We Hold These Values to Be Contingent: The Progressive Critique of the Declaration
By dismissing the Declaration's natural rights as outdated, progressives dismantled the only principled limit on government power — and their own record of segregation and eugenics showed exactly why those limits existed.
Everyone, even critics, recognizes the singular importance of the Declaration’s foundational claims: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” Progressives, however, are the exception. While sometimes professing grudging respect for the Declaration’s place in American history, they also minimized and disparaged its moral and philosophical foundations. This weakens the justification for their own political project.
Arising in the late 1800s amid a welter of social and economic changes, including mass immigration, industrialization, and urbanization, the progressive movement generated often discordant reform programs across a wide range of issues and levels of government. Armed with an overweening faith in the power of social science to solve social ills, progressives championed the initiative, referendum, and recall in state and local government, and a large administrative state staffed with experts in national government.
With such broad and disjointed proposals, the movement defies easy summary. However, its intellectual and political leaders, particularly at the national level, shared commitments fundamentally at odds with the principles of the Declaration, which, in turn, justified their opposition to the Constitution’s structure and institutions, and even to constitutional government itself. While the progressives were often quarrelsome among themselves, they were nearly universally united in their rejection of America’s founding philosophy. Herbert Croly’s verdict that “the best that can be said on behalf of this traditional American system of ideas is that it contained the germ of better things” captured their condescending mood.
The concept of truth lay at the heart of the conflict. Progressives or their teachers were trained in German historicism, which contended that “truths” evolve over time, making them, of course, not truths. What might be true for one epoch would not be true for another. If there are no fixed truths, then the claim that individuals possess natural rights given to them by their Creator must be false. Such a position was simply an assertion of the founders’ values, grounded in their contingent circumstances.
The progressive catechism holds that rights are granted by society — or, more accurately, by the experts and elites who claim to know society’s needs. The progressive legal scholar and political scientist, Frank Goodnow, confidently intoned that rights are “conferred upon an individual, not by his Creator, but rather by the society to which he belongs.” The “social compact” and “natural right” philosophies of the Declaration are “worse than useless,” he sniffed, because they “retard development” by limiting the power of government.
The historian Carl Becker, generous enough to call the principles of the Declaration “emotional inspiration,” nevertheless asserted that “to ask whether the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence is true or false is essentially a meaningless question.” Instead, when a people, such as the American founders, craft a rationale for “withdraw[ing] their allegiance” from their existing society, they are just reformulating their rejection of “the established law or custom of the community” into something “rationally defensible.” While the Declaration preached a “humane and engaging faith,” its authors lacked the higher gnosis of Becker, who pronounced that it rested on a “superficial knowledge of history.” In the end, he reported, this naïve faith “could not survive the harsh realities of the modern world.”
Reflecting the progressives’ confidence in social science, political scientist and progressive activist Charles Merriam happily announced that the “once dominant ideas of natural rights and the social contract” are “discredited and repudiated” relics since “none of these finds wide acceptance among the leaders in the development of political science.” An afternoon at a political science convention, it should be noted, has been known to make one doubt the wisdom of settling these questions through such a plebiscite.
However, Woodrow Wilson, also a political scientist, offered the most prominent critique of the founding. Its philosophy, he said, was suited for “the old-fashioned days when life was very simple.” Society, he insisted, had moved beyond 1776. “The old political formulas,” he lectured Americans, “do not fit the present problems: they read now like documents taken out of a forgotten age.” Wilson’s narcissism of the present — to say nothing of just his narcissism —led him to lament that his benighted fellow Americans “never got beyond the Declaration of Independence.”
Since Americans obstinately retained their primitive loyalties to the document, he needed to salvage it for his own political purposes. You should, he advised, “pass beyond” its “preliminary passages” and move to “the heart of the document,” which “consists of a series of definite specifications concerning actual public business of the day.” Perhaps recognizing that this rhetorical move was self-defeating, the grievances could not be grievances without the preliminary principles; he ended up marginalizing the grievances as well. The Declaration’s “bill of particulars” involved practical matters of the founders’ time, “not the business of our day, for the matter with which it deals is past.”
After Wilson’s analysis, all that remains of the Declaration is a denuded document larded with empty bromides that, at best, shows how “practical men” addressed the questions of their time. What we need to do, he said, is “translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written.” Such a position strips the document of any inherent meaning except to say that the founders addressed problems, so we should too.
Denigrating the Declaration, in fact, had a larger purpose. By dismissing its philosophy as a crude fetish from a bygone age, progressives could then dismiss limited government itself. Natural rights, by definition, require limited government. But if we only have social rights, then limits on government power, which restrict its ability to do what progressives thought needed to be done, were impediments to, well, progress. Thus, the progressive rejection of the Declaration should be viewed as a palate cleanser to its main course, rejection of the Constitution.
The most vigorous and comprehensive progressive critiques of the Constitution came from Herbert Croly and Woodrow Wilson. Croly famously said we should pursue Jeffersonian ends through Hamiltonian means. This invocation of Jefferson and Hamilton was just a founding gloss for a program decidedly against founding principles. Fulfilling Croly’s mantra would require empowering the national government to insert itself into ever-wider swaths of American political and economic life, and doing so would require dismantling the Constitution. The “abstract legalistic individualism of Jeffersonian Democracy” was reflected in the rigid structure of our political institutions, which prevented the “social experimentation” necessary to accomplish progressive goals. “The activity of government was restricted,” he lamented, “and its organs were emasculated, in the interest of a specific formulation of individual rights.”
Likewise, Woodrow Wilson famously rejected the Constitution for embodying allegedly “Newtonian” ideas reflected in the separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism. Rather than Newton, government is “accountable to Darwin” since it falls “under the theory of organic life.” Thus, Wilson and the progressives developed the idea of a living constitution precisely because they disapproved of the actual constitution. Its meaning should adapt to the spirit of the age, which, for Wilson, required concentrating power not just in the national government but specifically in the presidency. “The President,” he said, “is at liberty both in law and conscience to be as big a man as he can.” It was the president, he thought, contrary to the founders, who could identify and interpret the national will and create a coherent agenda to guide the government.
Of course, reading the founders makes it clear that they were far more informed by their study of human nature in constructing the Constitution than by Newton. Human nature, as history amply demonstrates, is not perfect and not perfectible, making “auxiliary precautions” on the government and its occupants necessary. In fact, Wilson’s presidency and the progressive era as a whole show exactly why we should be cautious about abandoning limits on government power. Wilson’s tenure in office was marked by the introduction of racial segregation in the federal bureaucracy and the screening of Birth of a Nation at the White House. During World War I, contempt for freedom of speech and religion became administrative policy. Thousands of political dissidents were arrested and incarcerated, and religious pacifists, including Mennonites, Brethren, Hutterites, Quakers, and Jehovah’s Witnesses, were imprisoned and subjected to physical abuse.
The progressive era also witnessed the rise of the eugenics movement, which reached its peak with the Supreme Court’s sanction of the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit by the state in Buck v. Bell (1927). Even policies such as the minimum wage that seemed meant to aid the less fortunate had racist and eugenicist motivations. Progressives were well aware of the disemployment effects of raising labor costs but celebrated that as a feature, not a bug, of a minimum wage since it would prevent the “unfit” from finding work and having the resources to procreate. Progressive intellectuals such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb lobbied for this new intrusion into the market because it would prevent “unfortunate parasites” from “unrestrainedly compet[ing] as wage earners.” And Frank Taussig sorrowfully confessed that “we have not reached the stage where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”
Wilson’s pseudoscientific appeal to Charles Darwin also grounded his rejection of constitutional deliberation. The founders denied that we can eliminate disagreement. “The spirit of faction,” James Madison said in Federalist 10, is “sown in the nature of man.” The Constitution was intended to create a system of deliberation that would “refine and enlarge the public view” by forcing elected officials to reflect on justice and the general good rather than indulge the public’s immediate and often transitory passions. Wilson, however, wanted to empower popular majorities rather than shape them through constitutional processes. For the founders, unchecked majorities threaten individual rights: the “artful misrepresentations of interested men,” Madison warned, can lure the public into the “tyranny of their own passions.” Since an organism must act in a unified way, Wilson’s evolutionary state, by contrast, authorizes the president to speak for all of society and implement his understanding of public sentiment through the administrative state.
In the end, progressivism undermines constitutionalism itself. Constitutional government requires that the rules of the game be fixed and known, but progressivism rejected the idea that there should be any fixed rules. The “felt necessities of the time” can always override constitutional constraints. Under progressivism, constitutionalism is at most a constitutionalism of convenience, which makes it no constitutionalism at all.
Ultimately, progressivism is self-defeating. If political truths evolve and are time-bound, then there is no reason to think that progressive policies should have any more purchase on us than any others. There is no principled reason we cannot dismiss them as breezily as they dismissed the founders. One could say that their naïve faith in the president’s power to divine, shape, and harness public opinion, and to give it expression through administrative agencies, cannot survive the harsh realities of our modern world. I suggest that the principles of the Declaration and the Constitution are true instead.
