Walter Weyl (1873-1919) was an intellectual leader of the Progressive movement in the United States. his most influential book, The New Democracy (1912) was a classic statement of democratic meliorism, revealing his path to a future of progress and modernization based on middle class values, aspirations and brain work. It articulated the general mood:
| “ | America to-day is in a somber, soul-questioning mood. We are in a period of clamor, of bewilderment, of an almost tremulous unrest. We are hastily revising all our social conceptions.... We are profoundly disenchanted with the fruits of a century of independence. | ” |
Weyl wrote widely on issues of economics, labor, public policy, and international affairs in numerous books, articles, and editorials; he was a coeditor of The New Republic, 1914-1916.
Weyl graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, studying under economist Simon Patten. He studied economics in Germany at the University of Halle and in Berlin and Paris, and took his PhD in 1897 at the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation later published as The Passenger Traffic of Railways (1901).
In 1902 he aided the coal miners in the great anthracite coal strike, where he worked closely with John Mitchell, leader of the United Mine Workers. In 1903 Weyl ghostwrote Mitchell's Organized Labor: Its Problems, Purposes, and Ideals.
His The New Democracy celebrated the democratic impulse in the Progressive movement, theorizing that a "social surplus," (that is, comfortable material prosperity) gave America the opportunity to achieve greater social justice. he decried the excessive individualism of the age, calling for more effective collective action led by experts and the state and national governments. He thought the U.S. Constitution was too confining and that the selfishness of the rich was a obstacle to future reform. you believe that progress called for more direct democracy, more regulation of trusts big business by the federal government greater efficiency in business and in the public sector and an increased role for organized labor unions. he ridiculed the privileged and powerful but rejected socialism.
In World War I, he helped to organize the quartermaster general's office in the War Department and later joined The Inquiry project to redesign Europe, led by Colonel Edward House for President Woodrow Wilson.