The Promise of American Life

Herbert Croly was a journalist and writer who wrote his most significant work just after the beginning of the twentieth century. He makes the case most simply: there have been two contending forces within liberalism fighting for the soul of the country from the very beginning. That is, there have been two distinct liberalisms. One was the Hamiltonian emphasis on the nation as a whole, as something transcendent over narrow interests. He called for a national purpose or interest to structure political dialogue. On the down side, the individual American might be forgotten in the process. The Jeffersonian view, on the other hand, valorized the individual and deemphasized a larger national purpose. Croly argued that both had serious flaws, but that the time was right to try to meld the two together for the good of the republic. His contention was that we had to wed the national purpose orientation of Hamilton with the focus on ordinary people from Jefferson. His appeal was for "positive government," the use by government of various tools to advance the national interest and the welfare of the people. This was an early salvo on behalf of the Progressive movement. With the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, this orientation became the dominant thrust of American politics for five decades.

The book was written as a kind of half-time review of US history. "Half time" of course as seen hundred years later, with over 200 years of history. The title is at first a bit repellant, smelling of "chosen country" sentiment. That's not what it really implies. The "promise" was something real for many immigrants, it meant opportunity and equality. Why then make a title out of it? Because things were moving into a direction which seemed to indicate that the promise was about to be lost. Croly asks what can be done to keep it. His solutions look a bit like the "social market economy" of Germany in the 50s to me. The language is in parts amazingly fresh and contemporary. The chapter on Jeffersonians versus Hamiltonians could have been written today, same as the short Lincoln bio chapter. The chapter on government by lawyer is a gem.(I am aware that his focus on Hamilton is not generally accepted. Why not Adams? But somehow Mr.Hamilton must have had a period of superiority in estimation, as proven by his face on money, where there is no Adams.) On the negative, in some places, the language is roundabout and absolutely not to the point, to the extent that the point remains hidden. I suspect this is done by age. We have another wave length in many respects. Or maybe Croly actually sometimes wrote less than clearly. I opened the book with some reservation not only due to the potentially ideological title. I read the 89 reprint, not the 2005 version. That was at the end of the Reagan era and the book was sold like some kind of Reagan prophecy. Don't blame Croly for that. He wrote at the time of Teddy, when the US was developing into something new, away from the pioneering age, into industrial monsterdom, on the back of several decades of economic revolutions after the civil war. Society was changing. The old individualist view of democracy was clearly becoming inadequate, a new Hamiltonian view of things towards protection of progress and efficiency of government seemed needed. Society had outgrown romantic start up notions of freedom and equality. Another negative observation: the chapter on the reformers is just sub-standard, no real analysis of their programs, more like contemporary newspaper leader articles. His view of TR is on the level of a state owned newspaper's praise of the Chief. It is not just a book about history, but essentially about ideas and interaction of structure and content. I find it particularly fascinating to watch how words change their meaning over time. Croly uses the word nationalism in a sense which baffled me at first, until I got it: he uses it in opposition to "all states for themselves", building a nation out of a group of less-than-nations. Being European, I am so used to understand nationalism as something which says: we first, above the others. (Deutschland ueber alles, literally...) Another instance of changed paradigm is Croly's naive assumption of racial stereotypes. He takes it for granted, that "negroes are inf

I first read Herbert Croly's 1909 book, "The Promise of American Life" while in graduate school in 1980. I recognized then that it offered a powerful, seminal, and motivating statement for the Progressive movement then dominating the United States. It presented a manifesto for change in a time when Americans felt keenly that the nation had "run off the rails" and set on course a liberal tradition that reached fruition in the "New Deal" of the 1930s and the "Great Society" of the 1960s. On recently rereading it I find it speaks to the America of the early twenty-first century as well, for his statement of the problems of the nation remain valid and his prescriptions for resolving them still offer hope for the future. For Croly the individualistic, libertarian America of the agrarian eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was gone, swept away by the forces of the industrial revolution, urbanization, centralization, and modernity. He advocated a new political consensus that included as its core a form of Hamiltonian nationalism, but with a sense of social responsibility and care for the less fortunate. Since the power of big business, trusts, interest groups, and economic specialization had transformed the nation in the latter part of the nineteenth century, only the embracing of a counterbalance to this power would serve the society of the future. Croly pressed for the centralization of power in the Federal Government to ensure democracy, a "New Nationalism." As Croly wrote, "the traditional American confidence in individual freedom has resulted in a morally and socially undesirable distribution of wealth" (p. 22). He argued for a national government that was more rather than less powerful than it had been, as a bulwark against overbearing self-interest, greed, corruption, and unchecked power. At the same time, Croly valued the individual motivated by civic virtue and "constructive individualism" and urged all to pursue this objective. In sum, despite his emphasis on state power for good, Croly's public philosophy is as much a plea for preserving and cultivating individuality in a time of consolidation as it is a call for a renewed American nationalism. Croly's ideas seem even more appropriate for the early twenty-first century than they were for when first written a century ago. Corporatism, greed, and self-interest currently offer no less a threat than in Croly's time. His prescriptions still hold: collective action through a strong, democratic government. "The Promise of American Life" is a powerful, evocative statement of the potential of humanity to remake the world into a much better place through cooperative action. Its lessons are still useful a century after its publication.