The Progressive Movement

Woodrow Wilson like Obama

"Woodrow Wilson"
Wilson was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in late 1920 for his services in the previous year. However, his brief retirement in Washington was unhappy; the ill and embittered former president lived out his days in virtual seclusion.




After the armistice in November 1918, Wilson decided to head the American peace delegation personally, hoping to assure the implementation of his conception of the postwar world. Despite being received with great adulation by the public in Europe, the president was soon confronted by Allied leaders who preferred that the peace process be a means to incapacitate the German war machine for generations to come. Dubbed derisively as “the drum major of civilization,” the idealistic president was forced in the end to approve compromises in order to achieve his top priority, the League of Nations, included in the Treaty of Versailles. Which is know as the U N today.

An exhausted Wilson returned to the United States, where opposition to the treaty and League was gaining strength. In typical fashion, he took his appeal directly to the public on a railroad speaking tour through the Midwest and West. In late September Wilson collapsed and was taken back to Washington, where he suffered a stroke on October 2. He was partially paralyzed and was incapable of spearheading the fight for the League; the Senate defeated proposals late in 1919 and again in the spring of 1920.
Rather than accept compromise, Wilson chose to take the treaty to the electorate by publishing entreaties on its behalf, believing that a Democratic triumph in the Election of 1920 would force the Senate to see things his way. His call for a “solemn referendum” was not heeded by the voters, who handed Warren Harding and the Republicans a smashing victory.

Just like what is going to happen again in 2010 and 2012
General Interest, 1924
Certainly the most successful third party in the immediate post-World War I era was the Progressive effort led by Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin. The end of the war had seen an upsurge in left-wing political activity in the United States, as evidenced in the growth and development of the Workers’ Party (the Communists), the Socialist Party and the Farmer-Labor Party, all of which increased their ranks at the beginning of the 1920s.

Today this would be ECIU and Acorn

Urban problems were addressed by professional social workers who operated settlement houses as a means to protect and improve the prospects of the poor. However, efforts to place limitations on child labor were routinely thwarted by the courts. The needs of blacks and Native Americans were poorly served or served not at all — a major shortcoming of the Progressive Movement. Hence Van Jones! “No more broken treaties”
Hillary Clinton doesn't want to be called a Liberal she prefers to be called a “Progressive”
Gee I wonder why
Henry Agaard Wallace
One of Wallace's immediate tasks was to reduce the grain surplus. Wallace, along with Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell and others, authored the first major New Deal agricultural legislation, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. That radical legislation, later found unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court, had the goal to "relieve the existing national economic emergency by increasing agricultural purchasing power." Local boards consisting of farmers were established to determine the production of farm commodities in their own communities. Unfortunately, by the time the act was passed, farmers had already planted their crops. Making one of the most difficult decisions of his life, Wallace ordered the destruction of six million hogs and 10 million acres of cotton in an effort to bring the surpluses down.
The Court struck down the act in 1936 because farming was not considered to be interstate commerce and therefore could not be regulated by the federal government. Years later Wallace would see the AAA as one of his crowning achievements.
You see radicals aren't good for this country.
Eventually, Wallace's relationship with Truman deteriorated completely and on September 20, 1946, the president removed him from his cabinet post. Wallace then assumed the Progressive Party leadership and became its candidate for president in 1948. In a four-way race, Truman carried the election, and Wallace placed a distant fourth.
You see the same thing is happening today, Only its Global Warming and Cap and Tax, and tax payer paid health care. And soon it will be illegals being able to vote!








Progressivism is a political and social term for ideologies and movements favoring or advocating changes or reform, usually in an egalitarian direction for economic policies (public management) and liberal direction for social policies. Progressivism is often viewed in opposition to conservative ideologies.
This in the end is never good for a free country!
Presidential leadership would provide the unity of direction--the vision--needed for true progressive government. "All that progressives ask or desire," wrote Woodrow Wilson, "is permission--in an era when development, evolution, is a scientific word--to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle

interpret the Constitution


interpret the Constitution ? Excuse me!



The Founders believed that all men are created equal and that they have certain inalienable rights. All are also obliged to obey the natural law, under which we have not only rights but duties. We are obliged "to respect those rights in others which we value in ourselves" (Jefferson). The main rights were thought to be life and liberty, including the liberty to organize one's own church, to associate at work or at home with whomever one pleases, and to use one's talents to acquire and keep property. For the Founders, then, there is a natural moral order--rules discovered by human reason that promote human well-being, rules that can and should guide human life and politics.
The Progressives rejected these claims as naive and unhistorical. In their view, human beings are not born free. John Dewey, the most thoughtful of the Progressives, wrote that freedom is not "something that individuals have as a ready-made possession." It is "something to be achieved." In this view, freedom is not a gift of God or nature. It is a product of human making, a gift of the state. Man is a product of his own history, through which he collectively creates himself. He is a social construct. Since human beings are not naturally free, there can be no natural rights or natural law. Therefore, Dewey also writes, "Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology."
Since the Progressives held that nature gives man little or nothing and that everything of value to human life is made by man, they concluded that there are no permanent standards of right. Dewey spoke of "historical relativity." However, in one sense, the Progressives did believe that human beings are oriented toward freedom, not by nature (which, as the merely primitive, contains nothing human), but by the historical process, which has the character of progressing toward increasing freedom. So the "relativity" in question means that in all times, people have views of right and wrong that are tied to their particular times, but in our time, the views of the most enlightened are true because they are in conformity with where history is going.





For the Founders, then, the individuals existence and freedom in this crucial respect are not a gift of government. They are a gift of God and nature. Government is therefore always and fundamentally in the service of the individual, not the other way around. The purpose of government, then, is to enforce the natural law for the members of the political community by securing the people's natural rights. It does so by preserving their lives and liberties against the violence of others. In the founding, the liberty to be secured by government is not freedom from necessity or poverty. It is freedom from the despotic and predatory domination of some human beings over others.
Government's main duty for the Founders is to secure that freedom--at home through the making and enforcement of criminal and civil law, abroad through a strong national defense. The protection of life and liberty is achieved through vigorous prosecutions of crime against person and property or through civil suits for recovery of damages, these cases being decided by a jury of one's peers.
The Progressives regarded the Founders' scheme as defective because it took too benign a view of nature. As Dewey remarked, they thought that the individual was ready-made by nature. The Founders' supposed failure to recognize the crucial role of society led the Progressives to disparage the Founders' insistence on limited government. The Progressive goal of politics is freedom, now understood as freedom from the limits imposed by nature and necessity. They rejected the Founders' conception of freedom as useful for self-preservation for the sake of the individual pursuit of happiness. For the Progressives, freedom is redefined as the fulfillment of human capacities, which becomes the primary task of the state.


These liberals or so called Progressives MUST be put out Period!!!!!!!!