Herbert David Croly (January 23, 1869 – May 17, 1930) was an intellectual leader of the progressive movement as an editor, political philosopher and a co-founder of the magazine The New Republic in early twentieth-century America.
His political philosophy influenced many leading progressives including Theodore Roosevelt, Adolph Berle, as well as his close friends Judge Learned Hand and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.
[2] His 1909 book The Promise of American Life looked to the constitutional liberalism as espoused by Alexander Hamilton, combined with the radical democracy of Thomas Jefferson.
[3] The book influenced contemporaneous progressive thought, shaping the ideas of many intellectuals and political leaders, including then ex-President Theodore Roosevelt.
Calling themselves "The New Nationalists", Croly and Walter Weyl sought to remedy the relatively weak national institutions with a strong federal government.
He promoted a strong army and navy and attacked pacifists who thought democracy at home and peace abroad was best served by keeping America weak.
Croly was one of the founders of modern liberalism in the United States, especially through his books, essays and a highly influential magazine founded in 1914, The New Republic.
In his 1914 book Progressive Democracy, Croly rejected the thesis that the American liberal tradition was inhospitable to anti-capitalist alternatives.
Jane Croly wrote only on the subject of women and published nine books in addition to her work as a journalist.
In 1910, after the publication of Herbert Croly's book The Promise of American Life, he was awarded an honorary degree by Harvard University.
In The Promise of American Life, Herbert Croly set out his argument for a progressive-liberal government in twentieth-century America.
He saw democracy as the defining American trait and described democracy not as a government devoted to equal rights but as one with the aim of “bestowing a share of the responsibility and the benefits, derived from political economic association, upon the whole community.”[7]: 194 He returned to Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton as representatives of the two main schools of American political thought.
Government, according to Croly, could no longer be content with protecting negative rights; it needed to actively promote the welfare of its citizens.
Croly proposed a three-pronged program: the nationalization of large corporations, the strengthening of labor unions, and a strong central government.
[7]: 193 Croly's plan included a federal inheritance rate of 20%, not the individual income tax that other progressive reformers wanted.
[5] Croly argued that compensation for work should be adjusted to “the needs of a normal and wholesome life”[7]: 417 —an idea along the lines of the Utopian author Edward Bellamy.
[5] In the telling of Fred Siegel of the conservative Manhattan Institute, “For Croly, businessmen and their allies – the jack-of-all-trades latter-day Jeffersonians – were blocking the path to the bright future he envisioned for the specialists of the rising professional classes.”[9] The Promise of American Life has received criticism from a number of angles.
The book had soaring praise for Mark Hanna, a conservative who saw the role of government very differently from Croly.
[4] A main concern of Croly's in Progressive Democracy was that the United States Constitution was fundamentally inconsistent with American democratic aspirations.
The basis for his argument was the belief that for progressive democracy to be successful it needed to move quickly, and the Constitution did not accommodate that.
The progressive democratic faith carries with it the liberation of democracy from this class of social pseudo knowledge.
"[13] After Woodrow Wilson won the presidential election in 1912, Harper’s Weekly became the leading magazine for Progressive party politics.
In 1914, Willard Straight and his wife Dorothy Payne Whitney provided the financing for Croly's magazine, The New Republic.
[5] TNR’s articles represented the politics of its founders, and by 1915 the journal had attracted an audience of about 15,000, mainly young intellectuals in New York.
In retaliation, Roosevelt accused the editors of personal disloyalty and ended relations with them, becoming openly hostile toward Croly and the others.
Croly's pragmatism set the magazine’s tone early, not blaming Germany but not openly supporting the Allies either.
The Treaty of Versailles delivered a severe blow to Croly's progressive spirit, causing him to declare that the Paris Peace Conference was the apocalypse of liberalism.
But, for Croly, the challenge of how to handle prohibition was the final straw in breaking his faith in his old vision of democracy.
He wrote that legislation as a solution for social issues was unimportant, and abandoned his own core philosophy that central government could create human amelioration.
[2] Adolph Berle, a member of the New Deal Brain Trust, was a Bull Moose Progressive and familiar with Croly's work.