Herbert David Croly

• Herbert David Croly
• Born: January 23, 1869
• Died: May 17, 1930

Social analyst and journalist and founding editor of The New Republic, was born in New York City, the only surviving son of two successful and controversial journalists, Jane Cunningham Croly (“Jennie June”) and David Goodman Croly. In his parents’ salon, Herbert Croly was exposed to many of the avant-garde currents that swirled around New York City as it was becoming the great American metropolis, currents that helped establish continuity between antebellum romantic reform and the reforms of the Progressive Era in which Croly rose to prominence.

David Croly actively directed his son’s education, weaning him away from traditional religion and trying to persuade him of the Tightness of positivism, which hoped to use a religion of humanity to tie people to the belief that society could be perfectly governed by scientific laws administered by an intellectual elite. Herbert Croly’s formal schooling was irregular. He attended Morse’s, a private school in New York City; the College of the City of New York in 1884-85, and Harvard College, as a special student, in 1886-88, 1892, and 1895-97, studying under William James, George Santayana, and Josiah Royce. He was never graduated but he was granted a courtesy degree in 1910.

Croly’s attendance at Harvard was first interrupted by his father’s illness and death in 1889, his succession to his father’s interest in The Real Estate Record and Builders Guide, and his work for the Record and Guide and its offshoot, Architectural Record. In 1892 he married Louise Emory, a wealthy student at the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe), and returned to college, but suffered a nervous breakdown in early 1893. He spent the next two years traveling and recuperating before returning to Harvard once again. After leaving school for the last time, he rejoined Architectural Record and served as its editor from 1900 to 1906. He gave up that position (though remaining on the staff until 1913) to concentrate on writing The Promise of American Life (1909), which brought him national attention.

As an architectural critic, Croly had been interested less in the fashionable revival styles than in whether it was possible to have a style that was distinctively American, that matched the modernization of social and economic life, and that still allowed freedom for personal creativity. Croly wrote The Promise as an answer to the widespread feeling that the conflict between personal freedom and the national scale of modern industrialism existed everywhere in American life, not just in creative fields such as architecture. He rejected as futile and inefficient the antitrust idea, later expanded in Woodrow Wilson’s New Freedom, that America could restore economic individualism by breaking up big business and big labor. Instead, the large organizations with their limited interests would have to be balanced by a strong government, particularly a strong executive branch, which would represent the national interest and be flexible enough to respond to changing needs. To assume that problems would solve themselves was conservative fatalism, Croly argued; modern society required continuous scrutiny and conscious control at the national level.

Croly’s book proposed a national system that would remain democratic because the regulatory elites in government would be closely watched by independent critics and because continual social changes would require that new elites with new skills constantly replace the old ones. If Americans would change their definition of freedom from economic individualism to a creative individualism, they would see that a highly organized and specialized society offered more people more freedom, more opportunities to use their talents, than had the earlier society of small businesses, small farms, and small towns. Thus the historic American conflict between Hamiltonian nationalism and Jeffersonian democracy, between elitism and egalitarianism, could be ended by a new national democracy that was engaged in a process of perpetual reform.

Recommended to former President Theodore Roosevelt by Learned Hand and Henry Cabot Lodge, Croly’s book helped crystallize the ideas that became Roosevelt’s notable but unsuccessful New Nationalism Campaign of 1910-12. Croly and Roosevelt met and corresponded, and the contrast between Roosevelt’s ebullience and Croly’s reticence was often noted. Croly expanded the role of the involved but independent critic-reformer in November 1914, when, with the financial aid of Willard and Dorothy Whitney Straight and the editorial help of Walter Lippmann, Walter Weyl, and Francis Hackett, he launched The New Republic, a weekly journal.

Since war had already broken out in Europe, Croly and his journal urged President Wilson to lead the neutral nations in reforming world politics and to use the preparedness movement as an instrument of social reform at home. Croly supported American entrance into the war in April 1917, hoping it would force domestic reform; but the prosecution of dissenters and then the disastrous Treaty of Versailles caused him to turn away from the nationalization of political and economic power that he had earlier accepted. In seeking methods of insulating people from arbitrary authority in the 1920s, he supported third-party presidential candidacies, encouraged groups to organize around local self-interest, and examined religion and social science for methods of regulating social change without regulating the people it affected.

Although Croly was always recognized as first among equals on the editorial board of The New Republic, policy was set collegially, and unity of purpose depended upon the editors’ sharing the same outlook, which did not survive the war. Croly delegated much of his editorial responsibility during the 1920s, and the journal ceased speaking with a single voice, reflecting the intellectual ferment among the liberals of the decade.

Croly retired to Santa Barbara, California, after suffering a paralytic stroke in 1928. He died there two years later, at sixty-one. His wife survived him; there were no children. While The New Republic remained as his continuing legacy, The Promise of American Life must still be regarded as the seminal liberal analysis of the necessary relationships among government, society, and the individual in the industrial age.

In addition to The Promise of American Life (1909), Croly wrote two books on domestic architecture; biographies of Mark Hanna and Willard Straight; Progressive Democracy (1914), a supplement to The Promise of American Life; and numerous articles. A small collection of his papers is in Houghton Library, Harvard; there are no major collections. The best study of Croly is C. Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism (1961). Other aspects of his work are discussed in C. Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (1961), and S. Kesselman, The Modernization of American Reform (1979). D. W. Levy, “The Life and Thought of Herbert Croly, 1869 1914” (unpublished dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1967) is the most detailed biographical study of the years before the founding of The New Republic. The New Republic produced a special supplement to its issue of July 16, 1930, with notable reminiscences and analyses of Croly. See also the Dictionary of American Biography, supplement 1 (1944).