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Herbert Croly (1869-1930)
The Promise of American Life (1909)
Herbert Croly’s 1909 book The Promise of American Life identified freedom, economic prosperity, and equality as the goals of the United States. The proliferation of large corporations had created vast inequalities between the few rich and the many poor. Furthermore, the spoils system created a class of politicians that enriched themselves through their continued control of government offices. This meant that there were few opportunities for political outsiders to influence government policy participate. The consequence is that many opportunities for economic success were closed to most people despite their best efforts. As a result, they were effectively precluded from reaching the promise about which Croly wrote.
Croly called for a resurgence of popular sovereignty and a greater respect for democratic values. He believed the US would be strengthened by measures that redistributed wealth (such as taxation of large inheritances) and imposed safety and health regulations on business. He saw poverty as an obstacle to the preservation of democracy and promoted public assistance for the needy. He also supported political reform that promoted democracy by reducing the role of money in the electoral process. These reforms sought to achieve greater effective equality by expanding each person’s opportunity for achieving what he called the “promise of American life”–a true opportunity to pursue happiness. Croly’s call for a “Square Deal” would be adopted by Theodore Roosevelt in his 1912 presidential campaign.
…[T]he American Promise has undergone certain important changes since the establishment of our national independence. When the colonists succeeded in emancipating themselves from political allegiance to Great Britain, they were confronted by the task of organizing a stable and efficient government without encroaching on the freedom, which was even at that time traditionally associated with American life. The task was by no means an easy one, and required for its performance the application of other political principles than that of freedom. The men who were responsible for this great work were not, perhaps, entirely candid in recognizing the profound modifications in their traditional ideas which their constructive political work had implied; but they were at all events fully aware of the great importance of their addition to the American idea. That idea, while not ceasing to be at bottom economic, became more than ever political and social in its meaning and contents. The Land of Freedom became in the course of time also the Land of Equality. The special American political system … was made explicitly, if not uncompromisingly, democratic; and the success of this democratic political system was indissolubly associated in the American mind with the persistence of abundant and widely distributed economic prosperity. Our democratic institutions became in a sense the guarantee that prosperi