I watch Glenn Beck's show on Fox News in the afternoons. One thing that he tells his viewers every day is to not trust what he says at face value. He tells his viewers to do their own research, so they can verify the facts for themselves. I have begun to do that. I have had a little time over the last couple of days due to the blizzard.
From the little bit of research I have done in a couple of American history textbooks, I have concluded that the Progressive movement was a political movement begun by socialist immigrants to the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century (1880s - 1890s). They wanted to wage war on capitalism - monopoly, corruption, inefficiency, and social injustice (1). They also wanted to strengthen the federal government and use it as an agency of human welfare (1). They also believed that the U.S. constitution was too weak a document to handle the social and political problems of 1900 America (1).
Education and the media are other tools that they began to use to spread their ideas. Social science was a new area of study that used scientific techniques to study societies and their institutions. One social scientist who was highly influential in the progressive movement was Thorstein Velben who wrote The Theory of the Leisure Class. In this book he wrote about a new economic system that would be run by engineers. His theory was that modern society should be run like a machine. During World War I, members of the Council of National Defense who were followers of Velben organized war boards to divide the economy by function (manufacturing, agriculture, etc.) rather than regionally (2). Another influential progressive writer was Jacob A. Riis, a Danish immigrant who wrote for the New York Sun. He wrote a book titled How the Other Half Lives which criticized the slums of New York. This book greatly influenced the first progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt.
One of the theorists who influenced the progressives was Charles Darwin himself. His theory of evolution led him to believe that history is a random process dominated by the fiercest or luckiest competitors. Social Darwinism was used by pragmatists to support their ideal that only scientific inquiry can guide modern society. A society's traditions or moral values had no influence over Truth. Politicians also abused Darwinian ideas by stating that the strong should naturally dominate the weak (2) which led to Manifest Destiny and the exploitation of the Native Americans in the United States and Imperialism and Colonialism world wide.
What does this have to do with today? When a government takes freedoms away from corporations, it can also take freedoms away from individuals. The ideas of socialism are not native to the United States. They were brought here by socialist immigrants who wanted to impose their ideals on America. They used education and the media to spread their ideas until students now ignore the traditions of the founders and Christianity and only rely on Darwinist evolution for their moral guidance. Young people now take it for granted that the purpose of the government is to take care of them, not that they need to take responsibility for their own well being.
Now I want you to know that I do not condone the political corruption and problems in the manufacturing sector at the turn of the last century, but I believe that the fact that Judeo-Christian values were tossed out the window by both Socialists and Capitalists alike which led to the belief that the weak had the right to dominate the strong and that moral behavior was irrelevant.
As Glenn Beck says, do not take my word for it. Please research some of these people on your own.
Sources:
(1) Bailey, Thomas A. and David M. Kennedy. The American Pageant, 7th edition. D.C. Heath and Company, Lexington, Mass. 1983.
(2) Brinkley, Alan. American History: A Survey, Vol. II, Since 1865, 10th edition. McGraw Hill College, Boston, Mass. 1999.
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