PoliticalChic
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- #21
I couldn't believe Hamilton listed as a progressive. But some have their own definitions.
1. Both Croly and TR abhorred Jeffersons legacy of limited government and uncontrolled individualism. Rather, they championed Hamiltons legacy of strong government and elite leadership.
a. Croly favored Hamiltonianism. And Croly was a preeminent Progressive.
b. Jefferson correctly viewed any tendency to impair the integrity of democracy as a prescription for disaster: the support must be of the whole people. And for Jefferson, democracy meant extreme individualism: as little government as possible.
c. For Croly, the nation needed Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends. Individual desires had to be subordinated to national purpose.
2. Listen to the echo of Croly in the thoughts of TR, from his Autobiography, wherein he wrote, that after the Civil War, our strongest and most capable men had thrown their whole energy into business, into moneymaking, into the development, and above all the exploitation and and exhausdtion at the most rapid rate possible, of our natural resources these men were not weak men, but they permitted themselves to grow short-sighted and selfish. Autobiography, p.28.
3. Wilson distrusted the great combinations that had come to dominate or destroy the Jeffersonian America of small business and community life. He believed that the only way to rid the nation of this evil was by restoring full competition. Roosevelt saw in the industrialized America what Hamilton had foreseen, the ills visited upon the working class and knew that industrial capitalism could only be moderated, not eliminated. Chace, p. 197.
4. TR and Wilson invented the activist modern presidency. TRs commitment to use Hamiltonian means to achieve Jeffersonian ends was not unlike Wilsons use of executive power to promote free competition that would prevent big business from stifling local economies.
For TR, as for Wilson, Hamiltons strong government had to be united with the one great truth taught by Jefferson- that in America a statesman should trust the people, and should endeavor to secure each man all possible individual liberty, confident that he will use it right. Cooper, The Warrior and the Priest, p. 41.
See Chace, "1912."
So, in the sense of investing in a big, strong central government, Hamilton was a Progressive....before progressivism.