Stand-Patters

What should a progressive society do with those who will not progress?

Thus far in our exploration of progressivism:

• Part 1 gives an overview of progressivism

• Part 2 looks at progressive ideas in Plato’s Republic

• Part 3 looks at the progress wrought through technological change in the midcentury modern age

• Part 4 looks at progressivism’s impact on engineering

In this post, we’re going to look at the impact of progressivism on midcentury modern government.

Where we’re going is:

• Drawing lessons about progressivism out of the midcentury modern experience

• Examining the modern progressive age—the digital age—to see if those same lessons apply

Finally, we will look at progressivism from a Christian perspective.

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Progressive Culture

Real cultural impact came when the engineering mindset—here is a problem, solve it—moved from producing material goods to governing a nation. In 1911, Willard A. Smith wrote:

"The engineer's habits of thought, carried into political economy, may make of it a higher grade of engineering."[1]

Progressives needed to overturn America's founding principles to move engineering from atoms to society. Woodrow Wilson was probably one of the foremost proponents of replacing governments designed to combat the frailty of humans. In a famous speech in 1912, Wilson said:

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. It falls, not under the theory of the universe, but under the theory of organic life. It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. It is modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. On the contrary, its life is dependent upon their quick cooperation, their ready response to the commands of instinct or intelligence, their amicable community of purpose. Government is not a body of blind forces; it is a body of men, with highly differentiated functions, no doubt, in our modern day, of specialization, with a common task and purpose.[2]

Progressives wanted to free people to do what was best for the nation. But which people, specifically?

Government officials should be trusted because they are trained specialists and know more about solving problems than the average person. The government should take on the engineer's attitude—find the problem, suggest a solution, try it at a small scale, and then implement it if it works. Wilson continues:

All that progressives ask or desire is permission—in an era when "development," "evolution," is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle; all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.[3]

Government officials should also be trusted because, by making the nation's interests their utmost goal, they are ultimately making the happiness and welfare of every citizen their desire. Education could be modernized, producing these kinds of people en masse, filling government offices easily. An excellent place to start in this enterprise was the engineering schools and engineers with many years of experience. George W. Melville, in a 1910 speech given at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, says:

In view of the enormously important part which the engineer plays in the life of today, it is incumbent upon him, more than upon most other men, to take a vital interest in the work of government and to lend his trained ability and judgment to its perfection. …he should take an active public stand to influence and guide the non-expert part of the population.[4]

Casting every existing social problem as an engineering problem would allow the government to apply the nation's most intelligent specialists to find an engineering solution.

The point is creating an ever-growing and perfecting culture. This process has no end, just new inventions, new ways of seeing the world, and ever-higher heights of social perfection. While Wilson says: "I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how fast we were going or where we were going,"[5] he does not, himself, define the end of progress. Instead, he describes a culture of ceaseless change, always towards something better, but without defining what better means other than more happiness, which, in turn, means more stuff.

Society, to be perfect, must be directed from the top to make the individual free. In the late 1800s, John Dewey writes:

Organized social planning, put into effect for the creation of an order in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals, is now the sole method of social action by which liberalism can realize its professed aims.[6]

Stand-Patters

But what about those who will not, or cannot, get on board with progress? What should be done with the person who does not have the temperament, intelligence, or mental capacity to move into this new world, where the government and organizations are all run according to scientific principles cast as engineering problems?

Convince Them

The first solution progressivism always answers to this question is pity and an invitation to a "better way of thinking." As Wilson says:

The world has a habit of leaving those behind who won't go with it. The world has always neglected stand-patters. And, therefore, the stand-patter does not excite my indignation; he excites my sympathy. He is going to be so lonely before it is all over. And we are good fellows, we are good company; why doesn't he come along? We are not going to do him any harm. We are going to show him a good time. We are going to climb the slow road until it reaches some upland where the air is fresher, where the whole talk of mere politicians is stilled, where men can look in each other's faces and see that there is nothing to conceal, that all they have to talk about they are willing to talk about in the open and talk about with each other; and whence, looking back over the road, we shall see at last that we have fulfilled our promise to mankind.[7]

Not everyone will accept such an offer, however whimsical and heartfelt the appeal. What should be done with these people?

Manage Them

Managers saw and controlled all the huddled masses who could or would work. Since these people had already passed through school, the manager was the only person who remained to reform their habits. Since large corporations often place engineers in positions of authority, engineers should lend their specialized knowledge and the engineering mindset to solving problems of directly managing the average worker. Melville, speaking to an engineering audience in 1910, says:

A problem of foremost importance at the present time is the management of labor to secure efficient work and satisfied men. It is probable that the direction of more than 90 per cent of the skilled labor is in the hands of engineers. Most emphatically is this a case where engineers owe a great duty to society. It is, therefore, an especial pleasure to recognize that some of our own members have played a foremost part in the best work that has been done in devising plans for compensating labor which will stimulate the men to their best efforts and reward them adequately. The names of Halsey, Taylor, Gantt, and Emerson will at once occur to you.[8]

Melville refers to Frederick Winslow Taylor, the well-known expert who attempted to create a "science of work." Taylor's procedure was to decompose the process of creating an item into components, then reorganize work to increase efficiency. Taylor did not have a high view of the average laborer, holding they would only follow instructions—never trying to improve processes. Instead, Taylor says, the greatest obstacle to companies meeting their goals is "the slow pace which they adopt, or the loafing or 'soldiering,' marking time, as it is called."[9]

Breaking these bad habits of 'soldiering' would bring them one step closer to the ideal.

Improve Them

Management techniques cannot reach everyone in a culture, however. Not everyone is employed by a large corporation, is willing to work, or has labor skills strong enough for a corporation to hire them. Still, other people are children—outside the factory floor's scope but within the schoolhouse's scope. One progressive theory going back to Socrates is that properly educated people will always choose wisely. Socrates argues that men will always do what is right if they have proper knowledge, saying:

…do you think that knowledge is a noble and commanding thing, which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge, but that wisdom will have strength to help him?[10]

Later thinkers, including Plato and Aristotle, rejected this reliance on knowledge to shape men's actions. Aristotle replaced pure knowledge with virtue, arguing men will be good only if they practice doing good. In 1899, Dewey picks up the idea of knowledge and virtue in his theories of education, arguing children should learn by doing whenever possible:

We cannot overlook the factors of discipline and of character-building involved in this kind of life: training in habits of order and of industry, and in the idea of responsibility, of obligation to do something, to produce something, in the world.[11]

Education must be shaped so all children learn virtue and knowledge by experience rather than by rote to bring the "stand-patters" into the modern world—but this is not enough.

Dewey begins his treatise, The School and Social Progress, by observing that education has been, in the past, guided by what parents desire. In the future, however, education must be guided by what is best for society:

What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy. All that society has accomplished for itself is put, through the agency of the school, at the disposal of its future members. All its better thoughts of itself it hopes to realize through the new possibilities thus opened to its future self. Here individualism and socialism are at one.[12]

In Dewey's view, changing education's form will make it more effective, and changing its aim will help fulfill progressive cultural goals. Educational authorities must move from the family to society so parents will not continue teaching their individualistic ideas generation after generation. So the person attaches their affection to society rather than their family.

Another form of improvement held that society could repair these broken people by simply bringing them into better conditions. Edward Devine argued in 1914:

We have more than once contrasted the view that progress is to be secured mainly by the deliberate elimination of the "unfit," with the more humane, or in what is perhaps a more descriptive phrase, the economic view, that progress is to come mainly through the rescue of the "unfit" and their transformation into fit and desirable citizens.[13]

Still, Devine allows some who are abnormal, and the "abnormal must be eliminated, or allowed to eliminate itself."[14]

Eliminate Them

It's 1915.

Walt sat down at his desk. It was a minor desk in a wayward corner of a large industrial firm, but it represented the start of his career. His engineering education brought him to this level, and he was confident it would take him much farther in life. The dairy farm is little more than a memory now. War has broken out in Europe, but the United States is not (really) involved yet—and this is the war to end all wars and finally bring peace to the world.

Now that mankind has discovered the real engine of progress—Darwin's evolution—man can guide "the direction of his own development." [15]

In 1899, W.S. Main, a Wisconsin State Senator, declared:

If all these [hereditary criminals] could be marshalled into one great camp and with a mill stone around each of their necks, cast into the midst of the sea the people would be relieved of their weightiest burden and the pathways of coming generations brightened with hope as never before.[16]

Killing "hereditary criminals" was not constitutional, of course. While Theodore Roosevelt argued the people are final arbiters of rights rather than the Constitution,[17] social mores would not allow such a radical solution. The clear alternative was eugenics, using science to ensure only the "well-born" would produce the next generation of humans. Eugenics relied on three techniques: reforming those that could be reformed so they produced fit children; exclusion, or removing these people from society; and sterilization. Eminent scientists of the time, such as Alexander Graham Bell, supported preventing certain classes of people to breed (or interbreed). Bell, in a letter to the United States Senate, said:

The laws of heredity indicate, that, if these deaf children should marry congenitally deaf husbands or wives, an increased proportion of deaf offspring will appear in the next generation; and that the continuous intermarriage of congenital deaf-mutes from generation to generation may ultimately result in the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.[18]

Bell cites Yale, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins University professors to support his proposition. State governments took the expertise of these scientists seriously, passing laws allowing doctors to sterilize anyone released from homes for the "feeble-minded," those declared congenitally criminal, and many others.

Reforming was the most common eugenic response. According to Lamarkian hereditary theory, personal traits could be passed on from parent to child. Teaching a prospective parent to work harder, lose weight, or develop skills, would, over time, improve the general condition of future generations.

Self-help books became widespread, providing advice on raising healthy children who would, in turn, produce stronger children and a more robust culture. Self-help books heralded the initial stages of families turning to experts, rather than more experienced family members and tradition, for advice. Best Baby and Fitter Family contests became common at county and state fairs. Doctors would examine hundreds of children and families, sometimes choosing the ones with the best pedigree, physical fitness, and home life situation as families that others should look to when having children or forming families. These contests were somewhat related to the earliest beauty contests.

Exclusion was not as common as reformation. The state could purify the population of undesirable traits over time by placing "defective women" in homes until they were past child-bearing age or requiring eugenics certificates before a marriage license could be issued. These certificates could only be obtained through a doctor's examination.

Sterilization was the "pointy end" of the progressive eugenic program; other elements were not so sharp and immediate, but they still worked to control the outcome of the "human breeding process."

Who could have imagined, at the beginning of a widely hailed progressive age, that most Western cultures would move from helping people be better to eliminating them if they would not—or could not—be better?

Anyone who understands the nature of the totalitarian trap.

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[1] Hon. Willard A. Smith, “The Need of Graduate Courses in Engineering,” in Addresses to Engineering Students, ed. J. A. L. Waddell and John Lyle Harrington (Kansas City, MO: Waddell & Harrington, 1911), 446.

[2] Woodrow Wilson, “What Is Progress?,” in The U.S. Constitution: A Reader, ed. Hillsdale College Politics Faculty (Hillsdale College Press, 2012), 640.

[3] Wilson, 640.

[4] George W. Melville, “The Engineer’s Duty as a Citizen,” Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 32 (1910): 529.

[5] Wilson, “What Is Progress?,” 636.

[6] John Dewey, “Liberalism and Social Action,” in The U.S. Constitution: A Reader, ed. Hillsdale College Politics Faculty (Hillsdale College Press, 2012), 626.

[7] Wilson, “What Is Progress?,” 642.

[8] Melville, “The Engineer’s Duty as a Citizen,” 540.

[9] Frederick Winslow Taylor, Scientific Management (Harper & Row, 1910), 30.

[10] Plato, The Dialogues of Plato, ed. B. Jowett, Third Edition, vol. 1 (New York; London: Macmillan and Co., 1892), 176.

[11] John Dewey, The School and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1899), 7.

[12] Dewey, 3.

[13] Edward T. Devine, “Protection vs. Elimination,” Survey, October 4, 1913, 35.

[14] Devine, 36.

[15] Rudolph J. Vecoli, “Sterlization: A Progressive Measure?,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History 43, no. 3 (Spring 1960): 201.

[16] As quoted by Vecoli, 190.

[17] Roosevelt, “Address by Theodore Roosevelt before the Convention of the Progressive Party.”

[18] Alexander Graham Bell, “Census of the Defective Classes,” Science 13, no. 311 (January 1889): 39.