January 13, 2010 09:00 PM
Editor's note: Koil Rowland has been in the practice of writing letters to his friends on significant historical and political issues for several years. The Missouri Record is pleased to print these letters with the author's permission.
A big change has occurred in the American political vocabulary. It’s a change both resultant from and symbolic of a major shift in American political thinking and American political life. The change is that many if not most of the leaders of the political system which called itself liberalism through the last half of the 20th Century and the opening years of this one now are calling themselves progressives. I judge that they’re doing it because they realize that for their purposes liberalism is a used-up word, a word which has lost its totemic power to persuade and inspire, a word bearing so heavy a load of bad connotations by now that it’s of no polemical use to them any more. But words mean things, and when a big and important group virtually abandons one word and substitutes another for it something significant is happening. So maybe it would be a good idea if those of us who have opposed liberalism and the liberals would have a look at the word progressive, trying to understand as best we can what it has meant in the nation’s political life--and what it means today.
The progressive movement in American politics came into being shortly after the close of our Civil War. It grew out of the beliefs and activities of various largely rural organizations which called themselves Granges and Farmers’ Alliances. Elements of those groups joined forces in 1891 to create the Populist Party, which may well have been the most important third party in all of American political history.
The Populists worked for what they saw as rights of the nation’s farmers and laboring classes which they felt were being denied them. The Populist Party sought the free coinage of gold and silver, public ownership of the nation’s utilities, and a graduated income tax. The party lasted for only about two decades, but as a foreshadower of things to come it was a political institution whose importance can hardly be overstated. Parenthetically, it probably is worth mentioning that major parts of the first Populist Party platform echoed almost word for word language in the Communist Manifesto.
Theodore Roosevelt was the leader of a short-lived Progressive Party in the early part of the 20th Century, and sometimes is given credit for being one of progressivism’s founding fathers. I believe it’s a mistake to give him that credit, if credit is the right word. The beginnings of what’s now known as progressivism go a long way further back in American life than Theodore Roosevelt’s time. And TR always was more a conservationist with populist leanings than a true progressive.
If progressivism as we know it today had a single founding father, Woodrow Wilson was that man--Woodrow Wilson, who introduced a graduated income tax to American political life, and having done so had the effrontery to call it a gift to the American people. Wilson had given the American people no gift. What he had done instead was use the government’s monopoly of legal force for redistributionist purposes and to redistributionist effect. Wilson’s embrace of the idea and the fact of the League of Nations was mischievous too, though far less so than his work in enacting a graduated income tax. But it was not Wilson who led the nation in its biggest steps toward what now would be called progressivism, it was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Franklin D. Roosevelt probably has become the nation’s most beloved President. In my opinion he was also incomparably its worst one. Let me outline for you just a few of the reasons I think that.
Using the powers granted to a variety of federal authorities and agencies (AAA, OPA, WPA, TVA, and many others) by a series of compliant Congresses, FDR caused the relationship of individual Americans to their federal government to be changed - - in fundamental ways and perhaps forever. The excuse offered for all this frenzied and revolutionary federal activity was that it was necessary to lift the nation out of The Great Depression, and did so.That excuse was totally bogus. It was our participation in World War II and not anything Roosevelt’s several Administrations accomplished which ended The Great Depression’s grip on the American people.
There were more of FDR’s malefactions than I’ve just cited. Many more. Maybe I’ll devote the whole of a letter to you some time to a cataloging of the wrongs he did. For now, though, let me just make the assertion that of all the things in violation of American law and the American spirit Franklin D. Roosevelt ever did, his leadership role in imposing on our people a so-called social security system was the worst.
As I have written elsewhere, the social security system for which FDR now is so fondly remembered is nothing but a gigantic Ponzi scheme, a scheme whose self-contradictions must doom it to failure in the long run. But as a people we Americans aren’t either much schooled in or much inclined to think about long runs. So as a people we hold the social system dear to our hearts. But it’s swindling us all. And most of us don’t even know that it is.
Things like the graduated income tax and the social security system have been parts of American life for so long now that most of us have come to think of them as rights--among our most basic and important entitlements. But they’re not rights, and we’re not entitled to them. They’re results of malign actions of our federal government, actions redistributive in intent and result. Just as they have been done they can be undone--if and when the American people decide they should be.
But we Americans have been so corrupted by many decades now of dependency on one kind or another of “progressive” governmental actions that the time when we will free ourselves from their debilitating and ultimately lethal embrace may not come soon. I pray it will come soon enough so that the American liberty which is our heritage can be saved and made whole again.
Koil Rowland is a writer in Jefferson City, Missouri.
If progressivism as we know it today had a single founding father, Woodrow Wilson was that man--Woodrow Wilson, who introduced a graduated income tax to American political life, and having done so had the effrontery to call it a gift to the American people.
