"A Government of Men": Responsible Government and the Rule of Law in the Progressive Era

Abstract

The Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 famously declares that the principle of the separation of powers will bind the commonwealth, “to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.” The idea of “a government of laws” expresses the Enlightenment ideal of an impersonal form of rule that substitutes abstract justice for the capriciousness of personal rule and is associated with two distinguishing features of American constitutionalism: the separation of powers and judicial review of administration and legislation. A century after Adams wrote, however, the ideal of “a government of laws” came under attack by a new trend in political thought. In place of a government of laws, a group of turn-of-the-century thinkers that included Woodrow Wilson, Frank Goodnow, Henry Jones Ford, and Herbert Croly advocated a system of government that, by uniting rather than separating legislative and executive power and by reducing judicial control of government, sought to enable an elected executive to hold real responsibility and, accordingly, to be held responsible by voters—what some of them called “a government of men.” Their vision of government was encapsulated in the idea of responsible government. The archetype of responsible government was British parliamentarism, or responsible cabinet government. As theorized and advocated by the American school of responsible government, a range of reform ideas from presidential representation, the unitary executive, and the executive budget, to weakened judicial review of legislation and even, for some, the popular recall of state governor, properly understood, were part of a project to establish some approximation of parliamentary government within the constraints of the American context—what is here called “parliamentarism with American characteristics.” This dissertation offers the first full account of that project. It does so in six chapters. Chapter 1 begins the story in the 1880s with the idea of formally parliamentarizing the American constitution by giving cabinet members seats in Congress, famously supported by a young Woodrow Wilson but also less famously by Gamaliel Bradford in a modified form. Chapter 2 follows Wilson in his pivot away from the Cabinet-in-Congress idea towards ways of achieving responsible government within the existing system through transformation of the presidency. It traces the development of this idea of responsible presidential government in the writings of James Bryce, Ford, Wilson, and Croly in the context of the transformation of the presidency by the three “progressive presidents,” Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson. Chapter 3 considers how the principle of responsible presidential government extended from the executive’s leadership of the legislature to its control over the administration in Frank Goodnow’s pioneering scholarship in public administration and administrative law. Chapter 4 extends the analysis to the judicial power by asking just how far the school of responsible government meant to take its critique of a “government of laws” through an examination of the diversity of their views on judicial review of legislation and administration. Chapter 5 situates the school of responsible government in the context of the progressive-era debate over direct democracy and representative government, exploring their varying assessments of the direct primary, initiative, referendum, and recall. Chapter 6 offers an account of the New York Constitutional Convention of 1915, which under the leadership of Henry Stimson synthesized the main principles of responsible government as developed by the figures studied in chapters 1-5 and applied them in a concrete set of constitutional amendment proposals.