In this context, Wilson was perceived as the somewhat more conservative candidate — because, again, he was closer to nineteenth-century laissez-faire liberalism. He promised to limit government's ability to centralize power by corralling industry into the same bed as the state. In a famous campaign speech at the New York Press Club he proclaimed, "The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power." Alas, it is difficult to take his liberty-loving rhetoric too seriously. Just two weeks after his Press Club speech, Wilson returned to his progressive antipathy toward individualism: "While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson's which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible ...But that time is passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise."20
Since Wilson ended up governing largely as a New Nationalist, the subtler distinctions between his and Roosevelt's platforms do not matter very much for our purposes. America was going to get a progressive president no matter what in 1912. And while those of us with soft spots for Teddy might like to think things would have turned out very differently had he won, we are probably deluding ourselves.
HOW IT HAPPENED HERE
The prevailing assumption today is that the rise of fascism in Europe transpired on a completely independent track — that due to numerous national and cultural differences between America and Europe, it couldn't happen here. But this makes no sense whatsoever. Progressivism and, later, fascism were international movements — and, in their origin, expressions of great hopes — that assumed different forms in different countries but drew on the same intellectual wellsprings. Many of the ideas and thinkers the Fascists and Nazis admired were as influential here as they were in Italy and Germany, and vice versa. For example, Henry George, the radical populist guru of American reform, was more revered in Europe than he was in America. His ideas gave shape to the volkisch economic theories on which the Nazi Party was initially founded. Among British Socialists, his Progress and Poverty was a sensation. When Marx's son-in-law came to America to proselytize for scientific socialism, he was so enamored of George that he returned to Europe preaching the gospel of American populism.
From the 1890s to World War I, it was simply understood that progressives in America were fighting the same fight as the various socialist and "new liberal" movements of Europe.21 William Allen White, the famed Kansas progressive, declared in 1911, "We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats [that is, the Socialists] in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause." When Jane Addams seconded Teddy Roosevelt's nomination at the Progressive Party Convention in 1912, she declared, "The new party has become the American exponent of a world-wide movement toward juster social conditions, a movement which the United States, lagging behind other great nations, has been unaccountably slow to embody in political action."22
Ultimately, however, America was the sorcerer's apprentice to Europe's master. American writers and activists drank from European intellectual wells like men dying of thirst. "Nietzsche is in the air," declared a reviewer in the New York Times in 1910. "Whatever one reads of a speculative kind one is sure to come across the name of Nietzsche sooner or later." Indeed, he went on, "[m]uch of the Pragmatism of Prof. [William] James bears auspicious resemblance to doctrines of Nietzsche." Noticing that Roosevelt was always reading German books and "borrowing" from Nietzsche's philosophy, Mencken (a serious, if imperfect, Nietzsche scholar himself) concluded, "Theodore had swallowed Friedrich as a peasant swallows Peruna — bottle, cork, label and testimonials."23 William James, America's preeminent philosopher, looked to the southern corners of the continent as well. As discussed earlier, James was a close student of the Italian pragmatists who were busy laying the groundwork for Mussolini's Fascism, and Mussolini would regularly acknowledge his debt to James and American Pragmatism.
But no nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany. W. E. B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay.24
No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler," writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought." Bismarck's "top-down socialism," which delivered the eight-hour workday, health care, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old," he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward," he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system...the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.25
Indeed, few figures represent the foreign, particularly German influence on Progressivism better than Wilson himself. Wilson's faith that society could be bent to the will of social planners was formed at Johns Hopkins, the first American university to be founded on the German model. Virtually all of Wilson's professors had studied in Germany — as had almost every one of the school's fifty-three faculty members. But his most prominent and influential teacher was Richard Ely, the "dean of American economics," who in his day was more vital to Progressivism than Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek have been to modern conservatism. Despite his open hostility to private property, and his fondness for what would today be called McCarthyite politics, Ely was not a top-down socialist like Bismarck. Rather, he taught his students to imagine a socialism of spirit that would replace laissez-faire from within men's hearts. Ely eventually moved to the University of Wisconsin, where he helped found the "Wisconsin model" — a system still admired by leftist intellectuals whereby college faculties help run the state. Ely also served as a mentor to Teddy Roosevelt, who said that Ely "first introduced me to radicalism in economics and then made me sane in my radicalism."26