#20, November 26, 2003

A State of Faith

The Imperial State and Progressive Ideology

This is a revised version of a book prospectus that I wrote in 1990. At the time I was moving away from African American history and wanted to use my interest in comparative history to refocus my intellectual energies. As such, I believe I was somewhat ahead of the curve in interpreting American history in terms of empire. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease’s book, Cultures of American Imperialism, was yet to appear and anyway my proposal suggested something somewhat different from the work in that volume, since I suggested that we ought to be thinking about the relationship between democracy and empire that does not require some kind of colonial or imperialist expansion in order to take form, but which is already imbedded in the American system of government. Kaplan in fact very graciously asked me to write something for the volume, but, unfortunately, being constantly on the job market and in the process of completing the revisions of Sparks from the Anvil of Oppression I didn’t feel that I had the time to produce an article in accordance with their schedule. With a couple of exceptions, most historians to whom I showed this proposal responded skeptically with regard to its ideas. I think they would be less skeptical now. The only major changes that have been made to the 1990 text relate to the addition of ideas about governmentality that come from David Scott's Refashioning Futures, which seems particularly germane here, and the incorporation of a review of Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings, which covered some of the same ideas I was grappling with but without consideration of empire.

Three premises animate the following analysis of the State and Progressivism. The first is that twentieth-century American history should be interpreted in light of the centrality of empire and the imperial. The second is that, far from having an undeveloped State, as many analysts have consistently argued, the American State is extremely sophisticated and powerful, made more so by the fact that many commentators often refuse to recognize its existence. The third is that the nature of the American State is not as pluralistic and inclusive as is often assumed, and exclusion of people, both within and without the United States, is often the norm. Exclusion is part of the mechanism of governmentality, which represents a distinct and coherent Progressive ideology that can be detected once these other premises are understood and incorporated into our analyses of the Progressive era.

These ideas bring together three different historiographies, those of Progressivism, empire, and the State. The first of these was in a state of confusion for a while with historians generally accepting the notion that the term “Progressivism” itself is too vague and incoherent to be useful. Recently, however, Daniel T. Rodgers has presented a new comparative analysis of the age of Progressive reform, so we will give this work some attention. The second and third of these historiographies, concerning imperialism and the state have been relatively neglected by historians. Over the last decade there has been a flourishing of work relating to the issue of American imperialism, so we want to consider some of the outlines of this literature, but regarding the State, there is very little that has been written – the old idea that the American State is relatively ill-formed compared to those found elsewhere still holding sway. Let us begin by focusing on Progressivism and the work of Daniel T. Rodgers.

Progressivism

Most American historians seem to agree that a number of major transformations in American politics and society took place in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries: a decline in popular participation in political elections, for example, and the emergence of the government not only as a valuable and hotly contested resource, but also as a major historical agent in its own right. Most historians seem also to agree that these transformations were closely tied to long-term economic and demographic developments: industrialization and the rise of the large-scale corporation, urbanization, immigration and so on. What historians of this period seem to disagree about are the problems of how and why the changes took the form they did, who was behind them and who benefited from them; and about the implications of these changes for American politics and society in the twentieth century. In a word, they disagree about the nature of Progressivism.

The traditional vision of this era was that it witnessed the rise of “the people” against elites, reformers against bosses, and the attempt to control unbridled corporate capitalism on behalf of all Americans.[1] This view was dismissed by Richard Hofstadter who suggested that ‘ancien regime’ social elites, threatened by the rise of powerful and wealthy corporate elites and by the expansion of an increasingly foreign-born, politically irresponsible but enfranchised lower class, were the prime movers behind the transformations, and that the unintended outcome of their efforts was greater participation in the political process by members of all strata of American society.[2] Other historians (Kolko and Weinstein, for example) argued that the critical transformations of the age were primarily structural rather than electoral or narrowly political; that it was in fact the new corporate elite who were behind the reforms; and that the outcome was the institutionalization of the once informal symbiotic relationship between government and the interests of big business.[3]

Still other historians (e.g., Wiebe, Hays) agreed with Kolko and Weinstein that a new professional elite were behind the reforms and political changes of the Progressive Era, but argued that their motivation was the search for order itself, and not anxieties over profit margins.[4] More recent historians in the field (McCormick and Hammack) have, in many ways, returned to a more pluralistic view of the period. By focusing on corruption and municipal reforms, these historians have shown that many different interest groups contributed to the clamor for and passage of reform measures. Some employ a more pluralist model than others: Hammack argues that middle- and low-income New Yorkers influenced political decisions directly through special interest groups, and indirectly through their votes, demonstrations and strikes;[5] McCormick is a little more subtle, outlining the unintended consequences of reform and arguing that, while popular feelings were strong enough to force the adoption of new economic policies, they were not strong enough to prevent the nature of these reforms being shaped by more powerful, organized interests.[6] Neither McCormick nor Hammack, however, believed he was creating a new synthesis for Progressivism. Both felt that other local studies comparable to their own needed to be undertaken before such a synthesis could be created.

This, then, was the current state of Progressive historiography until recently: an absence of a synthesis and a plethora of interpretations. Such historiographical confusion was captured most compellingly by Daniel T. Rodgers’ 1982 review article, “In Search of Progressivism.” Rodgers provided the best summary of the literature on this reform period as well as a very helpful tri-partite model of Progressive ideas – anti-monopolism, the language of social bonds (idealism), and efficiency. Finding these three, often contradictory, sets of ideas reflected in the historiographical literature, Rodgers concluded that “progressivism as an ideology is nowhere to be found.”[7]

But Rodgers himself would end up being the historian who once again “found” Progressivism, but it needed a turn to comparative and the Atlantic world of connections in reform for him to do so. It is important, therefore, to outline this work and its contribution before continuing onto discussion of the State and empire.

The originality of Atlantic Crossings is evident from its unconventional opening. Whereas most studies of Progressive social policy would commence with a portrait of urban blight or working conditions in Chicago’s packinghouses, proceeding then to a study of the social reformers’ attempts to ameliorate such conditions, Rodgers chooses to begin his study guiding the reader through the stalls at the Paris Exposition of 1900. From these no doubt prosaic and humdrum displays erupt an array of proposals for social change. Commencing thus, Rodgers invites the reader to think anew about the Progressive era and to cast aside assumptions, some of which may even have been shaped by his own earlier work. Further, placing the reader at the heart of the exposition and mentioning Henry Adams in doing so, Rodgers teases the reader into recognition that he may actually be turning the pages of his own autobiography – “The Education of the American Progressive.”

After having asserted that progressive social thought consisted only of constellations or clusters of ideas towards which Progressives gravitated, we now find that it is possible to talk of Progressive social politics that were meaningful not just for the United States, but also for Britain, Germany and France, and basically for the northern Atlantic world. Yet, not only might one find clusters of reform ideas in the United States, there were many different kinds of reform in these other countries as well. “In France the pioneers of social politics styled themselves radicals, solidaristes, economic interventionistes, or simply proponents of la reforme sociale. In England they went under the name of the ‘new Liberals,’ ‘new radicals,’ Christian Socialists, Fabians or ‘collectivists.’ In Germany, a dozen rival socio-political parties and pressure groups constructed themselves around permutations of the core term sozial.” (p. 52) One may wonder whether Rodgers has contrived a new conjuring trick, pulling out of his hat one well-formed and rather attractive bird, when, after reading the historiography of American Progressivism alone, a flock of mangled pigeons originating in numerous dingy cities might have been anticipated.

The strengths of this volume are so many that they cannot be captured in such a short space.[8] Rodgers makes a full-frontal and withering assault on the notion of American exceptionalism, while his multiple accounts of the transatlantic connections among the hosts of social reformers, drawn from as many archives, would be awe inspiring for almost any historian. Certain passages, like that of Randolph Bourne traveling through Europe on the eve of the “explosion” in 1914, were luminous. And, his description of “crossings” that occurred in both directions produced fresh interpretations of some old topics. A case in point is his reading of Roosevelt’s New Deal, here described as a “culmination” with Americans, dusting off ideas that had been developed earlier in the century across the Atlantic World, taking the lead in social policy (though appearance of this leadership role may result from the author’s pushing of imperialism and racism to the margins, so that fascist and Nazi initiatives appear as occasional influences and not essential to the dialogue).

The work is innovative not just for its attempt to re-conceive Progressive politics. It also continues Rodgers’ larger enterprise of re-familiarizing scholars raised on the social historical monograph with intellectual history, though guided by a clear understanding of what social historians of the 1970s achieved. For, an awareness of Atlantic connections is not itself new. Old style intellectual history had “Men of Good Hope” getting their ideas from abroad (though generally the ideas seemed to flow only in a westerly direction from Hegel to T.H. Green to John Dewey).[9] Social histories of progressivism had focused attention elsewhere, honing in on the policy makers, determining who they were, whom they represented, and what their intentions might have been. Rodgers has taken us back, not to the men of good hope, but to others, often the middle-level social policy wonks (artists caught up in the beauty of social form), who made pilgrimages back and forth across the Atlantic, not with Hegel in their knapsacks but rather a Settlement House’s baseline study or the Beveridge Report.

Working outwards from the World’s Fair does suggest that Rodgers might have pursued other narratives and connections and that this work represents a beginning not an ending in the writing of this kind of history. Rodgers has written as much in his response to those who have noted the absence of race, gender and empire in the study.[10] One wonders, however, whether such histories can coexist floating along different currents, or whether they do not begin to muddy the Atlantic waters. Moreover, a selection of topics that are conspicuous by their absence here might have summoned up different connections. A focus on temperance would have brought in conflicts over race both in the British Empire and the United States, it might also have cast the relative level of American state intervention in a different light; one on birth control might have found a Margaret Sanger on her way to study population growth in India; one on prostitution might have revealed a Teddy Roosevelt troubled by American prostitutes in Shanghai and Japanese ones in Sinclair’s Chicago; and focusing on issues relating to disease would have made the Atlantic seem like a single petri dish.

But what may be most absent is the anxiety that such connections could elicit. Henry Adams confronted by electric generators in Paris wondered “where in hell” the world was heading. So, paraphrasing Ranajit Guha, we might ask whether we can “afford to leave anxiety out of the story.” Doing so promotes an image of society “as a sort of machine operated by a crew who know only how to decide but not to doubt, who know only action but no circumspection, and, in the event of a breakdown, only fear and no anxiety.” What we do not see in this volume is the “crew agonizing” (along with Adams’ incarnation of Teufelsdrockh) “over the immensity of things in a world whose limits are not known to them.”[11] Such anxieties would help account for the fact that the Progressive era was the high noon of American racism and imperialism, and for the related concern Americans evinced in the aftermath of emancipation about the need to learn from others (most notably the British) how they had surmounted the “problems” of freedom. The cover of this splendidly produced volume bears the picture of an Ocean liner; we wondered whether this was the Titanic, about to take with it to the bottom of the ocean W.T. Stead, who wrote about every manifestation of corruption on both sides of the Atlantic (and elsewhere), and whose writings highlighted the sexual, racial, and class anxieties of many Progressives.

Comparative historians, Atlantic Crossings informs us, now need to begin considering how societies intersect – to reveal connections. Rodgers notes that, “The crux of comparative history is difference. By masking interdependencies between nations, freezing historically contingent processes into ideal types, and laying across them a grid of social and political characteristics, the method of comparison throws a powerful light on differences.” While embracing this point and the need for an understanding of connections, or “the world between,” which make differences “historically interesting,” it is also important to remember Peter Kolchin’s assertion that “most historical judgments are implicitly comparative history.”[12] As such, the connections we make (or search for) comprise part of a particular comparative matrix, and presume something beyond – the unconnected (the world outside). There is a limit to what we can look for and the kinds of connections we can establish, of course, but those limits give high definition to the things we connect and examine. What also needs consideration, then, is whether the pursuit of connections can be extended so as to reconfigure our comparisons.

One of these reconfigurations might be undertaken in a manner similar to that described earlier for Eric Foner’s Nothing But Freedom. What one sees across the board throughout are questions of governing in the aftermath of emancipation and the growing threat of labor to the industrial state. Clearly for France and Germany, neither of which did not rely so clearly on the products of slave labor, the question of emancipation was not so significant as it was for Britain and the United States, and yet in a world that was becoming increasingly focused on the needs to cut production costs, while building a society around those who were the victims of this process, the problem of labor was nevertheless a shared one. The fact that ideas flowed across the Atlantic from Britain to the United States, as Foner showed, is not surprising, since the problems of freedom were shared between these two nations. But, once certain trade routes were established for these ideas, other ideas, particularly those coming from German Hegelians, could travel in the vessels that plied these routes. However, it would be a mistake to see Progressivism as an escape from freedom, the emergence of a political philosophy on the corpse of Reconstruction and emancipation. Rather, it was an extension and fruition of the modes of government established to manage post-emancipation societies. In line with David Scott’s analysis we may suggest that the key solution to the predicaments facing industrial societies was found in reform, the rationalization of society, and the changing (“uplifting”) of people to fit social conditions, rather than the changing of the conditions themselves in accordance with the people’s sense of their needs. As such, while many aspects of New Left historians analyses are correct, the degree to which capitalism was to be conserved and safeguarded, the means by which this would be achieved was more in line with the organizational perspective, and demands for often sweeping change. Notions of empire and the state were crucial to such a process of reform and conservation, demanded by the predicament of governmentality.

Empire

In spite of the pioneering work of William Appleman Williams, who with his notion of “imperialism as a way of life" asserted the centrality of imperialism in American history, empire has remained very much an afterthought in American historiography.[13] This is particularly clear in the historiography of Progressivism. One learns that many of the central actors in national reform dramas – people like Josiah Strong, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Albert Beveridge – were imperialists, but this was not considered relevant to the interpretation of the reform movement itself.[14] Imperialism was mentioned in the old Progressive synthesis, but generally in a comforting guise. American international involvement was seen as an extension of the reform impulse. This impulse had emerged in the cities, taken hold in the states, and finally conquered the national arena. It only remained to extend the benefits of reform to the world.[15] The clear weakness in this view was that Progressives' interest in world affairs and their ability to influence intervention in other countries actually preceded their ability to achieve reforms at home. However, the limitations of this model, attached as it was to the portrayal of Progressivism as a fight for the people against elites, were too numerous for it to remain influential among historians for very long. Even so, it was dismissed for its failure to correctly characterize the nature of reform, rather than for its failure to analyze American imperialism correctly. As a result, historians began to focus on the development of bureaucracy or political voting behavior, and imperialism dropped out of the literature.

A most glaring example of the undervaluing of imperialism can be found in John Milton Cooper's The Warrior and the Priest. Cooper begins his work with a clear understanding of how imperialism shaped both Wilson's and Roosevelt's thinking at the turn of the century. Wilson, for example, is quoted as writing in 1900, “There is no masking or concealing the new order of the world...[American possession of the Philippines] has put us in the very presence of the forces which must make the politics of the twentieth century radically unlike the politics of the nineteenth. They concern all nations, for they shall determine the future of the race.”[16] As the book progresses, however, this analysis is shelved and replaced by one focusing on how both Presidents adapted their conservative principles to the demands of this age of reform. The fact that Roosevelt actively endorsed the ideas of the British intellectual James Bryce, while Wilson drew heavily on Englishman Walter Bagehot's work, is mentioned but not really thought through. Both Presidents are seen as idealists who wish to remake America, but in neither case is the importance of the imperial context recognized. Bagehot, above all, was an imperial thinker. His reformulation of liberalism, along with those of Matthew Arnold and T.H. Green, was shaped by the need to redefine the British “citizen” and the “the people” in imperial terms. Instead of being defined in opposition to each other, British classes were to be defined in opposition to the empire’s “uncivilized masses” (an early formulation of the “underclass” perhaps). The emphasis on tradition, the monarchy, Oxbridge and other admittedly unnecessary social and political encumbrances, was vital for the emergence of the imperial citizen. It was also vital for the colonized in his/her attempt to rise up the scale of civilization within the imperial model. All this Woodrow Wilson endorsed in his attack on hyphenated Americans, his assault on black rights, his emphasis on Princeton University as a training ground for “the people”, and his endorsement of the Imperial Presidency.

Roosevelt’s imperial analysis is even clearer, but perhaps also narrower than was Wilson’s. While the latter saw imperial destiny in terms of expanding “American” democratic traditions around the world (a developmental guise for imperialism), the former was concerned with masculinity and raw power. (T.H. Mahan; Takaki) In effect, Wilson was an imperial thinker; Roosevelt was just an imperialist. While the two were related, the former pondered the manner and terms in which diverse people could be incorporated into the body politic, while the latter merely took that body politic as a given and sought its expansion.

Summaries of the historiographical debates which revolve around the era often fail to mention both America’s imperialist ventures abroad and the domestic significance of imperialism. In his 1982 historiographical essay, Daniel T. Rodgers did not mention imperialism, because few historians had focused on its significance. But the omission of imperialism from the literature in part contributed to the failure to create a Progressive synthesis. Indeed, if we place the three sets of ideas delineated by Rodgers within the context of imperialism, we can outline a distinct Progressive ideology. In this ideology, "the language of social bonds" was paramount (this took the form of imperial idealism formulated around the concepts of "the people" and "the citizen"), while conflicts over questions of morality (prohibition), monopoly (anti-trust) and efficiency (conservation) were the arenas within which the imperial ideology was cemented.

While Progressive ideology appeared to incorporate seemingly contradictory elements, nevertheless these strands were shaped and limited by the imperial context and constituted a coherent ideology.[17] This was typical of the workings of empire in its European form also. Examining British practitioners of imperialism in India, Eric Stokes found that they brought together the “gospel of efficiency” and a strong moral code (the white man's burden); both of which found their way into American Progressivism.[18]

Before turning to a vital element of both Progressivism and imperialism, the State, it is important to define exactly what is meant by the terms “empire” and “imperialism”. As Hobsbawm has pointed out, much of the problem with the concept of imperialism (and one of the reasons, I would add, why Americanists eschew the term) lies in its genesis as a term of opprobrium at the turn of the century. Lenin's and Hobson's usage of imperialism was based primarily on the domination by metropolitan, capitalist elites of colonial territories for their own prophet. Clearly, there is a kernel of truth to this view. Its problems lie in the fact that it is too limited to an oppositional vision of a conflict between colonizer and colonized. Moreover, it neglects the way that imperialism works within states as a way of creating consensus where before there was none. In Britain, for example, the imperial notion of the United Kingdom was formulated to bring recalcitrant Scots, Irish and Welsh into a greater Britannia. In the United States, the Civil War could be, and perhaps should be, seen as an imperial war, undertaken by two elites seeking to shape the western territories in their own image, or at least ensure that they were not shaped in the image of the other.

A more inclusive concept of empire is required, then, one which, as William Appleman Williams described it, recognizes “imperialism as a way of life.” This does not suggest that there were no conflicts within American society. Rather, it means that they are transcended or muted by commitment on the part of lower-class and minority groupings to nationalist imperialist goals; it means that all conflicts are reformed and informed by empire so that they become conflicts over the distribution of spoils within the American state.

An important question remains: namely how can American imperialism be so important in American life, while the American State remains relatively weak and undeveloped compared to European nations. Clearly, what I am describing relies on an unorthodox understanding of the American State, where much of it is hidden within “American” ideology. The nature and historiography of the State, therefore, need to be considered at length.

The State

Social historians have, I believe, over-estimated the amount of agency that individuals, lower-class groups, and minorities have been able to attain in American society. With some notable exceptions, they have generally failed to place such individuals and groups within a hegemonic framework, and have not seen how it is that their agency is limited and shaped by various political, intellectual and cultural forces. In particular, such historians have not analyzed the State in any systematic way. The result has been that they have not been able to challenge “accepted truths”, which suggest that American history has witnessed an exceptional degree of individualism and an absence of a strong State. Where such a State can be said to exist it is regarded as a democratic, pluralist and minimalist entity which expresses the essential will of all American people.

When historians do write about the State they generally do so in terms of its bureaucratic and institutional characteristics and they assume that it reflects the power distribution within Civil Society (for example, the economy). Consequently, they have fluctuated between exaggerating either instrumentalism (when capitalists seem dominant) or pluralism (when lower classes and minorities seem to be increasing their influence).[19]

This institutional preoccupation has led to the reaffirmation of a belief in both consensus and American exceptionalism. It is generally believed that, compared to other countries, the State in the United States is undeveloped, and does not need to be firmly established because of the identity of interests existing among all Americans. However, the exact opposite of this is the case. If America is exceptional it is only because the State is more intrusive in society here than it is in comparable societies; the lack of consensus which is so apparent in this country, makes the expression of a State a fundamental part of the daily cultural diet.

Further, in spite of the success of political and social reform movements, the State did not become pluralistic in character, and it did not come to represent each grouping equally. Instead, if we turn our focus away from the normal subjects of social history – women, the lower classes and African-Americans – and place it on gender, class and race we can see more clearly that such reforms occurred because the State had developed in such a way that the reforms were not considered so threatening. Thus, if American out-groups came to accept “American racial destiny”, “American culture”, “national security”, “national regeneration”, “baseball”, and so on, however exclusionary the assumptions on which these were based, then they could be incorporated into the body politic. What I would argue is that the reforms of the Progressive Era witnessed exactly this development. Seemingly pluralistic and liberal reforms occurred within a context of American imperialist ventures, a condemnation of anarchy and anarchists, increased racism, and an entrenchment of notions of masculinity in American culture, so that the paradoxical result of the Progressive era was actually to disempower those people who, at least according to the rhetoric of the period, were supposed to benefit from the reforms.

Implicit within the foregoing analysis is the idea that the State should be seen as having a ideational or cultural dimension in addition to its institutional aspects. Progressives often discussed this dimension in terms of the ethical role of the State, and so the Progressive Era, in my opinion, should be seen in terms of the establishment of this ethical role. Historians have generally overlooked this because they have concentrated on the ambivalence that many Progressives felt towards the institutional State. While reformers sometimes feared bureaucratic excess and the limitation of individual autonomy, they nevertheless believed in the need for national regeneration. This apparent contradiction can only be understood in terms of the on-going imperialist enterprise. For imperialism allowed Americans to establish a state in the international arena without actually defining who and what it would represent. While the definition of the State would be hotly contested among domestic groups – populists, businessmen, trade unionists, suffragists, black activists, etc. – these same groups could be marshaled to support the expansion of “American” interests abroad. In other words, an ethical role for the State could be established seemingly disconnected from the interests of any section of American society. Once this ethical role became firmly established the institutional dimension of the State (which would always be linked to some political, social or economic group) could be minimized because Americans had internalized the ethical State. Just as Karl Marx predicted the withering away of the State following the socialist revolution, the new bourgeois order would see a similar contraction of the institutional state.

This is what is meant in my title by a “State of Faith,” which is taken from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Predicting a time when Americans would become “prone to indulgence of [their] ephemeral and casual desires” and when American society would become marked by class tensions, de Tocqueville offered a “long-term” strategy to “philosophers and men in power” who might wish to morally regenerate society. He advised them to “strive to set a distant aim as the object of human efforts,” and, in my work, this distant aim is the imperialist vision. If this was done, Tocqueville claimed, Americans and mankind generally would “gradually be led without noticing it themselves toward religious belief;” they would be brought “back, by a long and roundabout path, to a state of faith.” [20] Tocqueville was right about this, only the new-found commitment to imperialist liberalism at the turn of the century made the path not so long and roundabout.

The idea of the State developed here, then, is one of an ethical idea allowing for the religious regeneration of the nation. This is an invisible state located in the minds of a nation's inhabitants. It is reflected in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. The inhabitants of Boston in the year 2000 find that they have to conform to a particular ethical code or commit social suicide. Not surprisingly, Julian West from 1887 considers this to be a great increase in the powers of the state and says to Dr. Leete: “The idea of such an extension of the functions of the government is, to say the least, rather overwhelming.” But the reader is surprised by Dr. Leete's response: “Extension!... Where is the extension?”(67) Clearly, for Bellamy the new Bostonians were to internalize the state, internalize a new public spirit, and the State acting as an agent of social control would become superfluous.

This ideology can best be interpreted by understanding the response of Progressive thinkers to Hegelian philosophy.[21] The significance of Hegel's thought, alongside the importance of the State and Imperialism, has been neglected by historians. This is justified, in a way, by the fact that Progressives themselves often downplayed the importance of Hegel as an influence for their ideas.[22] Nevertheless, this is unfortunate for two reasons: first, it leads to an avoidance of discussion of social and political theorists' discourse during this period, resulting, once again, in the tendency to exaggerate the uniqueness of American political debates (for example, the emphasis on “Hamiltonianism” and “Jeffersonianism” is clearly warranted, since these terms were used by the Progressives themselves, but it needs to be tempered by the realization that these “keywords” had their equivalents in political discourses outside the United States); second, it means that historians do not have access to one of the easiest ways of understanding what the Progressives saw themselves as doing, namely developing a radical theory of the State that transcended the class, racial and gender conflicts of the era.

A vital aspect of the defining of a New Liberalism was the development of the idea of a Progressive State, one that did not merely bolster the status quo. This was what people like Herbert Croly and John Dewey disliked about Hegel, that he seemed too conservative (and this is what historians of the New Left, like Kolko and Weinstein have missed in their conspiratorial views of the Progressive reform impulse). The rejection of Hegel was not a rejection of his analysis, but of the politics that had been associated with him in his later years. He had come to be associated with the reactionary Prussian government. What Progressive theorists wished to do was create a political theory that would promote change (what they described as “progress”). Thus they adapted the Hegelian model so that the new elite would be the new university-educated, middle-class bureaucrat, and so that the vision of the future would not merely be the appropriation of “German” ideals and the “German” State by a Prussian elite, but the articulation of “civilized” and “modern” ideas (essentially by the middle class), both at home and abroad, by the American State. What they could not see was that to future historians (and a few prescient theorists like Randolph Bourne) the radicalism inherent within this Progressive doctrine would appear as little more than a conservative conspiracy to channel reforms in directions that would be functional to corporate capitalism. But then, this had been the fate of Hegel’s fundamentally radical notions at the hands of English New Liberals, American Progressives and, of course, Karl Marx.

The acceptance of America’s imperial role depended upon the recognition of the State as a vital part of American society; this recognition of the State gave credibility to intellectuals’ moves towards “the language of social bonds,” and away from concepts of the autonomous individual; it also required the definition or redefinition of concepts like “American”, “civilized”, “modern”, “progress”, and so on; and (owing to the static, rather than dynamic, nature of ideas within this model), this led to the belief that certain gender, class, and race practices in America (which were used to define the above-mentioned concepts) were normative rather than conditional; these normative concepts, clearly not apparent in other “primitive”, “backward” or “uncivilized” societies, were then used to legitimate American imperialism.

Not only does this dialectic work in such a fashion as to consolidate support for particular progressive ideals, it also has the tendency to become hidden, so that the ideas which both generated and were generated by it would become articles of faith; they would become “essential” American characteristics. In this way, the idea of “progress”, obviously at the heart of Progressivism, would be constantly transmogrified from a utopian vision to a teleological and evolutionary justification of the present. In America, this development happened sooner, rather than later, and even before the turn of the century, the Progressive ideology was in place.

Thus, centralizing tendencies in America – the development of a strong bureaucratic state, the emergence of confused, contradictory and yet cohesive concepts of “America” and “the people”, and the nation's foray into imperialism – affected turn-of-the-century social movements, and shaped discourses surrounding the “Labor”, “Woman”, and “Race” Questions which permeated American culture at this time. To put it briefly, the movements for the emancipation of women, African Americans, and labor were each able to make some headway during the Progressive Era not because universalist notions of liberation were dropped in favor of particularist strategies that emphasized a commitment to “American ideals” and the American State. Rather, they did so because such ideas were gaining ground under the guise of universalist notions. Moreover, the emergence of the United States as an imperial power at the turn of the century is critical to our understanding of these developments, and by extension, to our understanding of the political culture that emerged by the end of World War I. The gender, class and racial implications of the emerging imperialist consensus were hierarchical and exclusionary, and not egalitarian and inclusive, as the prevailing pluralistic models maintain.

My point is perhaps best illustrated by turning attention briefly to the relationship between the State and African Americans during the Progressive Era, one part of which can be seen in the changing visions of Africa shared by black Americans during the period. African Americans at this time moved from seeing Africa as a possible haven from American oppression (Bishop Henry McNeil Turner) to seeing it as a place in need of “missionary uplift” (Bishops Levi J. Coppin and Richard Robert Wright, Jr.,). In other words, an important transformation occurred in the minds of many African Americans as they started to see themselves as primarily “American” rather than primarily “African”. The responses of African-American visitors to places like Liberia and South Africa during the 1890s were shaped not only by their own experiences of American society, but also by the increasingly colonialist role that the United States was playing in the world.

Another dimension of the relationship between blacks and the State is the increasingly centrist positions taken by African-American intellectuals during the period. One such intellectual is Reverdy C. Ransom who during the 1890s was espousing a form of socialism, but who steadily moved into the mainstream of the Social Gospel movement. Other important figures following similar trajectories were newspaper editors, of whom many were pulled into the Booker T. Washington camp (itself a vehicle pushing for racial uplift), while others, like William Monroe Trotter, were pushed to political extremes and so discredited.

Empire had a direct impact on the work on the historical writing of two progressive historians, W.E.B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson. Du Bois clearly related the problems of the color-line to the larger issues of capitalist imperialism, and he became increasingly radical during his life and increasingly marginalized, eventually dying in exile in Ghana. Woodson, by contrast, who committed his efforts to the “uplift” of his race at home focused on what he saw as the positive, “civilizing” mission of American interventions abroad. It can be argued that the period which he spent as an educator in the Philippines (after the Filipino independence movement was put down) profoundly influenced the ways he defined “Negro mis-education” later in his life. Although he is currently described as an African-American nationalist, I would suggest that, analyzed in terms of empire, Woodson has to be seen as an integrationist, who, like Booker T. Washington, believed that the future of the race lay in accepting America’s position in the world and working within the confines of this system. While DuBois celebrated African heritage and endeavored to define a class position based upon the culture of the black masses, Woodson went a long way towards purging such culture in a celebration of African-American achievement.

We can end by considering the “rebirth” of freedom in the Civil Rights movement. While the commitment of Southern blacks to bringing about the end of Jim Crow is to be marveled at, for the degree to which they were willing to put themselves in danger in pursuit of freedom, it is nonetheless important to point out that many of the avenues towards change that might have been taken were no longer open to African Americans by the time the Montgomery Bus Boycott occurred in 1956. For example, as labor historians Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein have noted, the CIO Operation Dixie was crushed in the face of post-war anti-communism and McCarthyism. The kinds of threats to the labor system and to the traditions of governmentality that had been established since the Civil War, that this CIO movement represented needed to be resolved before changes might occur in the status of the nation’s Southern blacks.