How History Tells the Truth

This letter to the editor, by Kerry Kittel appeared in the Hudson Star Observer on May 15, 2025.

MAGA supporters often challenge people to name a country where progressive policies produced positive results. The answer is obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of history. The United States of America.

The Declaration of Independence proclaimed that all men were created equal and had unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It asserted that governments were created to secure those rights, and derived their just powers from the consent of the governed. These radical, progressive ideas moved colonial Americans, and eventually most of the world, away from conservative views on government such as absolute monarchy.

Abraham Lincoln, an early Republican progressive, released the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. After the war, progressive Republicans amended the Constitution to abolish slavery, extend citizenship rights to all people born in the United States, and allow black Americans the right to vote.

Progressive Republican leaders Theodore Roosevelt and Wisconsin governor Robert La Follette used progressive ideas to make America great in the first place by ending child labor, improving workplace safety, allowing women to vote, establishing national parks, and making our food supply and medicines safer.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal program created jobs, gave financial support to the unemployed, young and elderly, saved the banking system from collapse, greatly reduced home foreclosures, and so much more. The worldwide depression led to authoritarian dictatorships in many other countries. Progressive ideas almost certainly saved democracy in America.

When I discuss politics with my progressive friends, we aren’t huddled in some dark room plotting how to make America more like Cuba. We are trying to figuring out why progressive ideas like health care for all, free or low-cost college or technical training, responsible gun reform, and environmental protections work in some European nations but are stymied by conservative opposition in America.

I agree that history does tell the truth, but only if we look at actual facts rather than changing them to fit a false conservative narrative. The truth is that beginning with the Declaration of Independence, nearly every change that made America great grew out of progressive ideas and activism.