The new freedom and the radicals: Woodrow Wilson, progressive views of radicalism, and the origins of repressive tolerance, 1900--1924

It may seem like common sense today that progressivism is a very different thing from radicalism. But in the years before the First World War, there were several important forms of symbiosis between these two broad categories of political thought. First, progressives stressed participation of radicals in the institutions they created to resolve strikes and investigate the causes of unrest, as well as open-mindedness toward radical ideas in the findings of those institutions. Progressives called for incorporating beneficial aspects of socialism and syndicalism into capitalism in a way that would produce a hybrid form of political economy. In addition to these forms of porousness, there was also significant ideological overlap and coalitional reform efforts between these two groups.; All this would change during the First World War, and especially after the Russian Revolution. Woodrow Wilson instituted a vast machinery for repressing dissent, and other progressives, who joined the Wilson administration in large numbers, began to see radicals as a problem and shied away from defending them publicly. After the war, progressives renewed coalitions with radicals in such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Farmer-Labor Party, but they insisted that they did not share the views of radicals and drew a clear distinction between their own views and socialism.; This dissertation addresses how progressives themselves understood radicalism by examining their public and private writings. It identifies those conditions, such as economic recovery and conservative political economy, that have caused the connections between radicals and progressives to flourish and those, such as an external threat, revolutionary upheaval, or internal political violence, that have caused them to be repressed. The project examines eleven people: the journalists Herbert Croly and Walter Lippmann of The New Republic and George Creel of the wartime Committee on Public Information; the politicians Woodrow Wilson and Hiram Johnson; the social reformers Jane Addams and Florence Kelley; the intellectuals Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter; the labor lawyer Frank Walsh; and the labor economist Carleton Parker.