Roughly a century before the fiasco in Central Park, the Progressive movement was launched to address the same perception of government incompetence. City halls around the country, caught in the grip of rapacious political machines, simply couldn’t get things done—mayors and governors couldn’t build sewer and water lines, couldn’t maintain parks and school systems, couldn’t manage the nation’s messy transition from farm to factory. Progressivism emerged to stand up a system that would work. But the reformers drawn into the movement were torn between two ideas about how to turn things around. Some, adopting a perspective that would come to be associated with Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, believed that the key was returning power to the individuals and small businesses that had defined 19th-century life. Others, many of whom would align themselves with Theodore Roosevelt, took the opposite view, having grown convinced that imbuing bigger, more robust bureaucracies with new power—public-service commissions and public authorities, for example—was the only realistic way to overcome the power wielded by the political hacks and charlatans then dominating American life.
The tension between these two ideas—Brandeis’s Jeffersonian impulse to push power down and Roosevelt’s Hamiltonian impulse to push it up—became the most consequential divide within Progressivism. Faced with the pernicious influence of monopolistic corporations, for example, the two camps were at odds over whether to prioritize efforts to break up trusts, thereby enabling competition from below, or to subject corporate behemoths to more stringent regulation from above. The Jeffersonians scored a handful of major victories before the First World War, including breaking up monopolies such as Standard Oil. But in the decades that followed, Progressivism’s Hamiltonian impulse came to predominate, advancing the notion that big, powerful government was the key to doing big, important things. The New Deal was defined by an alphabet soup of robust bureaucracies empowered to wield enormous authority—the Social Security Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Tennessee Valley Authority among them. And while the Jeffersonian impulse did not fade entirely—Wicks Law was passed in the 1920s—the Progressive project largely sought to empower what many would come to call the “establishment.”
Then, in the shadow of Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, the teeter-totter tipped back across its fulcrum. The upheavals of the 1960s and early 1970s—the civil-rights movement, Vietnam, the counterculture, an environmental reawakening, second-wave feminism, Watergate—soured reformers on the very establishment they’d helped erect. Rather than empower centralized institutions, they would now endeavor to rein them in, placing guardrails around various power brokers and giving voice to the ordinary people the establishment ignored. The movement became culturally averse to power. Over the past half century, that Jeffersonian impulse to check authority—to return influence to the meek among us—has become progressivism’s abiding priority. And rarely do those inside the movement register that, entirely apart from the influence of conservatism, these two warring impulses cut in separate directions.
