Progress: A Hundred Years

[PoliticalChic]

You really just made an argument that TR was a progressive.

Many have.


The comparison is with the far more Progressive, the ant-Constitution, racist, Woodrow Wilson.

“…no one was more important to the origins of the administrative state in America than Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow. Wilson served as the 26th President of the United States and was a leading academic advocate of Progressive ideas long before his entry into politics. Much of his contribution to Progressive thought came in his work from the 1880s,…” The Birth of the Administrative State: Where It Came From and What It Means for Limited Government





Why am I responsible for both sides of the argument????

I was waiting for some to post this:

a. Teddy Roosevelt, during the Coal Strike of 1902: “To hell with the Constitution when people want coal.”

b. And in his (Roosevelt’s) speech “The New Nationalism,” 1902: “The state has a role in effecting economic equality, and superintending private property.”

c. And “The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.”

I don't think someone need be 100% progressive, or 100% conservative to be considered one or the other.

1. The first two words suggest someone else is posting for you.



Now, to proceed with your education.....

2. Progressives view the state as primary and the individual, secondary.

a. Woodrow Wilson's essay “Socialism and Democracy:” ‘Limitations of public authority must be put aside; the state may cross that boundary at will.’The collective is not limited by individual rights.


b. . “The American intellectual class from the mid 19th century onward has disliked liberalism (which originally referred to individualism, private property, and limits on power) precisely because the liberal society has no overarching goal.” http://fff.org/freedom/fd0203c.asp



3. Progressives tried to use war to change the American psyche to erase ‘individualism:

a. “Once the war is on, the conviction spreads that individual thought is helpless, that the only way one can count is as a cog in the great wheel. There is no good holding back. We are told to dry our unnoticed and ineffective tears and plunge into the great work.”
From a Randolph Bourne essay published in June 1917, “The War and the Intellectuals.”


b. John Dewey reveled in the thought that the war might force Americans to “give up much of our economic freedom…we shall have to lay by our good natured individualism and march in step.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-op goldberg20jan20,1,3087455.column


c. Teddy Roosevelt, in his “New Nationalism” speech” rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it.” New Nationalism Speech | Teaching American History



Such is the belief of a progressive.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Wrong. TR was not as anti-Constitution as Wilson.
Wilson despised the Constitution. TR gave it a nod.

1. The historian Mowry called TR “the advance agent of mainstream progressivism.”

a. It was TR’s belief that “executive power was limited only by specific restrictions and prohibitions appearing in the Constitution.” According to TR, “I did not usurp power, but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power.”

b. Taft condemned this as an “unsafe doctrine, ”which assumes the President “is to play the part of a universal providence and set all things right.”
Pringle, “The Life and Times of William Howard Taft,” p.425.



2. TR and Taft diverged in the way they flexed their ‘progressive’ muscle toward big business, and trusts. TR, rather than desiring to end trusts, wanted government regulation of same, while Taft invested his love of law, pursued strict enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act against every big corporation he could find. Pringle, “The Life and Times of William Howard Taft,” p. 658

a. In the beginning, Taft continued TR’s programs. His administration initiated twice as many anti-trust suits as had TR’s (TR: forty-four in seven years; Taft: ninety in three years). http://www.delbarton.org/OnCampus/academics/Teacher_Sites/Richard/ClassNotes/UnitVI.html


3. Taft viewed TR, Debs and Wilson as radicals and viewed himself as knowing he had “no part to play but that of a conservative, and that I am going to play.” Quoted in Pringle, “The Life and Times of William Howard Taft,” vol. 2, p. 658.
He championed the conservative creed of individualism, while warning of the dangers of socialism.

This view places him squarely at the very opposite of Wilson.


4. At the Socialist convention in 1898, Debs accepted Victor Berger’s Socialist Democratic Party platform: immediate overthrow of capitalism, nationalization of resources, improvement of working conditions, and equality for women.

You really just made an argument that TR was a progressive.

Many have.


The comparison is with the far more Progressive, the ant-Constitution, racist, Woodrow Wilson.

“…no one was more important to the origins of the administrative state in America than Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow. Wilson served as the 26th President of the United States and was a leading academic advocate of Progressive ideas long before his entry into politics. Much of his contribution to Progressive thought came in his work from the 1880s,…” The Birth of the Administrative State: Where It Came From and What It Means for Limited Government





Why am I responsible for both sides of the argument????

I was waiting for some to post this:

a. Teddy Roosevelt, during the Coal Strike of 1902: “To hell with the Constitution when people want coal.”

b. And in his (Roosevelt’s) speech “The New Nationalism,” 1902: “The state has a role in effecting economic equality, and superintending private property.”

c. And “The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.”

The Constitution is not a rule book, where questions of fair or foul, right or wrong, etc., can be easily looked up and settled.

Even the Supreme Court isn't at any given time sure what the Constitution means, given the 5 to 4, 6 to 3 rulings.

Or they're letting their own agendas rule them.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

You really just made an argument that TR was a progressive.

Many have.


The comparison is with the far more Progressive, the ant-Constitution, racist, Woodrow Wilson.

“…no one was more important to the origins of the administrative state in America than Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow. Wilson served as the 26th President of the United States and was a leading academic advocate of Progressive ideas long before his entry into politics. Much of his contribution to Progressive thought came in his work from the 1880s,…” The Birth of the Administrative State: Where It Came From and What It Means for Limited Government





Why am I responsible for both sides of the argument????

I was waiting for some to post this:

a. Teddy Roosevelt, during the Coal Strike of 1902: “To hell with the Constitution when people want coal.”

b. And in his (Roosevelt’s) speech “The New Nationalism,” 1902: “The state has a role in effecting economic equality, and superintending private property.”

c. And “The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.”

The Constitution is not a rule book, where questions of fair or foul, right or wrong, etc., can be easily looked up and settled.

Even the Supreme Court isn't at any given time sure what the Constitution means, given the 5 to 4, 6 to 3 rulings.

Or they're letting their own agendas rule them.

The Constitution is a rule book.

 

[PoliticalChic]

You really just made an argument that TR was a progressive.

Many have.


The comparison is with the far more Progressive, the ant-Constitution, racist, Woodrow Wilson.

“…no one was more important to the origins of the administrative state in America than Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow. Wilson served as the 26th President of the United States and was a leading academic advocate of Progressive ideas long before his entry into politics. Much of his contribution to Progressive thought came in his work from the 1880s,…” The Birth of the Administrative State: Where It Came From and What It Means for Limited Government





Why am I responsible for both sides of the argument????

I was waiting for some to post this:

a. Teddy Roosevelt, during the Coal Strike of 1902: “To hell with the Constitution when people want coal.”

b. And in his (Roosevelt’s) speech “The New Nationalism,” 1902: “The state has a role in effecting economic equality, and superintending private property.”

c. And “The right to regulate the use of wealth in the public interest is universally admitted. Let us admit also the right to regulate the terms and conditions of labor, which is the chief element of wealth, directly in the interest of the common good.”

The Constitution is not a rule book, where questions of fair or foul, right or wrong, etc., can be easily looked up and settled.

Even the Supreme Court isn't at any given time sure what the Constitution means, given the 5 to 4, 6 to 3 rulings.

Or they're letting their own agendas rule them.

"The Constitution is not a rule book, where questions of fair or foul, right or wrong, etc., can be easily looked up and settled.."

Only true if one is a Progressive, whose aim it is to purposely misunderstand.




As a basis for understanding the Commerce Clause, Professor Barnett examined over 1500 times the word ‘commerce’ appeared in the Philadelphia Gazette between 1715 and 1800. In none of these was the term used to apply more broadly than the meaning identified by Justice Thomas in his concurring opinion in ‘Lopez,’ in which he maintained that the word ‘commerce’ refers to the trade and exchange of goods, and that process, including transportation of same. A common trilogy was ‘agriculture, manufacturing and commerce.’

For an originalist, direct evidence of the actual use of a word is the most important source of the word’s meaning. It is more important than referring to the ‘broader context,’ or the ‘larger context,’ or the ‘underlying principles,’ which is the means by which some jurists are able to turn ‘black’ into ‘white’, and ‘up’ into ‘down.’
“Originalism,” Steven Calabresi