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Starting in the late nineteenth century, a different view of human nature and its motivations developed. The Progressive movement rejected the Founders' assumption of the universal depravity of human nature. Progressives believed human nature could be improved under the environmental pressures of technological, scientific, and economic changes. New “sciences” like sociology and psychology had developed that were discovering the material causes of human behavior whether social, economic, or political. From this knowledge came the technical means of alleviating the social and economic disruptions attending these changes. Masters of this new knowledge and the techniques for applying them, if given power, could apply these insights into governing and managing the state, and solving the new problems that had arisen from industrialization and technological change.
From the Progressive perspective, the Constitution and its structure of checks and balances were outmoded. Industrialization and technological development had created new problems that required a different form of federal government. According to Progressive president Theodore Roosevelt in his 1901 State of the Union speech, “The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.”
Woodrow Wilson made the same argument. Politics must now be understood as a Darwinian process, and the Constitution must evolve to meet new circumstances. “All that progressives ask or desire,” Wilson wrote in 1913 in The New Freedom, “is permission—in an era when 'development,' 'evolution,' is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”
The limited government of the Founders, then, was incapable of effective government given the developments in economic and social life that were changing human nature. The national interest could no longer be served by the state governments, the free market, or civil society A bigger and more powerful national government was necessary to control big business and corporations, and to more equitably distribute wealth and improve the general welfare. The clash of the various interests and passions of individuals and factions must be neutralized, and national unity must be created through a national government and its technocratic administration. The individual rights enshrined in the Constitution had to be redefined in terms of the larger society and its welfare.
The right to property, for example, so crucial for the framers, now must be “subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it,” as Theodore Roosevelt said in his famous “New Nationalism” speech delivered during the 1912 presidential campaign. Enforcing this concern for the “general right of the community” required a “policy of a far more active government interference with social and economic conditions.”
In his last State of the Union speech Roosevelt said, “The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated” to serve the unified interests of the collective people. Woodrow Wilson concurred. Imagining in The New Freedom the progressive utopia that would come into being once the existing politico-social order had been rebuilt by what Wilson calls political “architects” and “engineers,” he describes it as a structure “where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.”
To achieve these aims, the federal government had to grow, with agencies and bureaus created to administer the laws and regulations presumably made necessary by new economic and social conditions. “There is scarcely a single duty of government which was once simple which is not now complex,” Woodrow Wilson wrote in his essay “The Study of Administration.” He went on to write: “The functions of government are every day becoming more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multiplying in number. Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings . . . Whatever holds of authority state or federal governments are to take upon corporations, there must follow cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience.”
This wisdom, knowledge, and experience will be the purview of those schooled in the new sciences, not the traditional wisdom and practical experience of the people pursuing their various and conflicting interests. As Progressive journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1914, “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means,” which we can do because “the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.” The instrument of this process necessarily must be the federal government, now enriched by the Sixteenth Amendment, which in 1913 instituted a national income tax.
The Progressives, then, discarded the Founders' vision of an eternally flawed human nature, and the Constitutional architecture that balanced and checked the tendency for people and factions to pursue their interests and maximize their power at the expense of others. Now a more powerful federal government––currently comprising over 500 agencies and offices, with 2.3 million employees costing $200 billion annually–– armed with new knowledge and backed by coercive federal power, will organize, regulate, and manage social and economic conditions to improve life and create a more just and equitable society.
