Ideational Evolution: Wilson, Gladstone & Disraeli

This week someone sent me a quote from Gore Vidal’s 1987 novel Empire , an exploration of the United States’ entry into the colonial marketplace at the end of the 19th Century. The quote got me thinking about both Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt and their roles in a new generation of college-educated men born in the 1850s and 1860s who got into politics at a time when that was not the thing to do. That moment in history presents a striking contrast with our present moment, when a generation of politicians is doing battle with higher education. President Trump’s famous longing for a return to a time when America was “great,” which he himself has defined as the years between 1870 and 1913, does not appear to extend to the state of education during the Gilded Age. It would seem he'd prefer not to have a new generation of academics lead government into another progressive age, as did Roosevelt and Wilson. The quote from Empire is spoken by Vidal’s fictional version of the nove...

Benjamin Disraeli is remembered as a formative conservative in the 19 th Century, as the longtime head of the Tory party. But there was a time when he could have been a member of the liberal Whig party, RW Davis wrote in his biography of Disraeli in 1976. “There is no reason whatever to believe that Disraeli would have had any objection to entering Parliament under the Whig aegis," Davis wrote. "He had, after all, ridiculed all parties, Tories and Radicals as well as Whigs, without favoritism. And the introduction of the Whig Reform Bill early in 1831, word of which had reached him in Constantinople, he had hailed as ‘wonderful news which … has quite unsettled my mind.” Disraeli had even written, in 1831, the following in his novel The Young Duke : “Am I a Whig or a Tory? I forget." However, Davis was writing just before 1979, the year that scholars discovered Disraeli had written a novel about his first foray into elective politics in 1832, the same year as the fight o...