PrintMarch 4, 2013
Progressivism's Revenge
If the closest confidante and advisor to an extremely consequential American president had written a fantasy novel about a heroic social agitator with a plan to bring about a "benevolent" progressive dictatorship by instigating a brutal civil war, might one imagine that an honest press would take an interest? In fact this has happened, and America's actual press has tried to dismiss the book as a meaningless "bad novel".
In 1912, Edward Mandell House, Woodrow Wilson's most intimate and influential advisor, wrote Philip Dru: Administrator. (Read it online here.) House is credited with having orchestrated Wilson's presidential nomination, and was a prime mover in several controversial policy undertakings of his presidency. He was an avowed progressive, and, by his own lights, a master political manipulator and strategist. His novel's eponymous hero is a neo-Marxist revolutionary who insinuates himself into the machinations of politics in a speculative 1920 in order to prod America into...(Read Full Article)
