AlbionAmerican
Well-Known Member
- Messages
- 85
Teddy Roosevelt helped start the basis for much of what we now call liberalism. Read the Progressive platform of 1912 - it called for a national health service to include all existing government medical agencies, social insurance (security) for the elderly, the unemployed, and disabled, a minimum wage law for women, an eight-hour workday, government relief for farmers, a federal securities commission, an inheritance tax, workers compensation, and an eight-hour workday. Those are all things that liberals have pushed for and then tried to protect for the past 120 or so years. And Roosevelt promoted all of those things in his 1912 campaign, and was ostracized by conservatives because of it. Of course he was viewed at the time as a liberal and even radical, unless you're conflating "liberalism" with classical liberalism.
And of course Roosevelt was responding to the populist movement, and so were Democrats and other Progressive Republicans. That doesn't mean that he wasn't liberal. Roosevelt helped to initiate liberalism in terms of having a more aggressive and active federal government that helped to regulate corporations and played a larger role in providing at least minimal social services for working people. It was hardly the welfare state we have today, but it was definitely a start. And the entire South didn't vote for Catholic Al Smith in 1928 - North Carolina voted for Hoover, as did Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Tennessee.
Also, I'm curious as to how you would separate liberal and progressive, especially at the time he served as president.
Classical liberalism is the literal foundational philosophy of America and its entire basis of law so these ideas and principles are fundamentally different to progressivism, which was more or less a reactionary movement to the economic and social trends of the turn of the century. America is itself devoted to classical liberalism, we can't untangle that, even though its interpretation of what this means does get twisted and turned over time. Progressivism fundamentally changed this country though away from its previous idealism. I think these things are complex though because America was responding to many things around the turn of the 20th century. Enormous technological changes, global instability (the British Empire was firmly in decline while it appeared Germany, America and Russia would rule the future of the world). Plus there were massive waves of immigrants coming in, many of whom were Catholic and Jewish, which was just totally at odds to the far more Anglo Protestant origins of the country.
Perhaps Progressivism as a reactionary movement by the American elite (and a containment to the more mob like threat coming from the populist Democrats) was liberalism in the sense of preserving things against the challenges that came from also managing to integrate all these new immigrants (who were not steeped in American idealism at all). Perhaps Teddy Roosevelt too would have been a bit more "Bismarckian" lets call it to contain a more imperial and darker streak in America had he won in 1912, but what Progressivism turned into (or if you want to call it co-opted) under Woodrow Wilson essentially was political fascism. Mussolini and later Hitler adopted much of what Wilson himself implemented, who was a proud "liberal", I mean he literally created the "liberal international order", although I may also argue that Wilson was a captured pawn of British imperial interests who were infiltrating America during this time.
I mentioned it before but TR was basically the exact same as LBJ, both basically were manics to one extent or another, LBJ obviously much more of a manic depressive and TR maybe just more pure manic a lot of the time. Another strange thing about TR and LBJ is that the two presidents they worked for died in their home state. McKinley gets shot in Buffalo, NY (Roosevelt was governor of New York and born there) while JFK gets killed in Dallas, LBJ's state. Another strange thing, McKinley's killer was a Polish anarchist, JFK's killer (as the story goes) was a communist with his Soviet sympathis, both also supposively acted alone. Both VPs were radically different to their predecessors too, TR launched the Progressive Era and early stage American imperial aims, LBJ aggressively pursues civil rights, welfare expansion and Vietnam escalation. So both replacements took the country in radically different directions. Which is why its hard to parse out these liberal vs. progressive type of things. There are different versions of history depending on how you look at it, let's say McKinley doesn't get shot, how might history have been different? If you also see the comparisons between the two as I do, would you consider LBJ a liberal just because he did some liberal things, whilst also many not-so-liberal things?