It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.
—Charles Péguy, Notre Patrie, 1905

It is a pity that no one has yet written a history of the progressive mind in America. We are just distant enough from the heyday of progressivism to have a certain perspective on its characteristic ways of looking at the world, yet we are still just close enough to its demise—or its transmutation into something else—to have some vivid first-hand memories of the peculiar intellectual deformations it visited upon our political and cultural life for something like a third of the present century. Entire areas of American life—the media and publishing worlds, the entertainment industry, the Federal bureaucracy, education, the academy, even the churches—cannot be wholly understood without a firm grasp of what the progressive outlook bequeathed to us in the years of its ascendancy, which by my calculations extend from the end of the 1920s to the mid-1960s.

Such histories of the American political Left in this period as we have been given do not really satisfy the need for a study of the progressive mind, which, though anchored in left-wing political ideology, was always a reflection of something more than a set of political positions. The progressivism I speak of was an ethos, a cast of mind, a secular faith that reached into every aspect of living and thinking. It was thus as much a code