W. E. B. DuBois was thunderstruck. "I am writing this in Russia," he wrote back to his readers in the Crisis. "I am sitting in Revolution Square...I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik."42
DuBois offers a good illustration of how fascism and communism appealed to the same progressive impulses and aspirations. Like many progressives, he'd studied in Germany in the 1890s and retained a fondness for the Prussian model. An anti-Semite early in his career — in 1924 his magazines started carrying a swastika on the cover, despite complaints from Jewish progressives — DuBois applied for a grant in 1935 from an organization with known ties to the Nazis that was run by a well-known Jew hater who'd dined with Joseph Goebbels. He truly believed the Nazis had a lot of great ideas and that America had much to learn from Germany's experiment in National Socialism (though later, DuBois denounced Nazi anti-Semitism).
And so it was with other pro-Soviet liberal icons. Recall how a year before Lincoln Steffens announced he'd seen the future in the Soviet Union, he'd said much the same thing about Fascist Italy. The heroic success of fascism, according to Steffens, made Western democracy — run by "petty persons with petty purposes" — look pathetic by comparison. For Steffens and countless other liberals, Mussolini, Lenin, and Stalin were all doing the same thing: transforming corrupt, outdated societies. Tugwell praised Lenin as a pragmatist who was merely running an "experiment." The same was true of Mussolini, he explained.
The New Republic defended both fascism and communism on similar grounds throughout the 1920s. How, a correspondent asked, could the magazine think Mussolini's brutality was a "good thing"? Croly answered that it was not, "any more than it was a 'good thing' for the United States, let us say, to cement their Union by waging a civil war which resulted in the extermination of slavery. But sometimes a nation drifts into a predicament from which it can be rescued only by the adoption of a violent remedy."43
Charles Beard summed up the fascination well. Il Duce's hostility to democracy was no big deal, he explained. After all, the "fathers of the American Republic, notably Hamilton, Madison, and John Adams, were as voluminous and vehement [in opposing democracy] as any Fascist could desire." Mussolini's dictatorial style was likewise perfectly consistent with the "American gospel of action, action, action." But what really captured Beard's imagination was the economic system inherent to fascism, namely corporatism. According to Beard, Mussolini had succeeded in bringing about "by force of the State the most compact and unified organization of capitalists and laborers into two camps which the world has ever seen."44
The key concept for rationalizing progressive utopianism was "experimentation," justified in the language of Nietzschean authenticity, Darwinian evolution, and Hegelian historicism and explained in the argot of William James's pragmatism. Scientific knowledge advanced by trial and error. Human evolution advanced by trial and error. History, according to Hegel, progressed through the interplay of thesis and antithesis. These experiments were the same process on a vast scale. So what if Mussolini cracked skulls or Lenin lined up dissident socialists? The progressives believed they were participating in a process of ascendance to a more modern, more "evolved" way of organizing society, replete with modern machines, modern medicine, modern politics. In a distinctly American way, Wilson was as much a pioneer of this movement as Mussolini. A devoted Hegelian — he even invoked Hegel in a love letter to his wife — Wilson believed that history was a scientific, unfolding process. Darwinism was the perfect complement to such thinking because it seemed to confirm that the "laws" of history were reflected in our natural surroundings. "In our own day," Wilson wrote while still a political scientist, "whenever we discuss the structure or development of a thing...we consciously or unconsciously follow Mr. Darwin."45
Wilson won the election of 1912 in an electoral college landslide, but with only 42 percent of the popular vote. He immediately set about to convert the Democratic Party into a progressive party and, in turn, make it the engine for a transformation of America. In January 1913 he vowed to "pick out progressives and only progressives" for his administration. "No one," he proclaimed in his inaugural address, "can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party...I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking men, to my side. I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!" But he warned elsewhere, "If you are not a progressive...you better look out."46
Without the sorts of mandates or national emergencies other liberal presidents enjoyed, Wilson's considerable legislative success is largely attributable to intense party discipline. In an unprecedented move, he kept Congress in continual session for a year and a half, something even Lincoln hadn't done during the Civil War. Sounding every bit the Crolyite, he converted almost completely to the New Nationalism he had recently denounced, claiming he wanted no "antagonism between business and government."47 In terms of domestic policy, Wilson was successful in winning the support of progressives in all parties. But he failed to win over Roosevelt's followers when it came to foreign policy. Despite imperialist excursions throughout the Americas, Wilson was deemed too soft. Senator Albert Beveridge, who had led the progressives to their greatest legislative successes in the Senate, denounced Wilson for refusing to send troops to defend American interests in China or install a strongman in Mexico. Increasingly, the core of the Progressive Party became almost entirely devoted to "preparedness" — shorthand for a big military buildup and imperial assertiveness.
The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 distracted Wilson and the country from domestic concerns. It also proved a boon to the American economy, cutting off the flow of cheap immigrant labor and increasing the demand for American exports — something to keep in mind the next time someone tells you that the Wilson era proves progressive policies and prosperity go hand in hand.
Despite Wilson's promise to keep us out of it, America entered the war in 1917. In hindsight, this was probably a misguided, albeit foregone, intervention. But the complaint that the war wasn't in America's interests misses the point. Wilson boasted as much time and again. "There is not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are fighting for," he declared. Wilson was a humble servant of the Lord, and therefore selfishness could not enter into it.48
Even for ostensibly secular progressives the war served as a divine call to arms. They were desperate to get their hands on the levers of power and use the war to reshape society. The capital was so thick with would-be social engineers during the war that, as one writer observed, "the Cosmos Club was little better than a faculty meeting of all the universities."49 Progressive businessmen were just as eager, opting to work for the president for next to nothing — hence the phrase "dollar-a-year men." Of course, they were compensated in other ways, as we shall see.