grande to Peru.] Great Britain, having recently secured victory over Russia in the Crimean War, and having secured possession over rule in India, was at the height of its power in which the United States remained the only potential challenger to British hegemony on the world stage. Having drawn even with British population, and then surpassing it prior to the civil war, and with union industrial output about to outstrip British industrial production, Great Britain’s hold on Canada and its Caribbean colonies was thought to be vulnerable to American expansion. A divided America would impede union hegemony over ambitions for Canada and southern hopes for expanding slavery ever southward.
In 1861, Italy offered military support for the Union, but only on the condition that General Garibaldi be allowed to free slaves in its march through the south. Lincoln declined the offer, citing the cause for saving the union, without interfering with slavery. Two other countries, Russia and Switzerland, supported the union from the start. Russia, having issued its own Emancipation Proclamation in 1861, expressed sympathy and unwavering support for the American union. Switzerland, which had abolished serfdom in 1798, inspired volunteerism and emigration, which furnished the union with needed soldiery numbering in the thousands.
Having taking root in Europe, Marxism, socialism, and communism became watchwords in progressive circles. Europe, with its societies divided into numberless aristocratic estates of the realm, social classes, chivalric orders, titled peers, princely households, etc. – was so rigid in its class structure that birth was virtual destiny. Labor, artisans, craftsmen, engine makers, mechanics, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois were virtually consigned to the industrial laboring class and to the impoverished class of feudal peasantry. It was no wonder that Europeans across all class divisions both feared and awaited the revolutions that were certain to come.
America took a different path. In a society un-demarcated by class divisions, the laboring classes of yeoman farmers, rail-splitters, and pioneering homesteaders could expect to rise in society, bettering their lot, and giving to their posterity a head start in life. They could even expect to acquire and own property, with the expectation that by their enterprise, they could hire workers to produce more output as fruit ripened from their long years as struggling laborers.
Although President Lincoln formally proclaimed maintenance of the union as reason for war, this was not out of a desire to sustain slavery. In fact, he detested it—for both practical and personal reasons. Slavery cultivation exhausted the soil and produced no capital from the results of this uncompensated labor. “Free” labor, on the other hand, begets capital. Lincoln stated this explicitly as such in his First Annual Message to Congress, December 3, 1861:
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
EMANCIPATION AND FREEDOM
After the civil war, American progressivism became increasingly associated with Christianity itself as “one who favors, promotes social and political change in the name of progress.” However, what Americans thought as favoring progress did not connote meanings associated with being progressive. To be progressive was understood as movement (to a presumably better, more just society); the understanding of progress was a descriptive moniker, “complete” and defined through conceptual nomenclature, as already achieved.
The union victory “solved” the matter of freedom versus slavery. Slavery, that “peculiar institution,” could no longer be defended as beneficent to society. To consolidate this victory, movement forward in time (progressivism); and the cumulative nature of an endless perfecting of hard-earned knowledge derived from experience (progress), both began to diverge in meaning along positive and normative lines, respectively.
PROGRESS AS REFORM
Progress, with its normative connotation, was couched in the language of reform. By the 1880s, liberalism had been fully embraced in Great Britain by those seeking reform along the outlines depicted in plotlines appearing in several of Charles Dickens novels, such as Hard Times, A Christmas Carol, and Oliver Twist. Debtors Prisons and workhouses were gradually legislated away. By the 1890s, Progress became associated with social activism, especially in the United States. In 1908, progress became defined as an “effort to advance or improve,” which applied to anyone “striving for change and innovation,” not only in the course of human affairs, but in technology, management, and the arts—manifested as avant-garde experimental depictions on canvass, such as Dadaism that flourished during and in the aftermath of the First World War.
PROGRESSIVISM AS IDEOLOGY
As liberalism was being embraced on “both sides of the pond,” fin de siècle Europe interpreted progressive as a secular (i.e., unbelieving) understanding of humanity having no need of “gods” for giving salvific meaning to life. Specifically, Europeans embraced a philosophical progressive movement known as logical positivism, wherein Man can reason to increasing knowledge, without reference to stores of accumulated wisdom. Reason can be misleading and new knowledge retrograde. Forsaking custom leaves Man at the mercy of contingency, fashions, and trends. What at first glance may seem to be progressive may, upon reflection, be entering a deeper, darkening Brave New World of Social Darwinism, eugenics, and the surveillance state—a statistical, data-driven world that can calculate the cost of everything, but measures the value of nothing. .
Progressivism, originally seen as a forward movement to a more just society of equitable distributism, came to be seen as a striving for more liberation from the shackles of religion and superstition, without a moral compass, to direct that striving towards moral ends. Instead, Progressivism embraced a more Faustian age of libertarianism,** in which the will to power fostered an individualized passion toward inner mastery, inspiring the will to seek supremacy through exploring the inner depths of human personality (cf. Freud); to the outermost regions of space (i.e., the skyscraper in architecture); and sound (i.e., the dynamic, transcendent infinite space of sound in symphonic music). Thus, the age of progressivism also sponsored the introduction to history of the Übermensch.
**A fundamental characteristic of libertarian thinking is an unqualified skepticism of government. In the 18th century, Scottish Philosopher Adam Smith developed in his writings the human faculty of sympathy, which he described as a natural virtue of “charitable fellow feeling with the lowest of distressed humanity.” Instead of reliance on government to limit the strong from exploiting the weak, his studies of the economic effects of free markets greatly advanced the liberal theory of “spontaneous order,” according to which some forms of order in society arise naturally and spontaneously, without central direction, from the independent activities of large numbers of individuals. The theory of spontaneous order is a central feature of libertarian social and economic thinking, and is better known as though guided by an invisible hand. Free Marketers were content with laissez faire (“leave it alone”) economics. Progressives wanted government to lend a guiding hand to directing the economy to accelerate growth in the aggregate and spreading benefits downward to continue progress onward, to speed it up, by providing public education and social insurance, rather than attack the growing disparities between the wealthy few and laboring masses.
THE INVOLUTION OF PROGRESSIVISM
In 1889, progressivism was applied for the first time to the nomenclature of economics—the “progressive” income tax—one of the two certainties in life—the other being death—the two bedevilments of Benjamin Franklin’s cosmic universe. Though having been introduced to fund the civil war, the “direct” income tax was later challenged in the Courts. The U.S. income tax was eventually declared unconstitutional in 1894 because it was not “apportioned” among the states. By the First World War, the U.S. had amended the constitution to enable revenue to be raised by levying taxes directly on income. The progressive income tax was justified on grounds of equity. So-called progressives and reformers defended the higher rates for the reason that high-income taxpayers had the advantage of compound interest in their favor. Compound interest eventually concentrates wealth into fewer and fewer hands. The federal income tax was progressive in a sort of way. It generated greater revenue to fund a more equitable society. And its progressive nature tended to a utilitarian result, which offsets the problem of usury—applying higher marginal rates to higher levels of income.
The income tax had an unintended effect. While it enables the federal government to raise large sums of income in a hurry, (as in the case of fighting a war), they are seldom reduced after the conflagration is over. The growth of government almost always follows the growth of revenue. A flood of revenue inspires political parties to use federal power for collective measures to solve social ills and redistribution schemes not just for the nation, but for other “causes” around the world.
EMPIRES OF MONEY
With union victory in the American Civil War, the nation took on enormous debt to fund the cost of crushing the rebellion. Besides the issuance of “Treasuries” and war bonds, The U.S. Congress passed a law to tax income directly, regardless of state apportionment. It was a “graduated” income tax, which applied higher marginal rates at higher income thresholds. It was designed to be a quick and efficient “pay-as-you-go” method of financing the war effort.*** With victory assured in 1865, the debt had to be “serviced.” The income tax was repealed in 1872 as no longer necessary. Whether the income tax had been good or bad, progressive or regressive, was beside the point. It was a war measure enacted in the midst of civil war. Its constitutionality was not questioned. That would come up again as America was entering a gilded age of robber barons, shadowed by a reform movement that would lead America into the progressive era dawning in the twentieth century.
*** During wartime, Rome levied a property tax called a tributum, which was paid in years when military circumstances deemed it necessary.
The notion that anything connected with taxation as progress or progressive appearing in 1889 was in contradiction to a nation of pioneers, homesteaders, and emigres that foreswore old allegiances to embrace liberty in a country of vast horizons and “new” lands. The 1889 progressive income tax was not mentioned or proposed in a vacuum. While America was “settling down” from a half-century of sectional strife, the pursuit of empire was rapidly accelerating across the globe, in competition for new markets and naval supremacy. In the early 1880s, an international conference had been held in Berlin to carve up the African continent as spoils for the taking—without regard for natural boundaries and tribal affiliations.
Other “empires” were created under an economic system guided by market forces acting to stifle and crush all competition. Too much wealth was being concentrated into fewer families and institutional combinations formed into trusts, creating an aristocratic class of oligarchs—never intended by the founding fathers. In response to the growing concentration of wealth into combines and trusts, the U.S. Congress, in 1890, passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, in order to promote free competition and curb the growing power of trusts and monopolies which were seen as detrimental to competition in the marketplace. Specifically, the Act prohibited any contract, combination, or conspiracy that restrains trade or commerce among the states or with foreign nations.
This includes formal cartels and agreements to fix prices or limit production. This was considered a progressive measure because the Department of Justice could enforce measures against “restraint of trade,” such as refusals to deal, bid-rigging, dividing up markets, etc., and other anti-competitive practices in several industries. While large concerns were undergoing stricter scrutiny in their methods of “crowding out” competition, “progressives” noted that while antitrust activity could promote economic development across a wide range of sectors, a reliable supply of money was required to lubricate the engine of progress. A counter-movement was underway pitting creditors against debtors. The issue at hand was the increasing power of large banking and financial institutions, working in league with large corporate trusts, to favor a money supply backed solely by “hard” gold, to enhance return on equity. Debtors favored an increased supply of specie through coinage of silver. While this may be perceived as obscure arcana of the “dismal science,” farms, homesteaders, and manufactories protested threats to their livelihood that posed a Golgothan policy of “crucifixion upon a cross of gold.” Although the “Romans” of hard gold eventually prevailed, the economic issues of tariffs, trade, and taxation would become centers of contention for shaping a societal sense of “justice as fairness.” As America and Europe entered the twentieth century, new institutions, new industries, and new notions, such as the right to privacy, would take center stage in the intellectual annals of progressive thought. The twentieth century would also witness the high-point of progressivism—as consisting of vicissitudes of fashionable philosophies, one after another, turning into chimeras of illusion and chameleons of ideologies. Progressivism would continue into the 21st century, redefined in ways less societal and more identified with the human person as a deconstructed Individual. Both “progressivisms” will be covered in my next post.