The German Connection (Part 2 of 2)

American progressivism is not very American. It’s quite German, imported into the United States and derived from the same German school of thought that produced fascism and national socialism.

What is the stereotype for Germans that people around the world would likely recognize? Precision engineering and nihilism.

That is a broad cultural generalization, of course. It’s also not inaccurate. Why else do businesses market hi-tech products as “German engineered?” And who can forget that Germany was the home of the most (in)famous of all nihilists, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, the latter an open Nazi sympathizer in the 1930s?

Both Nietzsche and Heidegger were educated in German universities. Nietzsche studied at the Universities in Bonn and Leipzig in the 1860s—at the very moment Americans were concluding their Civil War and abolishing slavery via the 13^th Amendment—while Heidegger completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Freiburg in 1915.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, Germany was producing the greatest advances in mathematics, physics, and engineering. Around that same time, German thinkers were engaged in radical postmodern philosophic skepticism—an exercise in the self-destruction of reason—which became popularized as doctrines of nihilism, moral relativism, and historicism.  

This was the intellectual soil from which progressivism grew.

The German Way: Science and Nihilism

The two poles of progressivism—scientific central planning/social engineering and the emancipation of the human will from all moral constraints—reflect the main intellectual interests of the German academics who created the body of scholarship that formed the foundation for the progressive movement.  

Progressive intellectual pursuits flourished in Germany because Germans of that time did more than anyone to expand university-level institutions of progressive higher education.

Germans not only valued education, they created a German model of education—progressive education—they believed was superior to any kind of classical education rooted in old books and ancient literature. By the 1930s, as the nation transformed into the Nazified Third Reich, Germany boasted the greatest numbers of university-educated physicians, nurses, research scientists, academic professors, professional school teachers, lawyers, engineers, accountants, and bureaucrats of many kinds.

When German progressives experimented with eugenics, for example, the experiments were guided by German PhDs in medicine, biology, anthropology, and genetics. They “followed the science.”

[German Eagle from the 1930s on the main building of the Tempelhof Airport in Berlin, Germany]

By the time of WWII, Germany had the highest concentration, per capita, of the most highly-educated people on Planet Earth. Germany had the most developed elementary school system in the world, the highest literacy rate in the world, and the best universities.

Germany published more books annually than anywhere else in the world. Germany was the most learned and literate nation on Earth. Germany featured millions of people who, as they were becoming Nazis, “believed in science.” The problem was that they had no moral compass by which to judge what to do with science.

Should they cure diseases or cause them? Should engineers make death camps more efficient, or not? Should physicists create modern weapons of unmatched power to protect the German homeland or to conquer foreign nations? The science progressive Germans admired offered no answers to these ethical questions.

So what did learned Germans do with all their fancy formal education?

They persuaded themselves that their superior knowledge authorized them to plan and control the lives of others, all in the name of science, of course. Germans launched one of the most terrifying, murderous experiments in social engineering and progressive central planning in all of history, the human destruction of which was cut short only by the armies of foreign allied nations, including the United States.

The American Connection

Here I ask that you turn your attention away from Europe, and cross the Atlantic Ocean to the United States, and step back in time to the middle of the 19th century.

The Civil War persuaded many of the brightest young Americans that the United States had been ill-founded. After all, what were the results of the celebrated American Founding, which included the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and luminaries such as Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Franklin, Adams, and many others?

Answer: 700,000 Christian Americans slaughtered by fellow Christian Americans, widespread devastation, and a deep national melancholy among those who survived the war. A person could smell the rot of Gettysburg from miles away. The fires in Atlanta burned for weeks. The American Civil War was the closest thing to national suicide in the annals of modern history.

Intelligent young Americans, after the Civil War, were looking to re-found the United States, to rebuild the nation upon some kind of platform firmer than the natural right principles of 1776 and the 1787 experiment in constitutional self-government.

After the Civil War, many of these young men—many of whom had served in the Union Army—all of whom were disenchanted with the American Founding—enrolled in old, East Coast American colleges in search of alternatives and inspirations for political, social, and cultural reform.

They found none.

Instead, they found the same old books that Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis had studied, that the American Founders had studied, that earlier generations of Europeans had studied as they persecuted and made war on each other over the course of centuries.

The classical and religious education found in most American colleges did not offer a new science of politics or a new code of morality for which young American intellectuals were searching. Some of their professors, however, pointed to a place where rumors suggested one could find a new, progressive form of education: Germany.

And so they went.

In the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, at first a trickle and then growing streams of young Americans went to Germany to get the Ph.D., a degree the Germans invented. (It’s worth noting that many Germans did not come to the United States for the Ph.D. or any other advanced or terminal degree.)

Later, those same Americans, with their newly-minted German Ph.D.s in hand, returned the United States and created within American colleges the first graduate departments of political science, history, sociology, psychology, and eventually what came to be known as all the “social sciences.”

John Burgess was one of those young Americans educated in Germany. When he returned to the United States, Burgess founded the first American graduate program in political science at Columbia University. Several of Burgess’s early students helped to create a similar graduate program in political science at Johns Hopkins University, from which Woodrow Wilson would later earn his Ph.D. (Wilson remains the only United States President to earn a Ph.D.)

The list of pioneering American social scientists in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries—including Frank Goodnow, Charles Merriam, Edward Ross, Charles Beard, W.E.B. Du Bois and his teacher William James, and many others—were scholars, writers, and researchers who were educated in Germany, or educated in the United States by German-trained professors, or both.

[Photo of W.E.B. DuBois]

In some instances, the German influence on American higher education started even earlier.

Few people recall that the keynote speaker at the dedication ceremony for the cemetery at Gettysburg was not Abraham Lincoln, but the famed orator, academic, and President of Harvard University, Edward Everett.

Almost no one remembers that Everett, in the 1810s, studied at the German University in Göttingen. When he later accepted a teaching position at Harvard in the 1820s, he devoted great time and energy encouraging the Harvard faculty to replace their classical studies with the progressive research methodologies he observed and learned in Germany.

Francis Lieber was German, born in 1798 in Berlin, and educated at the University of Jena. Lieber then moved to the United States. In the 1830s he became a tenured and influential professor at South Carolina College (later the University of South Carolina), where he met John C. Calhoun. In my own book on Abraham Lincoln, I speculated that Lieber might have introduced Calhoun to Hegelian and other German forms of historicism and racial evolutionism, which Calhoun then used to defend race-based slavery.

These are but some of the more prominent examples of the importation of German thought into American colleges in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, which sparked two important developments: American colleges were quickly transformed from institutions of classical and (classically) liberal education into progressive research universities, which then fueled the progressive movement in the United States.

Equipped with their German educations, American progressive academics created new journals and wrote new books for the purpose of exploring how to change the United States away from a self-governing constitutional republic, into a modern, bureaucratic, administrative state.

The two poles of postmodern German thought—scientific central planning/social engineering coupled with nihilistic, morally relativistic philosophy—became the two poles of American higher education and, eventually, the popular and political progressive movement that flowed from the halls of American higher education.

A Tidal Wave

Progressivism crashed over the United States in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries like a tidal wave of epic proportions. Within two or three generations, progressivism changed religion in the United States, politics, and of course the meaning and purpose of education.

Those who questioned or challenged the basic premise of postmodern progressive thought were few, very few—they were outliers—and seen as whacky traditionalists scared of change and innovation.

Progressivism spread through both American political parties like a fast-growing cancer. When progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson ran for President in 1912, he was opposed by lifelong Republican Teddy Roosevelt. TR’s main critique was that Wilson was insufficiently progressive—that those who wanted full-blown progressivism, including national central planning and social engineering, should vote for Roosevelt.

By the time the modern conservative movement began in the United States—in the late 1940s, after WWII, and the 1950s—German-inspired, American-style progressivism was already almost a century old. By the time William F. Buckley Jr. launched National Review magazine in 1955, progressive academics had already transformed most American institutions of higher education into institutions of progressivism.

There’s more to this story, but here we must wind down. I have tried to show that our (post)modern United States, today, is thoroughly progressive—certainly more progressive than ever before in American history—and that American progressivism is not very American; rather, it’s very German.

When someone brags about being “progressive,” you’re not wrong to respond: “How German of you!”

The progressive dream remains a bureaucratic state that decides for us what foods we eat, what medicines are injected into us, how we run our businesses, how we educate our children, how we spend our own money and use our own property.

Culturally, the goal of progressivism is a nation of submissive subjects who are proud to be in regulatory compliance and no longer believe in moral right and wrong—except the unquestionable rightness and goodness of the progressive bureaucratic state itself.

Progressives dream of a world in which the emancipated will is experienced in the form of sexual desires unmoored from moral constraints—certainly the constraints connected to the natural family—and in which sexual activities are disassociated from the responsibilities of child-rearing; a world in which therapists, counselors, social scientists, and bureaucrats replace fathers, and, eventually, mothers too. (Many daycare centers, which feature licensed early childhood education specialists, and accept infants as young as six weeks old, are now called “schools.”)

Intellectually and educationally, the goal of progressivism is to produce technologies that will enable the bureaucratic class to provide the goods and services dependent, submissive subjects want and empower those subjects to experience personally any fantasies they have, no matter how unnatural they might be, including men who pretend to be women and women who want to be men.

Progressive education rejects the premise that human nature contains within itself limits on what is humanly possible. Progressive education places great emphasis on research methodology in the service of new technologies per the preceding paragraph. If you doubt this, sit in a few graduate courses, in any discipline, and see for yourself.

Progressive education mocks the instruction in moral virtue found in classical literature as old-fashioned, outdated, patriarchal, and unprogressive. In place of the classical understanding of happiness as moral and intellectual virtue, progressivism substitutes a shallow understanding of happiness as the indulgence of fleeting desires and appetites.

We Americans today, with few exceptions, are far more German than we are American because we are far more progressive than we are free, self-governing, responsible, and virtuous. We’re not good. We’re regulated. The question is: Should we do something about that? If so, what?