Leaders of Men, Woodrow Wilson

I can't help but find it interesting to see how many small elements of contradiction and irony seemed to plague the Progressive movement from both sides of opinion. Granted, these instances were neither all at once, nor were they expressed by only one member or proponent of the movement. My last blog discussed Carnegie, a staunch member of the anti-progressive movement, and his uniquely progressive ideals to solving the conflict. Now, looking at Woodrow Wilson, who stands clearly on the other precipice of this heated debate, I find a similar and equally as stark idealistic contrast. One of the main elements of the progressive movement was the idea that society as a whole operated as an organic body, each part requiring the aid of the others in order to survive and remain strong. Every part was vital, and to lose one would essentially doom the others, and this argument was made constantly in support of the government needing to regulate the economic downfalls of the period in order to save the failing middle and lower classes. In contrast, and criticism, people in support of the progressive movement would say that their opponents viewed society too much as a machine or technically body that operated in a series of independent parts, and when one part would weaken or break the machine could be repaired and then continue to work. This idea lacked compassion for the masses and therefore was decried by proponents of progressivism, yet in Wilson's essay on the qualities of a truly progressive leader, he opens with a statement that reads, "[He] need not pierce the particular secrets of individual men...The seer, whose function is imaginative interpretation, is the man of science; the leader is the mechanic." To me this says that an ineffective leader, or "seer" focuses too much time on trying to prod the thoughts of men and make a picture by which to lead on, whereas the effective leader looks to the whole and is a mechanic, which in this case would imply the whole being a machine. As previously stated, the "whole" being a machine was very much the view of the anti-progressive movement at the time, so I found it rather surprising, and startling to say the least, that one of the most well-known proponents of the progressive movement at the time, so well-known that he was writing essays on the qualities of a truly progressive leader, would even think to reference a machine for the sake of comparison.