tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7907752.post766119380502612921..comments2024-03-27T07:18:39.229-05:00Comments on In Medias Res: Mormonism and Progressive Utopian PoliticsUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7907752.post-19795686496564214892011-11-26T21:44:27.752-06:002011-11-26T21:44:27.752-06:00When all you're concerned about is symbols, gr...When all you're concerned about is symbols, grand narratives and far-fetched historical connections, "progressive" and "crony capitalist" are interchangable terms. I guess.Matt J Stannardhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16236787482565862733noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7907752.post-71033987721034523152011-11-22T17:04:51.993-06:002011-11-22T17:04:51.993-06:00Matt,
I think there are precise correlations of i...Matt,<br /><br /><i>I think there are precise correlations of influence here. The language that men like George Reynolds, who was an early organizer of Mormon Sunday schools, uses to describe what the Mormon Sunday schools want to accomplish mirrors precisely the language that people like Jane Addams and other advocates of the settlement houses and institutional church movements of 1880s and 1890s...Meanwhile, the great Mormon thinkers of the age – Widtsoe, Roberts, et al – are devouring progressive thinkers like Herbert Spencer and Henry Cope and so on, and making very similar arguments about the perfectability of human society and the unlimited capacities of rational thought and so on and so forth. To say the evidence isn’t there is sort of a boggling claim.</i><br /><br />But I'm not saying there is no evidence of a correspondence between how early 20th-century Mormons talked about their institutions and practices, and how progressives educators and scientists of the era were talking, am I? Have I misspoken here? I think what I've been saying is that it seems to me that you want to go <i>beyond</i> correspondence; you want to argue that there is something fundamentally progressive about these Mormon institutions and practices, because that will enable to you to make a claim about the likely (hidden?) progressivism of Mitt Romney. Perhaps I'm not seeing what's obvious to you, but I look at those same institutions and practices, and I see the attempt to shore up a lost vision with another, later, borrowed one, making the correspondence merely circumstantial. Consequently I think the fact that Romney may use language similar to that of an early 20th-century progressive it doesn't necessarily tell us anything, because there doesn't necessarily appear to be anything to those institutions and practices tied to the progressive moral vision, or the sort which led to, as you put it, "workers’ rights and organized private charities."<br /><br />Note that none of this is an argument against the likelihood that Romney may view organizations and good administration in the way you suggest; it's a challenge to the genealogy by which you present it as coming into Romney's worldview.Russell Arben Foxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03366800726360134194noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7907752.post-72720049397817995072011-11-22T08:55:46.106-06:002011-11-22T08:55:46.106-06:00I don't think it's simply a "parallel...I don't think it's simply a "parallel." In fact, it strikes me that you're the one making an argument based on ideal typology rather than on historical evidence. I think there are precise correlations of influence here. The language that men like George Reynolds, who was an early organizer of Mormon Sunday schools, uses to describe what the Mormon Sunday schools want to accomplish mirrors precisely the language that people like Jane Addams and other advocates of the settlement houses and institutional church movements of 1880s and 1890s: that is, the inculcation of a particularly consistent set of virtues into their charges through methods that increasing numbers of experts in education and psychology endorsed. Mormon leaders are reading and citing the same people - John Dewey, say, as well as the progressive educators Kristine cites - that progressives are. The arguments that Joseph F. Smith and Heber J. Grant make for the reorganization of the auxiliaries and the embrace of Prohibition and the importance of Mormonism's voluntary organizations - it's Smith, of course, who makes participation in Relief Society and Sunday school and all the rest mandatory - echo precisely the arguments that other progressive reformers were making about the virtues of community activism and its contribution to moral uplift. Heber J. Grant and Nephi Morris and other Mormon leaders explicitly in various places discuss their endorsement of the Prohibition movement the leaders of the temperance movement favorably. Meanwhile, the great Mormon thinkers of the age - Widtsoe, Roberts, et al - are devouring progressive thinkers like Herbert Spencer and Henry Cope and so on, and making very similar arguments about the perfectability of human society and the unlimited capacities of rational thought and so on and so forth. To say the evidence isn't there is sort of a boggling claim.matt bnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7907752.post-8473144981818734742011-11-21T22:34:15.357-06:002011-11-21T22:34:15.357-06:00Matt,
I think you’ve bought into a common misunde...Matt,<br /><br /><i>I think you’ve bought into a common misunderstanding about the social gospel being basically the Red Cross with a veneer of religious language and not the profoundly transformative movement that it in fact was, that you’ve bought into the romanticized notion of the Populists being noble anti-capitalist agrarians assimilated by lukewarm progressive compromisers, and most of all, I think that progressivism only barely and glancingly resembles the New Deal and the later regulatory state, because it imagined a new form of American life.</i><br /><br />I’ll possibly grant you the first charge, strongly dissent from the second charge, and more mildly dissent from the third. Your essay has but me in an interesting position, Matt, because as I’ve gotten into arguments about populism, progressivism, and American utopian and anti-capitalist movements with others over the years, I’m usually the one arguing that a certain conceptual continuity, in terms of moral (both religious and civic) fervor and a bottom-line insistence upon being able to govern oneself and one’s community in a context of equality, may be seen as extending from the People’s Party all the way up through the era of progressive reforms and even into the New Deal (thanks to the influence of thinkers like John Ryan). So generally, I’d be one to strongly agree that progressivism was a “transformative” movement, in the sense that I think it conveyed, in a different and more technical language, the same community-building goals of 19th century utopians (whether articulated by Henry George or Edward Bellamy or the Farmer’s Alliance) to a more urbanized, industrialized, and individualistic audience. Now I suspect that something vital was lost to this movement as the social gospel of the early 20th century replaced the often very literal “groundedness” of the populist argument for the rights and power of a community to sustain its members and command respect (an analog to the specificity of Zion here, perhaps?), but the visionary core concept endured through the decades, or so I believe. The problem, as I read it, with your treatment is that you’re postulating that a parallel conceptual continuity tells us something about Mormonism, and thus something about Mitt Romney’s leadership style and organizational vision. But the parallel doesn’t hold, because the chain of continuity isn’t there; Mormonism is missing the second step, where utopianism was translated into a different, organizational language. I don’t see it–I see your evidence about the Boy Scouts and Sunday School, and I’ll accept under advisement your claim about Mormon support for Prohibition (under advisement not because you’re incorrect, but because that doesn’t seem on my reading to support your claims for a Mormon embrace of the reforming moral power of efficient organizations either, seeing Prohibition was a cause very much shaped by the utopian fervor of 19th-century temperance movements), but overall what I see is a difficult, contested break from utopian equality and community, and its gradual replacement with a highly spiritualized but not in any way “progressive” trust in the righteousness and decency of the correlated programs of the modern church. Our welfare program, and other elements of our organization practices, often hint at or even directly partake of those older communitarian understandings, but I’m unaware of any concerted attempt to mold those understandings into an ideology of effectively administered moral renewal. Sure, I suppose that kind of justification can be grafted onto Sunday School and the like, and I’m not opposed to that–I like civil religion as much as the next guy–but as I understand it, for example, Sunday School was about making children into Saints and enlisting them into a community of such, not improving the race.Russell Arben Foxhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03366800726360134194noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7907752.post-76356279476463911932011-11-21T17:45:29.845-06:002011-11-21T17:45:29.845-06:00I think part of the problem here is that we're...I think part of the problem here is that we're defining words like "progressive" in different ways. I think you've bought into a common misunderstanding about the social gospel being basically the Red Cross with a veneer of religious language and not the profoundly transformative movement that it in fact was, that you've bought into the romanticized notion of the Populists being noble anti-capitalist agrarians assimilated by lukewarm progressive compromisers, and most of all, I think that progressivism only barely and glancingly resembles the New Deal and the later regulatory state, because it imagined a new form of American life. It was not, perhaps, the agrarian ideal of the Populists but it was, surely, not the society World War I left us with. This is why progressives like Jane Addams found the New Deal profoundly disappointing.<br /><br />Suffice to say, you're taking me to task for arguing that the progressives were utopian by saying "no they weren't;" I think they deeply and profoundly were. Now, of course this has to do with what we define "progressivism" as being, and of course there's entire books devoted to that. So perhaps you're defining progressives to include mostly boring politicians like Hiram Johnson while I'm including visionary reformers like George Herron and Florence Kelley - or even somebody like Frances Willard or Richard Ely, people who surely believed that all Americans could be remade into virtuous and conscientious citizens and that we could have 100% voter turnout and no child would be left unable to recite Plato. Of course, that's not your utopia, and it may not have been that of Brigham Young. But it surely became that of Joseph F. Smith, and Reed Smoot, and particularly Heber J. Grant. This is why you take issue with me calling William Jennings Bryan a progressive - because you like Bryan and do not want to see his ideals sullied by association with men like Theodore Roosevelt. The movement's borders were fuzzy, surely.<br /><br />Of course, we've not even begun to talk about the reams of historical evidence in which Mormons speak highly of progressive movements and progressive associations and endorse things like Prohibition and the NWSA - all in the end of building the Kingdom of God on earth. <br /><br />I'm surely sympathetic with your elegiac tone; the vision of Zion is a deeply seductive one, but I'm also tempered, as are you, I think, with a sort of Lutheran pessimism, and the visions of the progressives strike me as a bit naive. None the less noble, though, for how radically different they thought society could be.matt bhttp://juvenileinstructor.orgnoreply@blogger.com