Woodrow Wilson as “Corporate-Liberal”: Toward a Reconsideration of Left Revisionist Historiography

Scholars who view the American polity as governed by a “ruling class” or “power elite” hold that major U.S. political party leaders, especially the modern Presidents, have all tried to provide for the well-being of the giant corporate-industrial order and to perpetuate its underlying class structure. Since at least the turn of the century, according to this view, the senior officials of the executive branch — as partners of corporate executives — have shaped public policy to preserve corporate capitalism’s hegemony. For instance, in a provocative textbook along these lines, Ira Katznelson and Mark Kesselman argue that federal government policies assured corporate capitalism’s “initial success” during its “critical period,” the several years following the turn of the century which are commonly known as the Progressive Era.1 Katznelson and Kesselman have accepted as valid the findings and interpretations of left revisionist historical studies of that period,2 apparently without independently reconsidering the evidence. Their textbook exemplifies a growing tendency among political scientists to utilize such studies in support of radical critiques of the American polity. This tendency makes it timely and appropriate for political scientists to participate more actively in discussions of the adequacy of that historiography.