On the Origins of the Regime of Pragmatic Liberalism: John Dewey, Adolf A. Berle, and FDR's Commonwealth Club Address of 1932

Abstract

This essay stems from a prolonged study of Adolf A. Berle's drafts for the address “On Progressive Government” which Franklin Roosevelt gave in San Francisco during the 1932 presidential campaign. The essay compares Dewey'sIndividualism Old and New(Part I below) with the Commonwealth Club Address (Part II). The need for such a sustained comparison and commentary became clear only when I began to wonder whether Roosevelt's pragmatism—or rather the pragmatist teaching Berle formulated in responding to Roosevelt—was really idiosyncratic and philosophically derivative, as students of my generation had been taught to suppose. Like most journeymen, I had heard Justice Holmes's characterization of Roosevelt: “a first class temperament but a second class mind.” Coming from the oracle of pragmatist jurisprudence, that remark deflected my attention from Roosevelt's executive character and delayed my study of its effect on younger, more impressionable pragmatists like Berle. I also shared the common opinion of New Deal pragmatism as an encore for reform or a revanche for interventionism. I did not foresee that it might present an occasion for theoretical advance.