"The Most Popular, Most Robust and Most Influential Global Social Movement of the Day"

"[F]rom its very inception, the movement wasn't about sin-obsessed puritans, but rather a backlash against 'the most predatory and dangerous of all big businesses,' in which unregulated liquor traffickers hooked their customers on a highly addictive substance, just like Big Pharma stoking the opioid crisis. In both cases, every market incentive drives the industry to maximize private profit by flooding the community with wares that destroy the public welfare. In penning his famous Six Sermons on Intemperance—which jumpstarted the modern temperance movement in 1826—Boston preacher Lyman Beecher repeatedly used but one Bible verse: 'Woe unto him that giveth his neighbor drink, that puttest thy bottle to him, and makest him drunk also' (Habakkuk 2:15). Temperance activists aimed not at the drink or the drunkard, but the predatory drink seller, to be confronted through a consumer boycott."

Mark Lawrence Schrad at Politico reconsiders the Prohibitionists.

"How a Raucous Democratic System in Which the Vast Majority of the Electorate Voted Gave Way to a More Sedate and Exclusionary Political Culture"

"Wolfe's four lost men may have lacked charisma and accomplished almost nothing while in office, but, Grinspan argues, Americans were far more passionately invested in national politics then than they are today. And if you think our current moment of hyperpartisanship, political polarization, abusive language, widespread efforts to suppress the right to vote, and violent clashes over electoral outcomes is unprecedented, think again. As far back as the 1790s, opponents called George Washington a British agent and Thomas Jefferson a lackey of revolutionary France. In the decades before the Civil War, not a session of Congress passed without punches being exchanged between lawmakers and knives and pistols being drawn in the Capitol. But the high point of this kind of acrimonious politics came in the Gilded Age."

Eric Foner at The Nation reviews Jon Grinspan's The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915.

"Debates Surrounding Our National Value System"

"'The American Dream' has always been about the prospect of success, but 100 years ago, the phrase meant the opposite of what it does now. The original 'American Dream' was not a dream of individual wealth; it was a dream of equality, justice and democracy for the nation. The phrase was repurposed by each generation, until the Cold War, when it became an argument for a consumer capitalist version of democracy. Our ideas about the 'American Dream' froze in the 1950s. Today, it doesn't occur to anybody that it could mean anything else.

Anna Diamond at Smithsonian interviews Sarah Churchwell, author of Behold, America: The Entangled History of "America First" and "the American Dream."

"Go Back to When It First Came into Political Currency"

"As the political scientist Michael Sandel has pointed out, however, such positive rights are inherently on fragile ground unless they have the support of a strong community consensus, which in a modern liberal society can be achieved only through a civic republican politics. The defining theorists of the Progressive era understood this. Perhaps the most philosophically ambitious among them was John Dewey, who synthesized the liberal and civic republican traditions by way of a new concept of democracy itself: Democracy is not, Dewey argued, merely a mechanism for majority rule; it's an ongoing deliberative process through which bearers of individual rights address issues facing their political community as a whole and chart its future together. He redefined, in other words, the 'negative rights of liberalism and the 'positive rights' of civic republicanism as mutual necessities."

At The New Republic, Win McCormack presses "for progressive to be truly meaningful again."

Structuralist or Managerial?

"The financial crisis has reignited the debate among progressives over how aggressively to regulate the modern financial sector. But it also reveals this underlying tension between different progressive visions of governance. Mainstream progressives have tended to take the same line as Clinton and Obama, emphasizing an approach to economic regulation that prioritizes pragmatic, expert oversight. By invoking a different progressive tradition that offers an alternative to both an overly optimistic faith in top-down technocracy, and to the scorched earth deregulatory zeal of conservatives, Sanders is shifting the terms of the debate. Progressives may share a desire to redress the problems of private power and economic inequality, but they will have to also address these questions about how best to accomplish those aims. By renewing an older progressive tradition in the spirit of Brandeis and the antitrusters of the first Gilded Age, Sanders has raised a challenge that progressives will have to grapple with, whatever the outcome of this race."

K. Sabeel Rahman in The Atlantic asserts that Bernie Sanders is reviving Louis Brandeis's "curse of bigness" argument.

"Amazon Is the Price We’re Paying for That Bipartisan Turn in Thinking"

"Conservatives, it turned out, were only too happy to hear such talk. After years of defending monopoly as perfectly justifiable, they began publishing books and articles conceding that consumer welfare was a legitimate purpose of antitrust, perhaps the only one. Robert Bork denounced all of Brandeis's attempts to protect small producers as a 'jumble of half-digested notions and mythologies.' A cottage industry of like-minded critiques emanated from the University of Chicago's Law School and then traveled straight to Republicans in Washington. In the hands of Ronald Reagan's Justice Department, not to mention the judges he appointed to the federal bench, efficiency and low prices provided the justification for dismantling much of the old antitrust infrastructure. No subsequent administration, either Democratic or Republican, has meaningfully tried to revive it."


Franklin Foer in The New Republic looks at Amazon and monopoly.


Scott Timberg in Salon links Amazon to the decline of alternative newspapers.

"The First Liberal Democratic President Took Office Exactly 100 Years Ago This Spring"

"Yet Wilson, together with his allies on Capitol Hill, also laid the foundation for the 20^th century liberal state. He signed bills that created the Federal Reserve and progressive income tax rates, secured humane working conditions for merchant seamen and railroad workers, restricted child labor and curbed the power of large corporations. After the U.S. entered the war in Europe, his administration began operating the railroads, lifting the hopes of leftists who had long advocated public ownership of what was then a rich and vital industry.
"In 1916, Wilson accepted renomination with a speech that defined political conflict in terms that remain surprisingly fresh. Our programs, he told his fellow Democrats were 'resisted at every step by the interests which the Republican Party … catered to and fostered at the expense of the country, and these same interests are now earnestly praying for a reaction which will save their privileges, for the restoration of their sworn friends to power before it is too late to recover what they have lost.'"

Michael Kazin in The New Republic calls Woodrow Wilson "The Forgotten President."

"The Basic Bargain that Made This Country Great Has Eroded"

"This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.
"Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
"Well, I’m here to say they are wrong."

The Washington Post publishes President Obama's speech on the middle class, given in the same town where Theodore Roosevelt gave his New Nationalism address in 1910.

Ben Soskis and Timothy Noah react in The New Republic.

As does Robert Reich in Salon.

And John Nichols and Ari Berman in The Nation.

"We Can Have Concentrated Wealth in the Hands of a Few or We Can Have Democracy"

"In its first 60 years, the estate tax, along with other progressive policies, went a long way toward accomplishing this goal. By 1976, the amount of the nation’s wealth controlled by the richest 1 percent of Americans had fallen from more than 50 percent to only 20 percent. And this greater dispersal of wealth fostered a strong middle class.
"The tax policies of the past 35 years, however, have reversed the trend."

In The New York Times, Ray D. Madoff argues in favor of taxing inherited wealth as income.

Fit as a Bull Moose

"Morris recounts his battle first to wrest control of his party from Taft and the conservatives and, when that failed (only because of 'naked robbery' by 'the forces of reaction,' Roosevelt insisted), to lead a third-party campaign he understood to be doomed almost from the start. Roosevelt’s courage cannot be questioned. Who else would have insisted on delivering an 80-minute speech with a would-be assassin’s bullet freshly lodged in his chest? And the Progressive platform on which he ran was a bold, even visionary document: it recognized labor’s right to organize and promised to curtail campaign spending, promote conservation and provide federal insurance for the elderly, the jobless and the sick. But the evangelistic fervor with which he campaigned probably alienated more voters than it attracted. He had the satisfaction of swamping Taft on Election Day, but the victory went to Wilson, giving the Democrats the White House for the first time in a quarter of a century."

Geoffrey C. Ward reviews Edmund Morris's Colonel Roosevelt in The New York Times.

What Woodrow Wought

"Roosevelt and Wilson had plenty of differences, but in the long view of history their affinities loom large. For Roosevelt, presidential activism meant cracking down on the railroads, regulating food and drugs, breaking up trusts, protecting lands from exploitation, and arbitrating labor disputes. For Wilson, it involved regulating finance and the money supply, limiting the corporations' demands on their laborers, aiding farmers, preventing monopolistic practices, and making the new federal income tax a graduated one. Just three months ago, I wrote in Slate that over the last century, almost no one has questioned these achievements; clearly, I hadn't been watching enough Fox. Nonetheless, it's telling that these Progressive Era reforms have enjoyed such an enduring and uncontroversial place in our sense of what government should do. Their long-reigning acceptance shows better than anything else just how deeply reactionary Beck and company are."

David Greenberg in Slate explores why Woodrow Wilson has become the bête noire for today's Fox News conservatives.

The Ignoble Experiment

"In fact, Wheeler’s devotion to the dream of a dry America accommodated any number of unlikely allies. Billy Sunday, meet pioneering social worker Jane Addams: you’re working together now. The evangelical clergy of the age were motivated to support Prohibition because of their faith; reformers like Addams signed on because of the devastating effect that drunkenness had on the urban poor. Ku Klux Klan, shake hands with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW): you’re on the same team. The Klan’s anti-liquor sentiment was rooted in its hatred of the immigrant masses in liquor-soaked cities; the IWW believed that liquor was a capitalist weapon used to keep the working classes in a stupor."

In its May 2010 issue, Smithsonian magazine publishes an excerpt from Daniel Okrent's Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition.

Searching for Order

"What Lears makes of that is clear from the quote he takes from Herman Melville at the book's outset: 'Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.' To summarize his sense of the transformation almost to the point of oversimplification: An earlier 19th century notion of 'manliness' gave way to an amoral militarism, which fused with a muscular new Protestantism and evolving theories of racial supremacy; these, in turn, conjoined with a new economic order in which capital made way for capitalism. All were able to meld because each began in the post-Civil War hunger for 'regeneration.' The result was an assertive, aggressive, frequently intolerant national identity."

Tim Rutten reviews Jackson Lears's Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 in the Los Angeles Times.

State of Confusion

"More than half of the initiatives don’t pass, and some that do are sensible. But much of the system has been perverted into the opposite of what Hiram Johnson intended. It is not ordinary citizens but rich tycoons from Hollywood or Silicon Valley, or special interests such as unions for prison guards, teachers or nurses, that bankroll most initiatives onto the ballots.
"Then comes a barrage of television commercials, junk mail and robo-calls that leave no Californian home unmolested and the great majority confused. Propositions tend to be badly worded, with double negatives that leave some voters thinking they voted for something when they really voted against."

The Economist calls California "[t]he ungovernable state."

Maura Dolan in the Los Angeles Times reports on anger over the ease of amending the state's constitution.

Harold Meyerson in The Washington Post blames Proposition 13 for California's woes.

The Financial Product Safety Commission

"The situation with some financial products is similar to the drug market of the early 1900s, Schumer said. The government responded by regulating 'quack' medicine, he said.
"'Those who sell quack financial products in the 21st century' should be 'reined in, not with disclosure, but with real limits,' Schumer said."

Jeff Plungis on Bloomberg reports on a bill introduced by Senators Charles Shumer and Richard Durbin to create a new financial oversight agency modeled on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The Path of Progress

"They bundled and sold sub-prime mortgages, took their profits, and then left others holding portfolios full of worthless, even toxic, paper. This was exactly the kind of behavior that Brandeis despised. He believed that it was one thing for an individual to put up capital in risky ventures, playing to win but prepared for failure. But he saw the bankers of his time dodging failure by manipulating the marketplace at the expense of smaller entrepreneurs and consumers."

In the midst of the current economic difficulties, Melvin I. Urofsky in The New York Times looks back to Louis D. Brandeis's 1914 book, Other People's Money, and How the Bankers Use It.

"Communitarian Populism"

"There are no pitchforks in this populism. No 'self-serving and undemocratic' elites. They're just part of the same America. And yet, there is, in both the language and policies, a deep and profound commitment to 'ordinary Americans,' to their security and their chance to get ahead. And while the attack on Wall Street is muted, the sense that it has obligations beyond short-term profits is loud.
"This inclusive, communitarian populism is characterized by few enemies and very little talk of 'rights.'"

Mark Schmitt in The American Prospect explores Barack Obama's old-school progressive rhetoric.

"Christianity in Action"

"In 1918, Debs was convicted under the recently minted Espionage Act for questioning America's entry into World War I; before that, free speech protections were more a matter of custom, easily dispensed with during wartime, than of high legal principle. But his 10-year sentence raised 1st Amendment issues with unprecedented force. Sixty-three years old and in poor health, Debs faced the prospect of dying in prison. His drama played out against a backdrop of revolutionary violence both here and abroad: While he was serving his sentence, a bomb planted by anarchists ripped through a busy Wall Street intersection, killing more than 30 people and injuring 200.
"Freeberg shows that in the end it was Debs' popularity, not a knockdown legal argument, that compelled politicians, the mainstream media and eventually federal judges to reconsider the government's power to jail dissidents."

Peter Richardson reviews Ernest Freeberg's Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent in the Los Angeles Times.

Love for Sale

"In this battle, reform has right but absolutely no humor on its side--right, that is, if one assumes that human weakness is easily eradicated through the changing of institutions.
"The methods proposed for dealing with the extensive prostitution in Chicago early in the last century were, first, to segregate it in a particular part of town, and, second, to root it out and eliminate it altogether. Ministers, ambitious young lawyers set on forging political careers, anti-smoking campaigners, temperance workers, the B'nai Br'ith, vegetarians, and others on the side of sweetness and light naturally enough went for complete elimination."

In The Wall Street Journal, Joseph Epstein reviews Karen Abbott's Sin in the Second City.