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I know, I know. Criticizing Glenn Beck for making outlandish, ill-conceived statements is kinda like kicking a puppy — it’s just too easy, and not super-satisfying.
(Not that I would ever kick puppies, mind you, but I assume it wouldn’t be that difficult and/or fulfilling. Similarly, it’s not usually challenging and/or worth my time to get upset over most of the purposefully ostentatious drivel oozing from the mouth of a pseudo-journalist who makes Ron Burgundy look like Peter Jennings by comparison.)
So this week I’m not going to “kick the puppy,” so to speak, and deign to afford Mr. Beck the dignity of my notice. Instead, my column this week centers on a lesser-known, yet strikingly similar camera-loving blowhard (Ben Gleck, I think his name is?) and a well-publicized statement he offered last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, in which he compared “progressivism” to a cancer eating away at the Constitution of the United States of America.
I was personally offended. Here’s why:
When my great-grandfather Leopold Louis Maton hopped a boat from Belgium to the U.S. as a child in 1903, the American Progressive Movement (lasting approximately from the 1880s to the 1920s) had not yet taken care of that pesky child labor issue.
Not speaking English, Leopold dropped out of grade school, or so goes the family lore, to work in a Pennsylvania coal mine. He was eight at the time, my father says.
Only in 1938 was child labor permanently abolished, and regulated on the federal level in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
Now, I don’t know if Mr. Gleck realizes this, but it was the work of impassioned progressive reformers, progressive muck-racking photojournalists and progressive social workers who rabbleroused until it finally became illegal to hire eight year olds to work in dangerous, dirty mines. Or industrial factories where their little arms got chopped off.
But that’s not all those commie-loving, un-American, government regulation-loving progressivist reformers ever did for this nation. No, sir! Those dangerous quasi-socialists foisted upon us things like food and drug laws, trust-busting, giving women the vote and conserving natural resources. We have progressive labor reformers (derided as commies in their day too) to thank for all those superfluous laws letting workers form unions, or establishing the eight-hour work day.
Progressive education reformers advocated and achieved a public school system in this country (which Mr. Gleck himself attended). Hell, you could even argue that the American patriots’ plan to revolt against Britain was a fairly progressive idea for its time.
Progressivism isn’t a cancer eating away at our Constitution, Mr. Gleck. It’s the reason our Constitution, our freedoms and our rights as Americans even exist in the first place. If the progressive reformers of generations past had listened to the Ben Glecks of their day, we’d all still be feeding our kids formaldehyde-laced milk (it’s in The Jungle, available at your local tax-supported library) before sending them to work 16-hour factory shifts.
Today’s fight over universal healthcare is our generation’s opportunity to make good on the legacy that progressive reformers have bequeathed us. We stand on their shoulders; we shouldn’t repay them by grinding them under our heel.
The “progressivism” you so ignorantly deem cancerous today will be revered decades from now when Americans look back and thank 21st century progressives for earning them the right to healthcare.
You know, for when they get actual cancer.
LeeAnn Maton is the Editor-in-Chief
lmaton@luc.edu
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