ise of American life," in Herbert Croly's phrase, recognized the emergence of a permanent class of wage workers as the heart of the matter. The founding editor of the New Republic, Croly stated the issue with unusual clarity in Progressive Democracy, published in 1914. In an earlier America, "pioneer or territorial democrats," as he called them, "had every promise of ultimate economic independence, possessed as they were of their freeholds." But the private "appropriation of the public domain rapidly converted the American people from a freeholding into a wage-earning democracy" and raised the central question to which modern societies had not yet found the answer: "How can the wage-earners obtain an amount or a degree of economic independence analogous to that upon which the pioneer democrat could count?" Welfare programs, Croly argued—insurance against unemployment, sickness, and old age; measures enforcing safe and healthy conditions of work; a minimum wage—represented a very partial answer at best. Conservatives objected that such reforms would simply promote a "sense of dependence," and this criticism, Croly admitted, had a "great deal of force." The conservatives' own solution, however—"that the wage-earner's only hope is to become a property owner"—was so deeply inconsistent with the whole trend of modern industrialism that it was difficult to treat it "with patience and courtesy." The claim that saving and self-denial would enable workers to become proprietors was utterly unconvincing. "If wage earners are to become free men"—and "the most important single task of modern democratic social organization" was to make them free men— something more than exhortations to work harder and spend less was going to be required.

The syndicalist solution advocated by Croly at this time (to which we shall return in chapter 8) never commanded much support among social reformers and radicals. By 1914, social democracy had already established itself, at least among people with advanced opinions, as the principal alternative to a proprietary conception of opportunity. According to this way of thinking, a proper understanding of the "social question" had to begin with an acknowledgment of the irreversibility of the industrial revolution. Huge corporations, the wage system, a more and more intricate subdivision of labor—these were permanent features of modern society, and it was pointless to seek a restoration of proprietorship or some "analogous" form of independence, just as it was pointless to break up the

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