Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Service

In the lead up to modern redistributive social justice, the preceding movement used to call itself the "social gospel". This has proven to be a particularly hard shell for me to crack, but thankfully I'm not the only one out here trying to learn the history of progressivism and show it to others.

An article by Dr. Richard M. Gamble titled "Savior Nation: Woodrow Wilson and the Gospel of Service". Here's the PDF downloadable version, and here's the Google Docs directly viewable version lays it all out pretty well. Here's an example:

The United States had preserved its own liberty and now as a belligerent power was “an instrument in the hands of God to see that liberty is made secure for mankind.” Wilson, who habitually reversed the logic and sequence of cause and effect in history, derived the real meaning of the past from the present, of the Civil War from the later Great War: “We did not know that God was working out in His own way the method by which we should best serve human freedom—by making this nation a great, united, indivisible, indestructible instrument in His hands for the accomplishment of these great things.” 34 American history was a clear and seamless revelation to Wilson, the meaning of the Old Testament waiting to be read in the New.

In short, it seems that for Wilson American history and its principles and even its symbols belonged to all humanity. To think otherwise would have been the epitome of national selfishness, an unspeakable crime to the humanitarian internationalists of the Progressive Era. In a remarkable speech given before the outbreak of the European war in the summer of 1914, just days after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Wilson stood in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia on the Fourth of July and claimed that since the United States was the champion of “the rights of humanity” then its “flag is the flag, not only of America, but of humanity.”35 He divorced the symbolism of the flag’s colors and stars and stripes from their historical meaning and reinvented the banner as a universal symbol for the freedom of all mankind - an audacious claim of boundless national mission.

Dr Gamble's essay is compelling, at least to me, as to the corrupting nature of Wilson's Presidency, particularly in his use and abuse of history and the faith of the people to rationalize doing things that should never have been done.

http://tinyurl.com/cmzqlsu

William Z Foster's speech to the Intercollegiate Socialist Society

In the 'Socialist Review', the publication for the ISS, the following is written. (November 1920, page 185)

The I.S.S. Convention

While every session of the Eleventh Annual Convention of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, held in New York City on December 29th and 30th, 1919, was filled with vital discussion, the big dinner, devoted to a symposium on "The American Labor Revolt: Its Meaning," and attended by some 400 collegians, elicited, in the nature of the case, the greatest public attention. William Z. Foster, Secretary of the Committee for Organizing Iron and Steel Workers, the chief speaker of the occasion, gripped the audience with a thrilling story of heroic sacrifice and of the developing solidarity of labor as witnessed in the steel industry. Foster first told of the organization of the meat packing industry during the war, and the beginning, on August 1, 1918, of the campaign for the unionization of the steel workers.

William Z. Foster

"I have no patience with the radical who says that nothing can be accomplished through the regular trade union movement. The fault is not with the trade unions, but with the radical. The movement is shrieking for able men and if a radical has constructive ideas, the trade unionist will pick up these ideas and put them over. I know from experience of what I am talking.

"Formerly the union organizers used to begin their work among the steel men by organizing those of one craft in one locality. Their activities would be discovered and the men in the union would be promptly discharged. This happened over and over again. I proposed to start with the organization of all crafts in all localities. If we had entered on a big campaign along these lines at that time we would have been thoroughly organized before the armistice was declared. The suggestion seemed too great a departure for the unions to make. So we employed only a few organizers and started them in the Chicago district, and the men in Gary and Indiana Harbor came in by the thousands.

"We then went to Pittsburgh. We had to fight everyone in the town. Pittsburgh is a company owned town from top to bottom. The press, the banks, and other institutions-all are controlled by the interests, with the United States Steel Corporation the boss on the job.

"For weeks we tried to obtain permission to address peaceful meetings. We couldn't get results. Finally we decided to establish free speech ourselves. We went to McKeesport and asked the Mayor for the privilege of holding a meeting. He refused us our constitutional rights. We decided to defy the local authorities. We put up huge posters announcing the meeting, urging all who believed in sixteenth-century absolutism to stay away and those who believed in President Wilson's democracy to attend. The Mayor backed up and we held the meeting.

"We took the fight into Duquesne. We asked the Mayor for a permit to speak. Rabbi Wise was scheduled as the principal speaker. The Mayor of this town was not only mayor, but judge, one of the chief bankers, a president of the local steel mill, etc. He told us that Jesus Christ couldn't speak in Duquesne for the A.F. of L. We leased a lot, and one by one Mother Jones, another organizer, and myself were arrested as we began to speak and were fined $100 and costs. Still another organizer, hearing of the meeting, and entering the police station to pay the fines of those arrested was also hauled in.

"In those localities the deputy sheriffs, the company police, the private detectives, the city police, and the state police all cooperate against the men. Time and again workers have been arrested and fined $50 and costs for merely being found on strike!"

Mr Foster described the commissary department of the strike committee, and declared that, instead of the strike causing the United States Steel Corporation a loss of $20,000,000 the pre strike-calculation of the officials, it had resulted in a loss of $400 000,000. He felt that the eight-hour day would be won as a result of the strike.

William Z. Foster was a communist, an organizer, and a writer. More general information about him here. He would go on to write the book "Toward Soviet America".

The ISS was founded in 1905 by many Fabian-minded radicals. The ISS would go on to re-name itself LID, the League for Industrial Democracy. The LID's student wing would later on re-name itself SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society.

http://tinyurl.com/d92spwg

Progressivism: Transforming the executive into a legislator

Herbert Croly was a man of vision. He had a vision of future presidents where they didn't merely just execute the laws passed by congress, but the president himself was head legislator. Sound familiar? It should, that's how just about every president has acted since the progressive era. In "Progressive Democracy", the following is written: (page 355)

In the plan of state government which I have sketched in a previous chapter the executive has become essentially a representative agency. His primary business is that of organizing a temporary majority of the electorate, and of carrying its will into legal effect. He becomes primarily a law-giver and only secondarily an agency for carrying out existing laws. Yet he is none the less at the head of the administration; and the great majority of the progressives want him to be more responsible than he is now for administrative efficiency. They want him, that is, to have the power of appointment and dismissal over the upper grades of the civil service in very much the same way that the owner of a private business would have over his employees, and they want to liberate the power of appointment from the partisan abuses which have resulted from the custom of confirmation by a senate.

But they propose to grant this power to the executive in the interest not of frequent changes in administrative personnel, but in that of a relatively prolonged official tenure. The more clear-sighted progressives almost unanimously believe in a body of expert administrative officials, which shall not be removed with every alteration in the executive, but which shall be placed and continued in office in order to devise means for carrying out the official policy of the state, no matter what that policy may be. Such is, of course, the situation in European countries. The executive changes more or less frequently in nations governed by a Parliament, but the administration remains.

Now this is exactly what we have today. Presidents run for office saying they'll do this or that, raise or cut taxes, get x policy done, or repeal something.

Is this how an executive acts? Or is this how representatives act?

Recall Woodrow Wilson's declaration that he would be an unconstitutional governor. What was Wilson saying? Among other things, he was saying that he would shirk his constitutional duty to execute, and be an active legislator.(and as President, he continued this) The lines are blurred over seas in European parliaments, with respect to who has power to do what.

Our constitution prescribes a strict separation of powers.(one which progressives widely have disdain for)

Anybody who truely seeks to get rid of this national ill called 'progressivism' will at some point have to address this. We need to stop the president from legislating and put him back into his constitutional box. Since the era of Roosevelt and Wilson and the activist presidency, our liberties have become less secure, not more secure. The Founding Fathers gave us these firewalls on purpose, because protecting Liberty is much more essential than any "getting things done".

http://tinyurl.com/cqd6z2g

Fabian Tracts: Method of Propaganda

In "The Encyclopedia of Social Reform", W. D. P. Bliss(Founder, Fabian Society U.S.A.) writes the following: (Page 579)

The great literary success of the society, however, has been its Fabian Essays. In 1889 a course of seven lectures, which had been previously delivered before the society by membersof the society (George Bernard Shaw, Sidney Webb, William Clarke, S. Olivier, Graham Wallas, Annie Besant, and Hubert Bland) was published under the name of Fabian Essays in Socialism, and met with most marked success. Over 30,000 copies have been sold in England, and two American editions have appeared. The tracts are accurate and concise statements of industrial facts or explanations of the application of the principles of socialism to actual and existing political and social problems.

This is of course a pretty generic laudatory statement. But what's tucked into the sidebar is this:

Method of Propaganda

This is repeated by G. D. H. Cole, who was a part of the Fabian Executive and was at one time the Society's Executive Chair. Cole wrote Fabian Tract # 238 titled: "Some essentials of socialist propaganda: a tract for the times".

This is an important part of the process of permeation.

http://tinyurl.com/aef9pqq

Progressivism: The judiciary is an "expert panel" on the constitution

The progressives believe that the administrators should be separate from "politics". (I'll demonstrate this below) What they mean by "politics", is the political process. That is, you and I, the voting public.

In "Politics and Administration", Frank Goodnow writes the following: (Page 9)

Whatever may be the truth or error in this conception of the state, it is still true that political functions group themselves naturally under two heads, which are equally applicable to the mental operations and the actions of self conscious personalities. That is, the action of the state as a political entity consists either in operations necessary to the expression of its will, or in operations necessary to the execution of that will.

Note how in both instances the state is supreme. No mention of what the people actually want. And he goes on to talk about the will of "the sovereign", which is a lift right out of Hobbes' Leviathan. A book which lays out a tyrannical state. He talks about Leviathan on page 8.

But in keeping with this comment, you have the will of the state and the expression of that will. In order for that will(divorced from the people) to be expressed or executed, you need institutions which carry forward whatever it is that the government wants done. With that in mind, here is what Goodnow states on page 87:

The governmental authorities intrusted with the discharge of the administrative function should not only, like judges, be free from the influence of politics; they should also, again like judges, have considerable permanence of tenure. They should have permanence of tenure because the excellence of their work is often conditioned by the fact that they are expert, and expertness comes largely from long practice.

First, regarding the dirty influence of 'politics', Goodnow was hardly alone in this view. Herbert Croly agreed with this sentiment. In "Progressive Democracy", Chapter 17: "The Administration as an Agent of Democracy", Croly writes the following: (page 360)

In almost every case it depends for its success upon the ability and disinterestedness with which the law is administered.

"Disinterestedness" is the key. This is what makes "politics" so dirty and ugly: All of your individual private interests. Your private interests are what taint and corrupt the public interest, because your representatives are subject to your selfish wants and needs. But the administrators are not elected, they are expert, they are pure, they serve the public interest, they are disinterested. The public interest, those two heads Goodnow wrote about. The will of the state and the expression of that will.

Second, Goodnow is looking at the judiciary as a role model for administrative agencies, but in doing so he is readily putting on display his view that the judiciary is in/of itself an administrative agency. And what do they administer? The constitution. Woodrow Wilson writes in Constitutional Government (Page 155):

The tests of the federal Constitution can be applied in the state courts, and the tests of the state constitutions in the federal courts, but only in such a way as to make the federal courts the final judges of what the meaning and intent of the federal Constitution is, and the state courts the final judges and interpreters of what the state constitutions forbid or require.

One can't help but notice how Wilson wants to use the courts and constitutions against each other to systematically test for weaknesses. Like a foreign invader. But nonetheless, you see again the role of the judiciary in the progressive mindset. The judges are merely an expert panel among many. They say what it really says, not the text of the document.

It should be remembered, that Wilson recognized Goodnow's expertise on the matter:

In fact, when he later taught administration in the 1890s, he said that there was only one author other than himself who understood administration as a separate discipline: Frank Goodnow.[31]

We can see the judiciary as an expert panel on the Constitution in action. Congress already executed the will, now the expert panelists will express the will in written form. In J. W. Hampton, Jr. & Co. v. United States, 276 U.S. 394 (1928), Chief Justice William Howard Taft declared the following:

If Congress shall lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to [exercise the delegated authority] is directed to conform, such legislative action is not a forbidden delegation of legislative power. If it is thought wise to vary the customs duties according to changing conditions of production at home and abroad, it may authorize the Chief Executive to carry out this purpose, with the advisory assistance of a Tariff Commission appointed under congressional authority. * see footnote

This strikes right at the very heart of one of the things that Woodrow Wilson hated most, separation of powers. When Wilson declared that he would be an unconstitutional governor, that's exactly what he was announcing. And later as president, he made speeches about the "mechanical" and rigid nature of the constitution:

No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick co-operation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose. Their co-operation is indispensable, their warfare fatal. There can be no successful government without the intimate, instinctive co-ordination of the organs of life and action.

That's the only way progressivism can work. The branches stop fighting each other, and start fighting against us. The people. And of course, our selfish, dirty, private interests.

This is why the colleges don't teach the constitution anymore, instead they teach case law. In order for suitable experts on the Constitution to be trained, they need to know where this is going, not where it started. If potential jurisprudents read the Constitution, they would know that at some point we've gone too far away from what the document actually states, and they would be unsuitable to be an administrator on the Supreme Court. Or any court, for that matter.

* In the Taft quote, the four words in the square braces come from the Hillsdale Constitution 201 lecture. Part 7, "The Transformation of America's Political Institutions" 17:55. Lecture 7 was very helpful in several places for the construction of this post.

http://tinyurl.com/akncxtv

Reassessing the Presidency

Now that Hillsdale's lecture series Constitution 201 has concluded, I would like to just take a short moment to point out another series that has some segments similar to what Hillsdale presented.

I initially came across this by doing research into the work of one of Hillsdale's professors, Richard M. Gamble. In The Mises series "Reassessing the Presidency", Gamble lays out very similar concepts about Woodrow Wilson as you saw in Constitution 201, or as you will find in my archives.

So far I have only listened to the sections regarding Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Both of these sections appear to be very well researched and informative into the danger that progressivism presents our country.

The Mises audio lectures have also been uploaded to Youtube, if you so prefer, and for ease of navigation I have linked to them below. I have these listed in the same order as on the Mises page.

Harry Truman and the Imperial Presidency | Ralph Raico

The Impossibility of Limited Government | Hans-Hermann Hoppe

William McKinley: Architect of the American Empire | Joseph R. Stromberg

Martin van Buren: What Greatness Really Means | Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Presidential Money Mismanagement from FDR to Nixon | Joseph T. Salerno

Teddy Roosevelt and the Origins of the Modern Welfare-Warfare State | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Despotism Loves Company: The Story of Roosevelt and Stalin | Yuri N. Maltsev

Woodrow Wilson's Revolution Within the Form | Richard Gamble

The President as Social Engineer | Michael Levin

Unimagined Power: The Presidency in the History of Political Philosophy | Paul Gottfried

The Supreme Court as Accomplice: Judicial Backing for Executive Power | Marshall DeRosa

The Electoral College as a Brake on Presidential Power | Randall G. Holcombe

The Warren Commission: A Rothbardian Analysis | James Dunlap

Lincoln and the Triumph of Mercantilism | Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Presidential Use and Abuse of the Sherman Act: Cleveland to Clinton | George Bittlingmayer

Reluctant Imperialism? William Howard Taft and the Colonial Empire | William Marina

The Use of George Washington in the Statist Offensive | David Gordon

From Bad to Worse: Interventionist Bias in Conventional Presidential Rankings | Richard Vedder

http://tinyurl.com/bk3m5qm

Hugo Chavez: Democracy is impossible in a Capitalist system

In an interview that a lot of people missed, BBC interviewer Stephen Sackur has an exchange with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. (Video, Jun 21st 2010) Much of the interview is what you would expect, but one thing stands out:

(Click for larger)

As is usual, when these people are in front of an audience that they perceive as friendly, they are more honest than they'd otherwise be.

And Hugo Chavez is not alone in this belief. Let's start with Woodrow Wilson.

"it is very clear that in fundamental theory socialism and democracy are almost if not quite one and the same"

("Socialism And Democracy", 1887)

Occupy Wall Street:

"The only way to have a genuinely democratic society would also be to abolish capitalism in this state"

(Occupy Strategy Session, March 2012)

Weather Underground:

"The struggle for self-determination has had two stages : (1 ) a united front against imperialism and for New Democracy (which is a joint dictatorship of anti-colonial classes led by the proletariat, the content of which a compromise between the interests of the proletariat and nationalist peasants , petit bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie) ; and ( 2) developing out of the new democratic stage, socialism."

(You Don't Need A Weatherman To Know Which Way The Wind Blows, 1969.)

Van Jones/STORM Manifesto

"Like all effective organizations, STORM had to figure out how to support leadership while fostering democracy."

The manifesto "Reclaiming Revolution" is one of those which I recorded as an audiobook. If you want to understand Jones and the left, this manifesto is a great place to start. If you can't make time to read it, then you have the option listen to it. The STORM manifesto uses "Democracy" or "Democratic" 42 times.

And finally, the Fabian Society.

"She (Greece) fell before a united Macedon, even as Macedon fell before the larger unity of the Roman Empire. But did they not try a virtual Socialism in Athens? And while it endured, did it not produce an individuality elsewhere unequaled in the world?"

(William Dwight Porter Bliss, Founder of the American Branch of the Fabian Society. "Where Socialism was Tried" - November 11th, 1905.) In case you don't go read the article, he is indeed pointing to the birthplace proper of Democracy as his proof that Socialism has been tried. Athens, Greece.

The left's active definition of the word "Democracy" is "Socialism", and it has been for a very long time. They'll never announce it openly enough to make it into a dictionary,(or at least, every dictionary I've seen treats democracy and socialism as separate items) but it's pretty set in stone for me. They use a different language than we do and it's important to understand their language, if you truely want to stop them.

http://tinyurl.com/bmzppau