Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story

by Wilfred M. McClay

The problems of the day would never, they thought, be corrected by a Madisonian system of raw competition, in which (as Madison said) ambition would be made to counteract ambition and interests to counter interests. Instead, they would be corrected through the exercise of scientific intelligence applied by disinterested experts. Hence the Progressive emphasis on the transformation and renewal of social and political institutions as the key to the renewal of the world. Hence the responsibility of government, acting as the “social intelligence” of an informed public, to order the community in a way that would order the souls of its members. Hence the central importance of schools and education, as the vehicles by which the findings of scientific research could be incorporated into the lives of families and individuals, for the betterment of all. External change, then, would come before internal change. The deep social problems of the day, the unhappiness and insecurity of so many people whose lives had been upended by the new order of things – those problems could not be solved by religion, or the search for some other source of psychological “sense of wholeness.” They could only be solved by the reordering of the social world along fresh lines, in a way that embraced the realities of modernity rather than seeking to negate or repeal them.