Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Croly

Croly is quietly committing a rhetorical coup: he takes the misty, feel-good phrase "the Promise of American life" and pins it to a drafting table. In his hands, the promise stops being a self-executing destiny and becomes an "artful and laborious work" project. That phrasing matters. "Artful" flatters the reformer as designer, not scold; "laborious" denies the Gilded Age fantasy that markets and Providence will automatically harmonize private greed into public good. The promise, Croly implies, is not a birthright you inherit; it's a product you build.

The line's real move is the last clause, where national identity is fused with "the social problem". Croly is writing in the Progressive Era, when industrial capitalism had made the country richer and rougher at the same time: monopolies, sweatshops, urban crowding, labor violence, mass immigration, and a state apparatus still shaped for a smaller, agrarian republic. By "substantially to identify" the national purpose with social reform, he reframes patriotism itself. The nation isn't primarily a flag, a frontier, or a set of individual liberties; it's a collective obligation to manage inequality, power, and opportunity.

Subtext: if American ideals require deliberate craftsmanship, then laissez-faire isn't neutrality; it's abdication. Croly is also legitimizing expertise and coordinated government action without saying "technocracy". He makes reform sound like fidelity to America rather than a departure from it, smuggling an argument for a stronger state through the front door of national myth.