5. Walter McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), p. 128.
6. George Orwell, 'Review of Power: A New Social Analysis,' Adelphi, Jan. 1939, in Essays (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 107.
7. Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908, 1961).
8. Ronald J. Pestritto, 'Why Progressivism Is Not, and Never Was, a Source of Conservative Values,' Claremont Review of Books, Aug. 25, 2005, www.claremont.org/publications/pubid.439/pub_detail.asp (accessed March 14, 2007). Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1913).
9. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 66, 59.
10. Ibid., p. 111.
11. McDougall, Promised Land, Crusader State, p. 127.
12. John G. West, Darwin's Conservatives: The Misguided Quest (Seattle: Discovery Institute, 2006), p. 61.
13. Woodrow Wilson, Leaders of Men, ed. T. H. Vail Motter (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952), pp. 20, 25-26.
14. Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), p. 165.
15. John Milton Cooper Jr., The Warrior and the Priest: Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 150-51.
16. Beveridge boasted that the Meat Inspection Act constituted 'THE MOST PRONOUNCED EXTENSION OF FEDERAL POWER IN EVERY DI RECTION EVER ENACTED.' McGerr, Fierce Discontent, p. 163. For the quotation, see William E. Leuchtenburg, 'Progressivism and Imperialism: The Progressive Movement and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1916,' Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39, no. 3 (Dec. 1952), p. 484.
17. Walter McDougall's Promised Land, Crusader State is invaluable for understanding this point. McDougall writes:
Historians stress the dynamic crosscurrents in turn-of-the-century American society. Foster Rhea Dulles thought the era 'marked by many contradictions.' Richard Hofstadter identified 'two different moods' one tending toward protest and reform, the other toward national expansion. Frederick Merk wrote of Manifest Destiny contesting with mission, and Ernest May of 'cascades of imperialistic and moralistic oratory.' But the contradictions are only a product of our wish to cleanse the Progressive movement of its taint of imperialism abroad. For at bottom, the belief that American power, guided by a secular and religious spirit of service, could remake foreign societies came as easily to the Progressives as trust-busting, prohibition of child labor, and regulation of interstate commerce, meatpacking, and drugs. Leading imperialists like Roosevelt, Beveridge, and Willard Straight were all Progressives; leading Progressives like Jacob Riis, Gifford Pinchot, and Robert La Follette all supported the Spanish war and the insular acquisitions. (p. 120)
And in a famous 1952 essay, the historian William Leuchtenburg wrote that 'imperialism and progressivism flourished together because they were both expressions of the same philosophy of government, a tendency to judge any action not by the means employed but by the results achieved, a worship of definitive action for action's sake, as John Dewey has pointed out, and an almost religious faith in the democratic mission of America.' Leuchtenburg, 'Progressivism and Imperialism,' p. 500.
18. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 209; Arthur A. Ekrich Jr., The Decline of American Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1967), p. 193.
19. Long also said that it would come to America as 'anti-Fascism,' a fairly prophetic analysis since the left has long considered itself the fighting wedge of 'anti-Fascism.' For the Mencken quotations, see H. L. Mencken, 'Roosevelt: An Autopsy,' in Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Knopf, 1920), pp. 112, 114.
20. Ronald J. Pestritto, Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 255. Emphasis mine.
21. Progressives didn't start widely using the word 'progressive' to describe themselves until 1909. In England progressives might be called 'Tory democrats,' 'Labour imperialists,' 'new liberals,' 'Fabians,' or 'collectivists.' In America progressives might go by 'reformer' or even 'radical' and, of course, Republican or Democrat (the widespread use of the word 'liberal' to describe progressives didn't fully catch on until the 1920s). In France and Germany many of these labels were in play, too, as were such monikers as interventionnistes. Some cited Nietzsche, others Marx, others William James. Many — as Mussolini and Georges Sorel would — claimed all three as influences. Indeed, there's little doubt that some Italian socialist bands called fascios in Italy at the time fell squarely in the 'progressive' camp. And we know that the nationalist intellectuals who laid the groundwork for fascism in Italy were heavily influenced by William James's pragmatism, just as James was influenced by them.
22. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 57, 74.
23. Joseph Jacobs, 'Works of Friedrich Nietzsche,' New York Times, May 7, 1910; Mencken, 'Roosevelt: An Autopsy,' p. 111. Indeed, Richard Hofstadter, the iconic liberal historian, saw Teddy Roosevelt as a thinly veiled fascist. In the words of David Brown, Hofstadter's biographer, Roosevelt's defining characteristic was a 'Mussolini lite' and his politics, marked by a 'stern dedication to nationalism, martial values, and a common spirit of racial identity and destiny' were 'a slight variation of the fascist politics that poisoned Europe following Roosevelt's death.' David S. Brown, Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. xvi, 60.
24. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, pp. 86-87.
25. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 102; Charles A. Beard and James Harvey Robinson, The Development of Modern Europe: An Introduction to the Study of Current History, vol. 2 (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1907), p. 141; Frederic C. Howe, Socialized Germany (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1915), p. 166; Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 66.
26. Murray N. Rothbard, 'World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals,' Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, no. 1 (Winter 1989), p. 103.
27. Woodrow Wilson, The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, vol. 1 (New York: Harper, 1927), pp. 6-10.
28. James Bovard, Freedom in Chains: The Rise of the State and the Demise of the Citizen (New York: St. Martin's, 2000), p. 8.
29. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), pp. 124-25.
30. Wilfred M. McClay, 'Croly's Progressive America,' Public Interest, no. 137 (Fall 1999).
31. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 192.
32. Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism, p. 15; Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny, p. 191.
33. Bovard, Freedom in Chains, p. 8.
34. Leuchtenburg, 'Progressivism and Imperialism,' p. 490.
35. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), p. 14.
36. Herbert Croly, 'Regeneration,' New Republic (June 9, 1920), pp. 40-44; originally found in Sydney Kaplan, 'Social Engineers as Saviors: Effects of World War I on Some American Liberals,' Journal of the History of Ideas (June 1956), pp. 347-69.
