The Progressive Revolution , livre ebook

The Progressive Revolution
The Progressive Revolution
How the Best in America Came to Be
Michael Lux
Copyright 2009 by Michael Lux. All rights reserved
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lux, Michael, date.
The progressive revolution: how the best in America came to be / Michael Lux.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-470-39511-0 (cloth)
1. Democratic Party (U.S.) 2. Progressivism (United States politics)
3. United States-Politics and government. I. Title.
JK2316.L89 2009
320.510973-dc22
2008047045
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Since this book is about history, I want to dedicate it to two who have gone before:
To my father, John Lux, who gave me my love for history and politics, and my passion to do something about injustice.
And to my Republican grandmother, Hazel Carne, who thought of herself as a conservative and would probably have been a little concerned about having a book such as this dedicated to her, but who fed the poor from her own table when she was poor herself, which I ve always thought of as pretty darn progressive.
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: The History of American Progress
1 The Big Change Moments
2 A Progressive Revolution: How Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson Literally Invented the Idea of America
3 The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Right to Think and Speak Freely
4 Civil Rights, States Rights, and the Re-Creation of the American Idea
5 The Battle over Democracy
6 Trickle-Down vs. Bottom-Up
7 The Dream and the Backlash
8 Hope, Fear, and the Culture of Caution
9 The Next Big Change Moment
Notes
Index
PREFACE
My conservative friends will be delighted, I m sure, for me to acknowledge upfront that I come by my progressive nature, in part, because of being brain damaged. I m not kidding.
When I was a few months old, I got a toy wedged in my throat that cut off my air supply for a couple of minutes until my mom noticed me turning a deep shade of blue. She figured out what was going on and got the air flowing again. But the oxygen supply was cut off long enough for me to suffer a degree of brain damage that resulted in a mild form of cerebral palsy. I had a lot of trouble walking for a while and remained exceptionally slow and uncoordinated throughout my childhood-one of those slowest-in-school, last-one-picked-for-the-team kids. I was not, in Newt Gingrich s classic term of art, a normal American. Fortunately, my family did not care that I wasn t normal. In fact, they gave me special care and attention and support, a sort of abnormal kid s affirmative action.
Through our church, my family also hosted two families from apartheid-era Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). When I was in elementary school, I walked one of these families s two younger kids to school. Although I was too gimpy to protect them very well physically, I knew it was my job to stand by them and be there for them when the bullies in our school screamed nigger at them.
Having the kind of family who took such good care of the weak and looked out for their neighbors made me want to live in a country that did the same.
These experiences-of being the other, and of standing with the other-gave me my progressive faith. I call it faith because it was also fed by the Bible verses I learned growing up. I was taught to be my brother s keeper. I learned to treat others the way I would want to be treated. I was told that Jesus had been sent to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and to set the downtrodden free. Most of all, I was taught that living a good life meant feeding the hungry, giving clothes to the naked, and visiting the sick and those in prison-that these were the things I would be judged on.
So I grew up determined to do all those things. But I don t have the patience to be a good social worker, and I wanted to attempt something that would bring longer-lasting change. So I became a community organizer and from there was drawn into politics. I find politics to be endlessly fun and exciting. It has been my great good fortune to have knocked on thousands of doors and played a role in registering millions of people and turning them out to vote. I have produced television and radio ads, been a part in one way or another of presidential politics in seven elections, served as a senior staffer in the Clinton White House, been involved with scores of organizations, and written on a couple of different blogs.
Because my career has been in the political world, I am in no way a professional historian. I am, however, a thoroughly devoted history buff. I have devoured every American history book that I had time to read, beginning at a young age when I pored over my father s history books. I have noticed a pattern over the years: the debates of the past are remarkably similar to the debate I am engaged in now. The eras were vastly different. The names of political parties sometimes changed. The specific issues were different some of the time. But I noticed that the fundamental arguments and themes and even the basic political alignments remained remarkably the same over the years. People were arguing over voting rights back when our country began, and they still are today. Today people disagree about whether government should pursue policies that favor business and the wealthy, and they also disputed this at the nation s founding. In 1776, people clashed over whether Jefferson s words about all of us being created equal should be taken seriously, just as they debate this issue today.
That ongoing argument, between the forces of progressive thought and those of conservative thought, is what inspired this book. In the introduction, I lay out my basic theory about how the debate between progressives and conservatives has been a permanent conflict throughout our country s history. Furthermore, when progressives have been on the winning side of that debate politically, the country has made dramatic progress, whereas when conservatives have won the day, the country has suffered as a result. In chapters 2 and 3 , I focus on the debate in the days of the Founding Fathers and how the ideas they advanced and the progress and the mistakes they made carry over into today s political battles. In chapters 4 , 5 , and 6 , I turn to three of the biggest and broadest areas of conflict-civil rights, economics, and issues around what kind of democracy we want to have-and trace the evolution of those battles to modern times. In chapter 7 , I detail the history of the modern progressive and conservative movements, starting with Joe McCarthy on the right and Martin Luther King Jr. on the left, and show how those movements have developed and reacted to each other. In chapters 8 and 9 , I bring the discussion fully up to the present and make my argument on where the country should go from here.
I want to thank several people who have helped me enormously in the creation of this book.
First are some of the authors who most inspired and influenced my writing. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. s superb book The Cycles of American History was one that I drew on and referred to heavily throughout my book. I never would have been able to track down all of the information on voting and the debate over democracy without Alexander Keyssar s comprehensive The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States . Lerone Bennett Jr. s classic Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America has inspired me for thirty years (even though Bennett is far more critical of Jefferson and Lincoln than I am). Harvey Kaye s Thomas Paine and the Promise of America and Garrett Epps s Democracy Reborn: The 14th Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America both enormously influenced my overall thinking in writing this book. And no author affected me more in terms of my book s subject than Garry Wills in his Lincoln at Gettysburg . Learning how conservatives then and now have opposed the ideas in the Gettysburg Address and how Lincoln crafted his argument